Stuart Kells

You need to know there isn't one. No library, no catalogue of what was in it, no books attested to have been owned by Shakespeare, not a bookplate. So is the book just literary clickbait? Yes.

There's 100 pages on the "hunt" for a Shakespeare library, starting within a century after his death. It's a long string of disappointments and forgeries. You do learn something about his contemporaries and the following eras of bibliophiles and Shakespeare aficionados, as well as what books Shakespeare show more is clearly referencing or even stealing outright from, and thus must have had access to.

In Part II we're into the authorship question. Was Shakespeare the Stratford one we know or a secret front/pseudonym for . There are entire books on this topic, but we don't even get an overview really because this part is about the author and author's friend who subscribed to a particular sect of fake-speares called the Nevillians. Not even one of the popular fake-speares. We get 100 pages on why they're wrong, followed by a pretty good section where a case is made for Shakespeare as plagiarist and spin doctor, taking other people’s work and adapting it into play form to great success, followed by many revisions by him and later editors to arrive at the “perfect” plays in their final form. This really subverts the entire authorship question by lobbing in the grenade of considering if he really was the super genius wordsmith they’re so busy trying to pin on someone with better credentials. A talented, but even more shrewd playwright becoming a legend by the polish of history. An intriguing idea, but only about a dozen pages are about this.

In Part III we finally get 70 pages of “visions of Shakespeare’s library”. So this is it, right? A learned take on what books such a library might have included based on the surviving plays and poems? No. Australian adventures in Shakespeare, an attack on the First Folio, controversy surrounding the bawdry passages, private press editions, followed by an Epilogue trying to tie a bow around all this as if there’s been a throughline in the work at all.

It's not just a book that sells a false premise, the content is so scattershot that despite desperate attempts to return to the idea of Shakespeare's library, it has so little to say about any one thing it's like reading a book of upcycled blogposts. show less

My proposal for a book on Shakespeare’s life:

Chapter One: "He was as tough and romantic as the town he lived in" ... nah too preachy , let’s face it. I want to sell some books here ... "Inside his tights lay the coiled sexual tension of a jungle cat" (I love this!), "Stratford was his town ... and it always would be ..."

Chapter Two: "But at the very moment a visiting group of players draw back the curtain on a startling and spectacular thespian future,and he's smitten by a star-crossed show more love affair, then weighed down with the responsibilities of a parent before he can break with the Forest of Arden..."

Authorship dispute coming up with some bits about "Shakespeare's Library" on the side...

This book conveys the excitement of looking for evidence of his identity at the Folger Shake-speare Library (no, they don't actually use that hyphen, thank God!). Many eons ago, the New York Times reported that Roger Stritmatter got his Ph.D. in comparative literature for a dissertation on the Folger's copy of Edward de Vere's Geneva Bible. If Shakespeare scholarship were truly scholarly and objective, rather than an exercise in snake-oil tradition, pseudo-authority, and groupthink, Stritmatter's research would never have seen the light of day.

Following up on Professor Stritmatter's snake-oil research, I had the good fortune to find that the heavily annotated copy of the Whole Book of Psalms bound with Oxford's Geneva Bible is the key that unlocks the mysteries of many Sonnets, the "Rape of Lucrece", and passages in plays, that echo the distinctive psalm translations in that Elizabethan "hymnal." I just hope that Stuart Kells's implication that evidence, not faith, should settle who wrote Shakespeare will some day be adopted by the community of Shakespeare alternative "scholars."

We've now had everyone from William Kyd to Rodney Dangerfield proposed as the true Boss. I find it all great fun. I'm not entirely persuaded that the opposition to William of Stratford is solely based on class prejudice (though that certainly obtains). But the plays were written by someone who signed his name William Shakespeare (or some variation, spelling being a bit lax in those faraway times). And they're pretty good, on the whole. If someone, say, Francis Drake, were once proved of being WS, that would dominate the headlines for at least a week. Wouldn't change the plays. They were written by William Shakespeare. I've always admired the English for allowing their harmless lunatics to walk about freely.

Shakespeare - probably the number 3 after Brexit and Trump/Putin to bring out the fanatics beating drums....any mention that it might not have been the geezer from Stratford who wrote all those dramas and sonnets is assured a number of furious posts, all by people convinced that they know who did what several centuries ago. For some people it's much more entertaining than reading most of his plays...!

Bottom-line: I’m happy to assume that William Shakespeare, playwright and genius was William Shakespeare, playwright and genius and that it was this William Shakespeare, playwright and genius who wrote the plays by William Shakespeare, playwright and genius. I know that this statement is wildly controversial but hey - I’m that kind of guy. show less

All Theories of the Hyphen are as lame as these ones, and it is best to say as little about them as possible.

***

Kells makes a skeptical, well-researched, convincing, fascinating, amusing case for who Shakespeare really was, why we have never found his manuscripts, and many other adjacent issues. He has utterly convinced me, but then, I was more than halfway there to start with: I figure Shakespeare was a hack. Kells is rather more nuanced in his thesis than I am in mine.

Anyway, clever and show more funny. Now I am eager to read more by him. If only the stupid Bluefire would download the text of the library book for me.

Library copy show less

International money transfers (forex) are built on a shoddy foundation of risky, ticket-clipping practices by a cabal of mostly US banks. An Australian came up with an idea in the 1990s for a trading platform for all kinds of derivatives and forex transfers which would reduce the risk of systemic collapse. He made a fintech startup called Alice. Powerful US banks later created a clearing house bank which infringed Alice's patents. But rather than pay for a licence to the technology, the show more cabal took Alice and its creator to court -- all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. SCOTUS ruled (rather erratically) that all software patents are invalid, so Alice lost.

That's the summary. The rest of the book is padded out with hagiography about the Alice creator and all his friends and contacts, including at the lowest point two chapters about a writer's dogs. The interesting bits were the early descriptions of the international finance systems, and the details of the Byzantine US legal system. I didn't come away with the sense that Alice's patents were really so ground-breaking, or even what they were supposed to do. Alice did not change the world. show less