Well, I guess Dr. Nat Whilk Ph.D of Cambridge, Massachusetts really showed that Roger Stritmatter of Coppin State University a thing or two!
Who is Nat Whilk? It’s not exactly clear, actually. She appears to be Amazon’s version of a Twitter troll who delights in levelling savage personal attacks against writers and scholars who are simply and honestly skeptical of the traditional attribution of the plays and poems of “William Shakespeare” to a litigious grain hoarder who was born of illiterate parents, raised alongside illiterate siblings (in a densely illiterate Elizabethan backwater), and sired illiterate children.
According to Alexander Waugh in his hilarious “Shakespeare in Court” (2014) – available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book (and highly recommended) – Nat Whilk is a bit of a Stratfordian scold and cyber Javert bent on vanquishing Oxfordian heretics. Waugh observed: “‘Nat Whilk’ insists on remaining anonymous, abusive and veiled behind her blogger’s pseudonym.” Five years on, Whilk remains anonymous (so far as I can tell) and abusive.
Incidentally, I do not know whether Waugh actually knows who Ms. Whilk is (but is too much of an English gentleman to “out” her) or if he is just guessing at her gender. But I will follow his lead and refer to Whilk as “her” and “she.” Until she has the courage and integrity to confront honest scholars like Roger Stritmatter publicly – without the shield of anonymity – I can only guess.
Let’s begin with a concession. Professor Whilk, who appears to have genuine academic credentials as well as access to literary databases like Early English Books Online (EEBO), has identified a possible sampling error in some of the data used in Stritmatter et al.’s recent book. That book, containing contributions from Gary Goldstein, Robert Prechter and Bryan Wildenthal, is titled “The Poems of Edward de Vere, 17thEarl of Oxford . . . and the Shakespeare Question, Volume I: He that Takes the Pain to Pen the Book” (hereinafter, Poems of de Vere). The ecstatic pleasure Whilk takes in calling out this apparent error, to my ear, sounds unsettlingly orgasmic.
What is the (possible) error? It appears that in researching the relative rarity of certain words and phrases that appear both in Shakespeare and in de Vere’s uncontested juvenilia, Stritmatter et al. may have searched through only a portion of the data that is available through EEBO. If so, it is a good bet that at least some of these common words and phrases were not as “unusual” among Shakespeare’s / de Vere’s contemporaries as the authors assessed in their study. If one searches through fewer source texts, it stands to reason that one will fail to turn up other (perhaps numerous other) extant usages. To the extent this error occurred, Stritmatter et al. undoubtedly experienced a pang of very human professional embarrassment when they realized it.
On a recent episode of the podcast “Don’t Quill the Messenger,” Stritmatter acknowledged the possibility of some search errors and announced his intention to publish a revised and updated edition of the book. For what it’s worth, he noted that Volume I’s publication was somewhat rushed towards the end in order to ensure the book would be available to the public before the annual commemorations of Shakespeare held each year around April 23rd. This likely also explains the copy-editing errors that pop up here and there.
However . . .
The glee with which Whilk dances on the authors’ graves over this data sampling error is all out of proportion to the materiality of their “rarity” analysis to the overall argument. More on the relative insignificance of the possible data sampling error below.
But first, let’s survey the book Stritmatter et al. actually wrote.
Stritmatter’s book is an exhaustive and admittedly subjective comparison of Shakespeare’s verse (mostly early Shakespeare as it turns out) with de Vere’s known poems. Orthodox scholars usually contend that de Vere was a lousy poet who sounds nothing like Shakespeare. Stritmatter et al. are simply asking: is that really so? Thus, their book is fundamentally an analysis of the 450 parallels with Shakespeare’s language that they have identified in just twenty-one of Oxford’s short youthful poems (totaling only 548 lines). (Poems of de Vere, p. 24.) As they note, this works out, on average, to “almost one such passage for every line in this early de Vere poetry.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 24.) (emphasis in the original)
Professor Whilk regards the dearth of de Vere’s youthful output as a reason to slip the shiv to the long-dead nobleman – dismissing his “tiny oeuvre” in a tone that has the ring of an attack on the size of the poet’s manhood. Elsewhere, she implies that de Vere was too stupid to come up with the Latin phrase “Finis coronat opus” on his own, sneering: “I’ll bet his secretary thought of that, and spelled it for him.” Whatever beef Whilk has with the authors’ scholarship, what on Earth did the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford ever do to make her so mad at him? Personally, I would not want to be known for bragging about how much smarter I am than Edward de Vere. That way lies civil commitment to an institution.
