humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

On Mar 26, 5:09=A0pm, Dominic Hughes wrote:

> Is this supposed to be responive to what I said. =A0Your conspirator/
> jokesters put up a stooge as a front-man to fool the public, a real
> person but an illiteratre country bumpkin (to make the joke even
> funnier), and they did this out of fear that some middle class Puritan
> might tumble to the meaning of this most obvious pun, and would
> therefore deduce that it was Oxenforde who had written the works, and
> then he would tell other Puritans and lower class scum about the
> naughty bits in the works, and that even though those people had
> minimal to non-existent knowledge of the works (works they couldn't
> even understand), they might go back and look at the works and figure
> out that Sonnet 103 was describing a crapping contest between Oxenfart
> and the Queen (a notion that only one other person in the history of
> the world has discovered in the poem), and then, being the total
> idiots they were, they would then conclude the poem was describing
> actual events, and so, even as
> late as 1623, the secret had to be maintained, because those Puritans
> would be so upset about this old information about some poet/
> playwright that they previously didn't even care about, and the long-
> dead Queen, and then they would disseminate the information far and
> wide, even to the stupider and less-interested lower class, fomenting
> class tensions and potentially threatening the stability of the
> crown.
>
> All that fear for people who were basically just like children for
> whom Shakespeare would be no different from the Tooth Fairy or Santa
> Claus. =A0Your theory is holier than your u-trou.
>
You have aptly summarized the Crowley Thesis. Implausible people do
improbable thinks for unimaginable reasons in a universe known only to
the Infallible Crowley. The utter absence of evidence, or even a
concept of evidence (how does he know that Elizabethan aristocrats
regarded the rest of the population as "children", for instance?),
merely caps the buffoonery.