humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

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On Mar 20, 12:32=A0pm, Lyra wrote:
> On Mar 20, 8:30 pm, Lyra wrote:
>
> (quote)
>
> Wednesday, March 19, 2008
>

(Lyra quoting a blogger, Mark Alexander?).

> The Tempest was written before 1604.


There's much scientific evidence to the contrary.

Dr. Dean Simonton, a leading scholar in the area of
scientific studies of genius and creativity states at
UC Davis states that Stratfordian dating of the plays
is correct and the Oxfordian dating of the plays is wrong.

That means that the Oxfordians are wrong about
Redating The Tempest and that the Jacobean plays
are not going to be moved into the Elizabethan era
just to get around the problem of the date of Oxford's
decease.

I was searching around for some verification of Oxford's
5th grade accessibility score on the Cornell Lex when
I came upong Prof. Simonton's seven stylometric studies
of Oxfords texts v. the Shakespeare texts (Simonton is
also an expert in this area).

After studying Simonton's method and results, I felt that
Simonton was overinterpreting the conclusions.

Apparently Simonton came to the same view a year or
so later since all traces of Oxford, his alleged authorship,
and Simonton's stylometric studies on Oxford v Shakespeare
had been taken down from his website.


Further proof that Simonton no longer supports Oxfordian
authorship is in Simonton's own statements below.

In the abstract for his article, Thematic Content and
Political Context In Shakespeare's Dramatic Output,
With Implications for Authorship and Chronology
Controversies, Simonton writes:

Empirical studies of Shakespeare's plays have usually
assumed that the traditional Stratfordian chronology is
basically correct. This assumption is cast in doubt by
Oxfordians who claim that the plays were authored by
Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

However, prior investigations have shown that Strat-
fordian chronologies are more strongly supported by
stylometric analyses than are Oxfordian chronologies.

In this study the two authorship positions are evaluated
by examining the correlation between the thematic
content of the plays and the political context in which
the plays would be written according to rival sets of
dates.

Stratfordian chronologies, when lagged just two years,
yield substantively meaningful associations between
thematic content and political context, whereas Oxfordian
chronologies YEILD NO RELATIONSHIPS, however lagged.
Hence, ONLY the Stratfordian results are consistent with
previous research indicating that artistic creativity is respon-
sive to conspicuous political events.

(emphasis mine).


I would add that Strats have designed over one hundred
and twenty peer-reviewed stylometric studies, each one
measuring some element of the text, each one distinct
from the others, all studies coming to the same conclusion:
The traditional dating of the Shakespeare works based on
topical material is correct, the topical evidencel in turn
supoorts the scientific dating of the plays.

I'm not claiming that Simonton's paper is sufficient to
overturn Oxfordian claims to authorship but Simonton's paper
confirms Stratfordian findings and Stratfordian findings
confirm Simonton's conclusions.

Now that the Oxfordians have managed to get the Oxford-
ian case into academia, the Oxfordians are going to come
up against more than mere literary criticism, they're going
to be exposed to a thorough scientific critique. I don't doubt
that Don Foster will jump into it and Vickers right after.






Thanks, Lyra.

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