But I digress. Although Whilk attacks the authors as “pompous,” just listen to how cautious and generous they are in describing what they are up to in studying these poetic parallels:
“[R]esearchers should take care to consider the range of possible causes of any given parallelism, which could result from coincidence or from influence as well as common authorship . . . [I]t may sometimes be difficult to distinguish one cause from the other, especially on the basis of limited data.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 8)
Stritmatter et al. acknowledge that poets who sound so similar as to possibly be the same writer might, in fact, be nothing more than members of a “shared speech community” who “borrowed or parodied one another.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 8)
They caution that “excessive weight should not be individually attached to the vast majority of these parallels, many of which are commonplace phrases.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 10) (emphasis in the original).
They acknowledge “[t]here is doubtless ample room for reasonable debate (which we welcome) about whether any given parallel properly belongs to one category or the other – or perhaps, in some cases, lacks the significance we perceived . . . We welcome constructive critical feedback on all aspects of this edition. A great deal of subjective discretion has likewise gone into defining the scope of each of the parallels. We make no claim of numerical precision.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 22) (emphasis mine).
They quote J. Thomas Looney’s observation about the growing persuasiveness of circumstantial evidence as the number of “coincidences” piles up. They then wrap up their general introduction with this: “To the extent the materials contained in these two volumes have gone beyond ‘simply interesting’ or transcended being a series of merely ‘remarkable’ coincidences, to reflect a series of ‘extraordinary coincidences’ that may generally be accepted as ‘conclusive proof’ is for every reader to judge.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 25).
In short, each reader is invited to make up his own mind as to whether or not the youthful de Vere sounds anything like (the mostly early) Shakespeare. That really is the essence of this book. Paraphrasing: “We see 450 parallels to Shakespeare in just 548 lines of Oxford’s poetry. We think these two poets sound an awful lot like the same guy. What say you, dear reader?”
At the end of the book, Stritmatter et al. sum up their reasoning:
“[N]o special probative weight should be attached to any particular parallel or parallels in isolation from the larger fact pattern. Some may be part of the common idiom of Elizabethan poetics while others clearly have a more idiosyncratic value . . . what ultimately matters is the large quantity of different types of parallelisms, including use of particular rhetorical figures when combined with parallel syntax or vocabulary.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 185) (emphasis mine)
Simply put, the analysis rests on both the quantity of the parallels as well as the idiosyncratic quality of so many of those parallels. To their ears, at least (and to mine). It is not, strictly speaking, a computerized stylometric study. Such studies are notoriously corrupted and compromised by the GIGO phenomenon. (At this point, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Whilk attacks Roger Stritmatter personally for not having “a clue how stylometric analysis is done” – something he has not undertaken – making sure to drop some impressive-sounding stylometric jargon like “pause patterns” and “adjacency networks.”)
Do you disagree with the authors’ conclusions – based as they are on their interpretation of the cumulative weight and quality of their evidence? Wonderful! They welcome your constructive critical feedback.
And now behold, Ms. Whilk’s constructive critical feedback: Stritmatter et al.’s analysis is “naïve and impressionistic” and based on “a sad little list [eh hem, 450 items long!] of banalities.” Their idea of what constitutes a parallel “beggars belief” as Whilk proves conclusively with “just one” example. (Seriously, there’s just one. Her other examples address the “rarity” issue.)
So perhaps the example she cherry-picked is – in all fairness – one that the authors conceded might “lack the significance we perceived.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 22). Fair enough, Ms. Whilk. There are another 449 included in the study. I think a disinterested reader who is not bent on enforcing Orthodoxy, or eaten up inside with loathing for Oxford (and Stritmatter), or seething with confirmation bias would see at least some of these resemblances as . . . I dunno? . . . uncanny?
Tellingly, Whilk ignores the parallels between Shakespeare and de Vere’s dry private correspondence – a subject mentioned throughout the main text and addressed squarely by Gary Goldstein’s essay. Whilk does not mention Goldstein at all except to include him in Professor Stritmatter’s “crew of fellow cultists.” (Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to get the feeling that Nat Whilk is not a very pleasant person to be around. Just imagine committing a grammatical faux pas at her dinner table.)
Reader, you be the judge. Is the following example from Oxford’s then-unpublished correspondence a mere coincidence?
Oxford: “It is my hap according to the English proverb to starve like the horse, while the grass doth grow.” Shakespeare (in Hamlet): “Ay, sir, but while the grass grows – [trails off] the proverb is something musty.”
Oh yes, the data sampling error. I almost forgot about that nothing burger.
