Charles Beauclerk on James Shapiro

Charles Beauclerk, author of Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom, comments on Prof. James Shapiro's Shakespeare authorship book, Contested Will. Comments were made during the Q&A following Beauclerk's talk on Timon of Athens at the Shakespeare Symposium, held at the Watertown Free Public Library in Watertown (MA) on May 8, 2010.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Beauclerk
• Shapiro
• Shakespeare
• authorship debate
• Oxfordian
• Stratfordian
• Timon of Athens
• Earl of Oxford
• Edward de Vere

[peethagoras]

The truth is simple: the man behind the shakespeare name was John Dee.

[peethagoras]

I watched charlie Beauclerk many years ago in Bath at a Shakespeare authorship thing. Not many got the cahnce to say anyjing other than charlie's hobby horse: Oxford (a distant ancestor of charlie's) was the pen behind Shakespeare. The trouble with all his arguments is that there is hot one shred of evidence bto back up his mouth.

You might be good at reciting poetry charlie, but you are crap at facing real argument. If you don't agree with this, then why not debate in public?

[iago21k]

Conrad is a bad example as he was a man of modernity and is incomparable with Shakespeare’s time, something that Shapiro clearly states. So why make such a rhetorical comparison?

[krelllabs]

Amaxamon, that is a non sequitur. We have the life of Vere, and almost nothing on the Avon man, except a few scratched signatures and a pathetic last will, no pun intended. No evidence? I think you could get a pretty solid conviction on circumstantial evidence, not to say that the plays deal in levels of aristocratic life which no lower middle class genius, however high an IQ, could compose.

[amaxamon]

@krelllabs By this same logic, there is MOUNTAINS of "evidence" that the Book of Mormon is a factual history. 

[amaxamon]

Wow this is so off: Shapiro doesn't say that Conrad should have stayed home, he says that if a writer has talent, it doesn't make a difference, which is true. Final analysis: NO EVIDENCE for the Oxfordian claim, lots of evidence against it.

[bfoaliali]

To be honest, this video has no substance. He doesnt make any points, or any arguments, or any claims, or any reasons to not belive Shapiro (given, this is a 3 min snippet). I have not read Shapiros book, and am on the fence in regards to this debate, but this video was just an ad-hominem filled rant.

[angerdux8]

De Vere's life fits like a glove, but his writing is very different from Shakespeare's, too different for me to capitulate for Oxford. But whoever wrote Shakespeare was intimately familiar with De Vere and comfortable enough using his experiences. I wish we had more of De Vere's work, but as a writer myself, the diction doesn't match.

[krelllabs]

And the overwhelming body of knowledge about, say, Italy in the plays, which could only have come from Vere, down to seeing boats sailing on canals, long thought to be a mistake but turning out to be accurate. If the man from Stratford picked details like that up, only to go home and scrawl his signature, then we have THE greatest mystery of all, authorship fully aside.