The Greatest of Literary Problems

The Greatest of Literary Problems

Author: James Phinney Baxter

Publisher: AMS Press

Published: 1915

Total Pages: 790

ISBN-13:

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Excerpt from The Greatest of Literary Problems: The Authorship of the Shakespeare Works; An Exposition of All Points at Issue, From Their Inception to the Present Moment God does not ordain the vilest among men to be his messen gers of peace and enlightenment to mankind - and, certainly, the men to whom our pretentious guides have introduced us were among the vilest of their kind. No wonder the world is awakening to the necessity of a higher criticism than that with which it has hitherto been cloyed, and turning to one incomparable genius, who, voicing the primal strains of the Renaissance in Tudor England, bore them on with ever swelling majesty to the close of the grand symphony which ended with his life. This great genius I hope to Show was Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans. Time was when I should have dismissed this thesis with impatience, but I am hoping that my readers will weigh the evidence I adduce before condemning me as a mere theorist. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.


Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare

Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare

Author: Barry R. Clarke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0429642970

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Francis Bacon's Contribution to Shakespeare advocates a paradigm shift away from a single-author theory of the Shakespeare work towards a many-hands theory. Here, the middle ground is adopted between competing so-called Stratfordian and alternative single-author conspiracy theories. In the process, arguments are advanced as to why Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) presents as an unreliable document for attribution, and why contemporary opinion characterised Shakspere [his baptised name] as an opportunist businessman who acquired the work of others. Current methods of authorship attribution are critiqued, and an entirely new Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP) method is introduced which, unlike current stylometric methods, is capable of detecting multiple contributors to a text. Using the Early English Books Online database, rare phrases and collocations in a target text are identified together with the authors who used them. This allows a DNA-type profile to be constructed for the possible contributors to a text that also takes into account direction of influence. The method brings powerful new evidence to bear on crucial questions such as the author of the Groats-worth of Witte (1592) letter, the identifiable hands in 3 Henry VI, the extent of Francis Bacon’s contribution to Twelfth Night and The Tempest, and the scheduling of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the 1594–5 Gray’s Inn Christmas revels for which Bacon wrote entertainments. The treatise also provides detailed analyses of the nature of the complaint against Shakspere in the Groats-worth letter, the identity of the players who performed The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn in 1594, and the reasons why Shakspere could not have had access to Virginia colony information that appears in The Tempest. With a Foreword by Sir Mark Rylance, this meticulously researched and penetrating study is a thought-provoking read for the inquisitive student in Shakespeare Studies.