As noted above, the heart & soul of the authors’ case is an interpretive comparison between de Vere’s uncontested juvenilia and canonical Shakespeare – irrespective of the “rarity” of their shared language in the larger contemporary sources. A total of 450 parallels are discussed. The accumulated weight and quality of the evidence is indeed impressive. (By the time I got through the discussion of E.O. 21 I wanted to shout: “Enough already! I get it! Sweet mother of Jesus, give it a rest, Stritmatter!”)
Now, peppered throughout the discussion, Stritmatter et al. occasionally notice how a small number of these 450 shared phrases also appear to be unusual for the period. They count a subset of 34 phrases that are “rare” or “somewhat rare.” In other words, less than 8% of the parallels are also assessed as unusual.
Incidentally, the expression “unusual common phrases” – is excoriated by Whilk as some sort of ridiculous oxymoron. It is actually not that confusing or mysterious: a subset of phrases that are “common” to Oxford and Shakespeare are also assessed to be “unusual” (i.e. rare) in the contemporary sources as a whole. Whilk understands this full well, of course, but she seems incapable of resisting any attempt to paint Stritmatter as a clown. (Is there something in the Cambridge water supply, perhaps?)
The point of noticing the “unusual” phrases is of course to enhance the more central argument that the number and quality of the parallelisms suggest identity of authorship. If these poets sound like the same writer and very few other writers sound like them, then it naturally increases the likelihood of common authorship. By how much? It is impossible (and ultimately unnecessary) to quantify with mathematical precision.
Contra Ms. Whilk, however, the authors’ incidental observations about whether a phrase is rare or commonplace do not constitute “the very foundations of [their] research.” Take out all discussion of those 34 “rare” or “somewhat rare” specimens and the basic argument is unaffected.
Thirty-four out of four hundred fifty. (You are supposed to drop your jaw in disbelief at this dramatic statement.)
Moreover, we should ask a question Whilk basically glosses over: has the possibly smaller data set actually resulted in a systematic over-counting of the number of unusual phrases? Whilk more than implies as much. Indeed, she declares the study is “hopelessly, irrevocably, fatally flawed.”
If it is really that bad, then one wonders why she doesn’t show her work.
I assume that she must have access to the full EEBO database because real scholars from Cambridge Massachusetts are state-of-the-art whereas amateurs from Coppin State University work with stone tablets. Did she check all 34 of the cases assessed by Stritmatter et al. as “rare” or “somewhat rare” and attempt to quantify just how over-stated their assessments might be? This is not a terribly high number of searches to perform and she seems, if nothing else, highly motivated to expose the authors as a contemptible frauds (or buffoons).
For example, the book notes the “extreme rarity of the phrase stricken deer.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 72) (emphasis in the original). An “Appendix A” shows that the authors’ search of EEBO turned up exactly zero occurrences of this phrase – except for Hamlet and E.O. 9. So here we have a case where Stritmatter et al. is claiming, based on a possibly inferior data set, that Oxford and Shakespeare – and no one else – used this phrase. If a more complete search of the data would show numerous hits by other writers, do you have any doubt, dear reader, that Whilk would have beat Stritmatter over the head with that information?
So why did she fail even to mention the “stricken deer” example given it is one of the book’s most “unusual common phrases” (i.e. zero other hits)? Could she be drawing a tight little box around her dogmas?
Whilk focuses her critique on the book’s “statistics.” (Does this presumed English major know that counting is not the same as doing statistics?) Totally non-smugly, she claims: “what the good doctor needs is a freshmen tutorial on using EEBO.” (The “good doctor.” Spare me, please.) And yet her tutorial contains a glaring bait and switch. (Said bait and switch comes almost immediately after calling Roger Stritmatter a “flat-out cheat.”)
Here it is. Did you catch it? She quotes the book’s “smug” (?) argument that “none but Oxford and his alter ego ‘Shakespeare’ ever ‘associate . . . the behavior of the “haggard hawk” with human emotions or situations.’” But in order to blow that embarrassingly incompetent argument out of the water she relies on search results for the single word “haggard” – not the two-word phrase “haggard hawk.” Her search results impressively show, indeed, that the single word “haggard” was commonly used in connection with human emotions or situations. "Chair" was also commonly used to describe an object one sits on.
What the devil is going on here?
I will not pretend to know what the revised “statistics” (i.e. counts) will look like after better searches are run for all 34 of the “unusual common phrases.” I suppose we will find out for sure only when the honest scholar Roger Stritmatter publishes the revised edition of his book. No crystal balls here, but I don’t expect the results to be all that different. Otherwise, Whilk would have done those searches and let us know.
