More Shakespearean dingbattery

[oursin]

But this time it is the Oxfordian kind, rather than deep Mybuggery about the symbolism of BOARS.

Receiving random spam with the subject line 'Fun', including links, does not inspire me to click those links for fear of finding myself on the wrong end of some ransomware demand, but a little light googling took me to enough places to ascertain that while it might not be a matter of malware, it was not anything I wished to delve very deeply into.

I will not mention the actual name, as the person seems to be like Beetlejuice and appear when named in various discussion fora, but they are in the habit of randomly (???) emailing individuals, on what basis I know not, because neither my website nor my academic blog, nor my twitter-feed, which would be the most obvious ways they would find access to me, would find me fulminating about that allotrope of the phenomenon I include under the general heading of 'ripperology' which is The Oxfordian Hypothesis.

Apparently the methodology involves decoding a hidden message in the Sonnets by reading them backwards - this, I fancy, takes a little longer than summoning up the Devil by playing The White Album backwards, or was it just one track (?Helter-Skelter), I forget.

I was nigh moved to hilarity on peeking at one of the articles, which thought it exceeding telling that Mr WS of Stratford had not mentioned his copyrights and his intellectual property in the works that posterity has alleged to be his in his will, which involved So Much Misapprehension and Anachronism that one does not really even need to remark that, actually, even in this year of grace authors, alas, oft neglect to do this.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

You've got to admire a man who can write verse AND secret messages in the same poem.

[oursin]

Backwards, in high heels!

[legionseagle]

See as example of not mentioning IP in will the Lynn Chadwick case (this was not, in fact, neglect in this case, but savvy tax planning, of the kind Agatha Christie rued not having taken much earlier.)

[nineweaving]

Oh, that bozo. Name him not, or he will fasten himself to your sites like a remora.

You cannot explain to these whackjobs that authors had no rights to their works until the Statute of Anne in 1710. Shakespeare's company owned Shakespeare's unpublished plays, but they had to pry the rights to the printed plays out of various stationers' hands, and they nearly didn't get Troilus and Cressida back.

Nine

[ethelmay]

Anal art from the CIA?

[gillo]

Oxfordians are just plain bonkers. They handwave the fact that their guy was dead nearly a decade before the plays stopped appearing - and with contemporary references at that.

OK, I'm biased, doing an MA half a mile from the Birthplace, but refusal to accept that the bloke all his contemporaries said wrote the plays actually did write them seems not just bizarre but perverse.

[forthwritten]

Oh my god, you got an A- T- email! Expect a follow-up email in which he calls you a dipshit and aggressively accuses you of having no sense of fun.