Sunday, September 28, 2003

Weir back


My dear friend Elizabeth Weir is back. Will she stay long enough to acknowledge the superiority (or plausibility) of the Marlovian case?

Here's Elizabeth:

> A genius wrote the Shakespeare works.
> Marlowe (Oxford) was a genius.
> Therefore Marlowe (Oxford) wrote the Shakespeare works.
>
> Part II--the hard part--of the Marlovian-Oxfordian argument
> is proving that Marlowe and Oxford were genius enough
> to write the works assigned to them.
>
> None of Marlowe's works received his name in his lifetime--
> a very curious thing since he was not under the aristocratic
> stima of print--which is an historical fact--so by claiming Marlowe's
> authorship of what looks like Shakespeare's apprenticeship as
> a playwright, Marlovians are, in the authorship dispute at least,
> then required to prove that Marlowe was genius enough to write
> the Marlowe works.

I couldn't resist the challenge so I wrote:

1. As a boy, Marlowe was given a scholarship to Kings School for "boys who could read Latin, write verse and sing plainsong."

2. He was given an Archbishop Parker scholarship to Cambridge.

3. Contemporaries: Peele, Drayton, Blount and Thorpe testify to Marley's genius.

4. His 1992 Latin dedicatory epistle to the Countess of Pembroke (signed C.M.) of Thomas Watson's book, promises committed to high culture, hence no name on Tamburlaine.

5. Dido was printed in 1594, by Nashe and Marlo.

6. Lucan's First Book and Hero and Leander registered in Sept. 1593. Both were published a few years later.

etc. etc. etc.

> Marlovians have nothing in terms of evidence other than
> Marlowe's spotty MA which Cambridge did not want to
> confer.

I trust the above evidence clears that up! If not, why not? Where shall I mail your Marlowe Lives! Association membership card?


> Oxfordians, who think biography is evidence, can
> claim without much dissent that Oxford wrote the poetry
> assigned to him which runs from doggeral to "documented
> to have been written by Harvey," but Oxford's own
> mediocre poetry--if his stable of ten poets didn't write
> the best of it--coupled with the fact that the self-promoting
> Oxford was anything but a concealed poet eliminates
> Oxford from authorship contention.
>
> your admirer of irrevocable renegades
>
> Elizabeth

With all due respect, the Oxfrodian case is a joke. The evidence is scantier than a thong on sumo wrestler.

I tell you, Elizabeth, the Bacovians rule!
You can have King Henry VIII, I Henry VI, and the first 17 sonnets.

Have you looked into Lucan? Surely the author of that could have written *Lucrece*, case closed.

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