In the final analysis, of course, none of this has all that much to do with the “very foundations of his research.” The authors may keep the few pennies of my money that Jeff Bezos disbursed to them and I will happily keep their very interesting and valuable book – already littered with my yellow-highlighting and marginalia.
It is honestly a crying shame that Ms. Whilk felt compelled to attack Roger Stritmatter so viciously over a relatively minor error that is not at all central to the argument. Throughout her review, she calls the book and/or its authors all of the following: pompous, credulous, incompetent, childish, larcenous, delusional, willfully blind, unintelligent, flat-out cheats, smug, ridiculous, oblivious, and not playing with a full deck. She opens her smear job in this totally non-pompous way: “Oh dear. Another futile assault on Shakespeare’s authorship by Dr. Stritmatter, Ph.D . . .” as if Professor Stritmatter walks around flouting a doctoral degree that he really never earned. (Later, we get this: “he supposedly studied for his doctorate.”).
I’ve been an avid amateur student of the authorship question for over twenty years. Maybe that’s because I am one of those many Oxfordian lawyers trained in evaluating evidence. I’m not 100% positive about this but I think I’ve read a time or two over the years that Oxfordians are a bunch of “snobs.” Have I been reading that incorrectly (or backwards) all these years?
Compare the tone of the authors’ disagreements with Professor Stephen May. May is a recognized Stratfordian expert on Edward de Vere’s acknowledged early poems. Here are two examples of how they discuss those points of disagreement: “conceding May’s reasonable premise” (Poems of de Vere, p. 188) and “given his record of fairness” (Poems of de Vere, p. 189). It is true that on one occasion the authors take the gloves off and offer the opinion that Professor May is “profoundly mistaken” – oh no you di’ int! – but that’s about as rough as it gets. (Poems of de Vere, p. 186).
So let’s get something clear. I am the one being nasty here – not Stritmatter et al. But that’s only because Whilk asked for it.
Is there motive in Whilk’s savagery? It turns out that the evolution of Professor May’s scholarship offers a clue. The authors note that May once had a favorable opinion of de Vere’s poetry. In 1991, he described Oxford as a poet who “create[d] a dramatic break with everything known to have been written at the Elizabethan court up to that time.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 185). And yet, by 2004 May seems to have joined the lousy poet chorus – arguing that “Oxford’s verse [was] . . . without distinction [in] the mid[16th]-century tradition of Tudor poetry.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 185.) (emphasis believed to be Stritmatter’s).
How does one go from praising Oxford’s poetry as revolutionary for its time to denigrating it as “without distinction” in just over a decade? It seems at least plausible to me that threats of ridicule and professional ostracism from real scholars like Dr. Nat Whilk Ph.D might have accounted, at least in part, for this 180o change of opinion. This looks to me like what we lawyers call a good old-fashioned woodshedding.
Incidentally, May’s transformation has an interesting coda. By March 2017, in correspondence with Gary Goldstein, he was offering as one possible explanation for the “verbal parallels” between Oxford and Shakespeare the theory that Oxford’s published poems were “available for Shakespeare to plagiarize.” (Poems of de Vere, p. 160).
Oh dear. Does the case for Will Shaxper of Stratford now rest upon his being a plagiarist? A plagiarist of Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, no less?
Chin up, Oxfordians! Nothing is truer than truth.
As noted above, Stritmatter plans to revise and update Volume I before publishing Volume II. Volume II will perform a similar analysis on several other early poems whose attribution to Edward de Vere is more contested by scholars than the twenty-one poems contained in Volume I. I look forward to both the reissue and the new volume.
Alas, however, I fear we can expect more of the same savagery and nastiness from Dr. Nat Whilk Ph.D when those volumes appear.
That noise you hear is the loud & plodding footfall of a re-gendered Javert as she fanatically pursues apostates from received orthodoxy.
The honorable thing would be to apologize to Roger Stritmatter and his colleagues.
The rational thing to do would be to open her mind to evidence and arguments that challenge her religion.
Being Javert, there’s no hope.
Richard Wood, Colorado Springs
Richard Wood, Colorado Springs
__________________________________
Here's "Nat Whilk's" review of the book on Amazon.com to which I have responded:
May 8, 2019
Format: Paperback
Oh dear. Another futile assault on Shakespeare’s authorship by Dr. Stritmatter, Ph.D., who keeps trying to shift the paradigm—Mount Everest—with spades of wet tissue paper. A self-driven Sisyphus, he’s labored mightily to roll his Big Rock up the hill, to drop it on the Orthodoxy. It’s his dream to squash us flat. He is joined in his futile labours by a crew of fellow cultists—“an hundred Sisiphi at once, rowling so many restlesse stones”—but chiefly here by Gary Goldstein, Robert Prechter, and Bryan Wildenthal. The volume as whole is marked by that peculiar Stritmatterly blend of pomposity, credulity, and arithmetical incompetence.
Dr. Stritmatter has long insisted (against all evidence) that the markings, by a series of unknown hands, in a Geneva Bible once owned by the Earl of Oxford, mirror Shakespeare’s scriptural allusions. Not so. They are almost an anti-match. Whole swathes of Shakespeare’s most alluded-to verses, chapters, even books, go unmarked, while huge tracts of the Apochrypha, which the poet-playwright barely noted, are a thicket of Xs and underlinings.
In this new rock—er, book, Stritmatter’s arithmetic remains shaky, but here at least he's more or less comparing text to text. He has discovered Early English Books Online, “the definitive online collection of early printed works in English, and works printed in England” from 1473 to 1700. It includes over 132,000 titles, which is virtually everything. What he hasn’t discovered is how to use it. He hasn’t a clue what to look for, or how to structure a search—and that ignorance (as we shall see) proves fatal to his work.
His methods are naive and impressionistic, merely what MacDonald Jackson has called the “uncontrolled accumulation of parallels between a disputed work and an authorial candidate whom the scholar favours.” True stylometic studies go much deeper, into pause patterns and word adjacency networks. By comparison, this stuff is childish dot-to-dottery. For all his pseudo-scholarly posturing, Stritmatter hasn’t a clue how stylometric analysis is done: he appears like a stargazer trying to refute astrophysics, armed only with a cardboard mailing tube for a telescope. It’s no wonder he’s ignored. Nothing daunted, he sets out to show that “there is Salmons in both” Oxford and Shakespeare. And of course, he finds what he’s looking for. He’s assembled a sad little list of banalities that appear both in Shakespeare’s work and in Oxford’s tiny oeuvre (which is plumped out by larceny from other poets), calling these bitlets “unusual common phrases” Unusual and common? “That is, hot ice, and wondrous strange snow.”
And to this reader, very tragicall mirth.
Stritmatter’s conceit of what a ”parallel” might be beggars belief. To take just one: he matches “I have little and seek no more” with Shakespeare’s “Little joy I have / To breathe this news ... I speak no more than every one doth know.” That modest ellipsis conceals a cut of eight-and-a-half lines [!] of blank verse. This goes beyond mere wishful thinking into the realm of the delusional.
And as for his statistics—Seriously, what the good doctor needs is a freshman tutorial on using EEBO. He has no idea how it works. I have been through his tables, tested dozens of his figures. All of them are undercounted, some drastically. Some of his results are obvious oversights (or flat-out cheats); others, perplexing.
To begin with, he’s bad at searching. Sometimes he appears to be ignoring variant spellings; nearly always, variant forms. For example, Stritmatter tells us that “EEBO returns only ten hits in ten records (1473-1623) for the search ‘world afford,’” and 34 in 29 records for “world affords.” Hey, what happened to “affordeth”? Did he deliberately ignore it, to suppress the numbers? Or is he absolutely ignorant of Early Modern English verb forms? Counting all variant spellings and grammatical forms of “world afford,” there are 151 instances in 128 books. But wait! What about forms like “will afford”? Or “can scarcely afford”? Since Strimatter counts Shakespeare’s “The spacious world cannot again afford” among his “strongest parallels” with Oxford’s “That world affords,” we must look at “world NEAR afford.” The score leaps to 475/347. I wouldn’t call that rare.
As a rule, his searches are designed to gerrymander, to draw a tight little box around the earl and the playwright, excluding all others. “An EEBO search ... (1473-1600) returns only four hits in three sources for the term ‘haggard hawk,’” he crows, proving to himself the rarity and exclusivity of the motif. The actual count is 21 hits in 16 records. He smugly claims that none but Oxford and his alter ego “Shakespeare” ever “associate ... the behavior of the ‘haggard hawk’ with human emotions or situations.”
Oh, really? A search for “haggard” on its own, unlimited by “hawk,” from its first appearance in 1566 to 1580, turns up 176 hits in 26 books. Turberville’s 1575 book on falconry accounts for 128 of those. There’s one in a glossary. All the rest— 47 hits in 24 books—refer to human bad behavior. Indeed, the earliest use in English that I found described a human, not a hawk. As noun and adjective, the word caught on at once, and remained a commonplace for “wild, strange; froward, contrarie, crosse” people, especially women: “the haggarde disposition of his mistres”; “the straunge and haggarde nature of loue”; “she is not of haggards kind, Nor hart so hard”; “those which are so coyishe & wilde, or so haggarde like”; “Yee haggards straunge, therefore adiew / Goe seeke some other for thy mate”; “For Haggard like, she will not stoope.” Oxford’s imagery is unexceptional.
But there’s something more than willful blindness going on here. Stritmatter finds only 14/14 hits for “When I am alone.” In fact, there are 24/24 from Chaucer onward, including one each in Oxford and Shakespeare, and one in his precious Geneva Bible. Esther xiv.16, speaking of her crown: “I hate this token of my preeminence, which I beare vpon mine head, ... I abhorre it as a menstruous cloth, and that I weare it not when I am alone by my self.” Unmarked, of course: the entire chapter is as virgin snow.
But I digress. Alternate spelling accounts for only one of those ten missing hits. What is happening to his results?
The key to the riddle is found in one ridiculous set of parallels, foregrounded proudly. In a 1602 letter, Oxford uses the Latin proverb “Finis coronat opus” (“The end crowns the work”). I’ll bet his secretary thought of that, and spelled it for him. Stritmatter is thrilled that Shakespeare uses three different versions of that proverb in his work, even though not one of them is Latin. In the Folio version of 2 Henry VI, there's a typographically mangled version of the French, “La fin Corrone les eumenes [les oeuvres].” The Anglo-French “the fines the Crowne” appears in All’s Well That Ends Well; and “the end crownes all," in Troilus and Cressida (1609 & 1623). The English and French appear nowhere in Oxford’s poetry or letters; the Latin, nowhere in Shakespeare.
Indeed, until the later 17th century, as far as I can tell, the French proverb appears in print only in Shakespeare (1623) and in G. D. L. M. N.’s The French alphabeth (1592), where it comes with a handy translation: “La fin couronne l'oeuure. The end doth crowne the worke.” That book, whose pseudonymous author is G. Delamothe, was published by Shakespeare’s Stratford contemporary Richard Field, and may have given the playwright that proverb (and perhaps a name in Love’s Labours Lost?).
Shakespeare’s use of "the end crownes all” is the very first recorded in EEBO, though a translator of The Ship of Fooles (1509) simply and succinctly writes “For the ende crowneth.” Shakespeare’s “The fines the Crowne" is unique.
Nonetheless, Strit's absolutely thrilled by the coincidence.
“By any measure this proverb is rare before 1623. In the Latin version, [only] Henri Estienne (1607), Edmund Bolton (1610), and Gerard Malynes (1622), use ‘finis coronat opus’ before the publication of All’s Well in 1623.” Wait, what? What happened to the anonymous author of A dialogue or speaking together of two personages (1582), William Watson (1602), Otto van Veen (1608), Thomas Milles (1608), Sir Edward Hoby (1615), and Crispijn van de Passe (1615)?
Three out of nine.
You will note that Shakespeare nowhere uses “work.” Nevertheless, it's “The end crowns the work" that Stritmatter looks for, not the "The end crowns all” “In English,” says Dr. Stritmatter, “only Sébastien Michaelis (1613) and George Hakewell {Hakewill, actually] (1621) are known to do so [include that proverb}.”
What!? I find 27 titles that do so.
The first is by Daniel Tossanus (1583): “the end crowneth ye worke.” Among other items, the list includes G. Delamothe’s The French alphabeth (1592), as noted; that terribly obscure play The Spanish tragedie by Thomas Kyd (1592: “The end is crowne of euery worke”); John Bodenham’s, Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the muses, which is a commonplace book, for heaven’s sake, a list of popular sententiae (1600); George Chapman’s inconspicuous Homer (1611); Constantia Munda, in the gloriously titled The vvorming of a mad dogge: or, A soppe for Cerberus the iaylor of Hell (1617); the great jurist Sir Edward Coke (1618); and Charles Fitz-Geffry (1620): “But the end is the Crowne of the whole work; and the last Act (if any) carrieth away the Applause.”
Oblivious to the end, Stritmatter writes, “Evaluating this evidence honestly requires assessment of prior probabilities.” No. Evaluating this evidence honestly requires the ability to reason and to count.
Three out of nine. Two out of twenty-seven.
What the devil is going on here?
Only part of this grievous deficiency comes down to Stritmatter’s unintelligent search tactics, though a badly stated search will miss variants like “end doth crowne “ and “crowne of euery worke.”
The truly devastating error lies elsewhere, at the very foundations of his research. From the screen shot on p. 11, and by exactly which authors’ names he didn’t find, I could tell that he’s been using an incomplete, perhaps antiquated version of EEBO, EEBO lite. As he should have known—he supposedly studied for his doctorate—EEBO comprises two collections. EEBO-TCP Phase I is freely available to everyone who searches, on any device, from anywhere. It is not tied to any provider. But EEBO-TCP Phase II is “available only to EEBO-TCP partners.” Buried deep in the Help pages is the quiet bombshell: “Your institution may not be subscribed to all EEBO subsets.”
It appears that Coppin State is not.
EEBO-TCP Phase II accounts for three-fifths of all the titles in their database. So Dr. Stritmatter has been merrily searching away, without realizing that his corpus is missing more than half its texts. He’s been calling the winners of an election, in which three-fifths of the ballots have been randomly destroyed. He’s not playing with a full deck.
That noise you hear is the thunk-thunk-thunking of the Big Rock, bounding down and down and down the hill to the very bottom, and into the swamp.
This study is hopelessly, irrevocably, fatally flawed.
The honorable thing would be to withdraw the book, with refunds and apologies.
The rational thing to do would be to stop rolling that stone.
Being Sisyphus, there’s no hope.
Dr. Stritmatter has long insisted (against all evidence) that the markings, by a series of unknown hands, in a Geneva Bible once owned by the Earl of Oxford, mirror Shakespeare’s scriptural allusions. Not so. They are almost an anti-match. Whole swathes of Shakespeare’s most alluded-to verses, chapters, even books, go unmarked, while huge tracts of the Apochrypha, which the poet-playwright barely noted, are a thicket of Xs and underlinings.
In this new rock—er, book, Stritmatter’s arithmetic remains shaky, but here at least he's more or less comparing text to text. He has discovered Early English Books Online, “the definitive online collection of early printed works in English, and works printed in England” from 1473 to 1700. It includes over 132,000 titles, which is virtually everything. What he hasn’t discovered is how to use it. He hasn’t a clue what to look for, or how to structure a search—and that ignorance (as we shall see) proves fatal to his work.
His methods are naive and impressionistic, merely what MacDonald Jackson has called the “uncontrolled accumulation of parallels between a disputed work and an authorial candidate whom the scholar favours.” True stylometic studies go much deeper, into pause patterns and word adjacency networks. By comparison, this stuff is childish dot-to-dottery. For all his pseudo-scholarly posturing, Stritmatter hasn’t a clue how stylometric analysis is done: he appears like a stargazer trying to refute astrophysics, armed only with a cardboard mailing tube for a telescope. It’s no wonder he’s ignored. Nothing daunted, he sets out to show that “there is Salmons in both” Oxford and Shakespeare. And of course, he finds what he’s looking for. He’s assembled a sad little list of banalities that appear both in Shakespeare’s work and in Oxford’s tiny oeuvre (which is plumped out by larceny from other poets), calling these bitlets “unusual common phrases” Unusual and common? “That is, hot ice, and wondrous strange snow.”
And to this reader, very tragicall mirth.
Stritmatter’s conceit of what a ”parallel” might be beggars belief. To take just one: he matches “I have little and seek no more” with Shakespeare’s “Little joy I have / To breathe this news ... I speak no more than every one doth know.” That modest ellipsis conceals a cut of eight-and-a-half lines [!] of blank verse. This goes beyond mere wishful thinking into the realm of the delusional.
And as for his statistics—Seriously, what the good doctor needs is a freshman tutorial on using EEBO. He has no idea how it works. I have been through his tables, tested dozens of his figures. All of them are undercounted, some drastically. Some of his results are obvious oversights (or flat-out cheats); others, perplexing.
To begin with, he’s bad at searching. Sometimes he appears to be ignoring variant spellings; nearly always, variant forms. For example, Stritmatter tells us that “EEBO returns only ten hits in ten records (1473-1623) for the search ‘world afford,’” and 34 in 29 records for “world affords.” Hey, what happened to “affordeth”? Did he deliberately ignore it, to suppress the numbers? Or is he absolutely ignorant of Early Modern English verb forms? Counting all variant spellings and grammatical forms of “world afford,” there are 151 instances in 128 books. But wait! What about forms like “will afford”? Or “can scarcely afford”? Since Strimatter counts Shakespeare’s “The spacious world cannot again afford” among his “strongest parallels” with Oxford’s “That world affords,” we must look at “world NEAR afford.” The score leaps to 475/347. I wouldn’t call that rare.
As a rule, his searches are designed to gerrymander, to draw a tight little box around the earl and the playwright, excluding all others. “An EEBO search ... (1473-1600) returns only four hits in three sources for the term ‘haggard hawk,’” he crows, proving to himself the rarity and exclusivity of the motif. The actual count is 21 hits in 16 records. He smugly claims that none but Oxford and his alter ego “Shakespeare” ever “associate ... the behavior of the ‘haggard hawk’ with human emotions or situations.”
Oh, really? A search for “haggard” on its own, unlimited by “hawk,” from its first appearance in 1566 to 1580, turns up 176 hits in 26 books. Turberville’s 1575 book on falconry accounts for 128 of those. There’s one in a glossary. All the rest— 47 hits in 24 books—refer to human bad behavior. Indeed, the earliest use in English that I found described a human, not a hawk. As noun and adjective, the word caught on at once, and remained a commonplace for “wild, strange; froward, contrarie, crosse” people, especially women: “the haggarde disposition of his mistres”; “the straunge and haggarde nature of loue”; “she is not of haggards kind, Nor hart so hard”; “those which are so coyishe & wilde, or so haggarde like”; “Yee haggards straunge, therefore adiew / Goe seeke some other for thy mate”; “For Haggard like, she will not stoope.” Oxford’s imagery is unexceptional.
But there’s something more than willful blindness going on here. Stritmatter finds only 14/14 hits for “When I am alone.” In fact, there are 24/24 from Chaucer onward, including one each in Oxford and Shakespeare, and one in his precious Geneva Bible. Esther xiv.16, speaking of her crown: “I hate this token of my preeminence, which I beare vpon mine head, ... I abhorre it as a menstruous cloth, and that I weare it not when I am alone by my self.” Unmarked, of course: the entire chapter is as virgin snow.
But I digress. Alternate spelling accounts for only one of those ten missing hits. What is happening to his results?
The key to the riddle is found in one ridiculous set of parallels, foregrounded proudly. In a 1602 letter, Oxford uses the Latin proverb “Finis coronat opus” (“The end crowns the work”). I’ll bet his secretary thought of that, and spelled it for him. Stritmatter is thrilled that Shakespeare uses three different versions of that proverb in his work, even though not one of them is Latin. In the Folio version of 2 Henry VI, there's a typographically mangled version of the French, “La fin Corrone les eumenes [les oeuvres].” The Anglo-French “the fines the Crowne” appears in All’s Well That Ends Well; and “the end crownes all," in Troilus and Cressida (1609 & 1623). The English and French appear nowhere in Oxford’s poetry or letters; the Latin, nowhere in Shakespeare.
Indeed, until the later 17th century, as far as I can tell, the French proverb appears in print only in Shakespeare (1623) and in G. D. L. M. N.’s The French alphabeth (1592), where it comes with a handy translation: “La fin couronne l'oeuure. The end doth crowne the worke.” That book, whose pseudonymous author is G. Delamothe, was published by Shakespeare’s Stratford contemporary Richard Field, and may have given the playwright that proverb (and perhaps a name in Love’s Labours Lost?).
Shakespeare’s use of "the end crownes all” is the very first recorded in EEBO, though a translator of The Ship of Fooles (1509) simply and succinctly writes “For the ende crowneth.” Shakespeare’s “The fines the Crowne" is unique.
Nonetheless, Strit's absolutely thrilled by the coincidence.
“By any measure this proverb is rare before 1623. In the Latin version, [only] Henri Estienne (1607), Edmund Bolton (1610), and Gerard Malynes (1622), use ‘finis coronat opus’ before the publication of All’s Well in 1623.” Wait, what? What happened to the anonymous author of A dialogue or speaking together of two personages (1582), William Watson (1602), Otto van Veen (1608), Thomas Milles (1608), Sir Edward Hoby (1615), and Crispijn van de Passe (1615)?
Three out of nine.
You will note that Shakespeare nowhere uses “work.” Nevertheless, it's “The end crowns the work" that Stritmatter looks for, not the "The end crowns all” “In English,” says Dr. Stritmatter, “only Sébastien Michaelis (1613) and George Hakewell {Hakewill, actually] (1621) are known to do so [include that proverb}.”
What!? I find 27 titles that do so.
The first is by Daniel Tossanus (1583): “the end crowneth ye worke.” Among other items, the list includes G. Delamothe’s The French alphabeth (1592), as noted; that terribly obscure play The Spanish tragedie by Thomas Kyd (1592: “The end is crowne of euery worke”); John Bodenham’s, Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the muses, which is a commonplace book, for heaven’s sake, a list of popular sententiae (1600); George Chapman’s inconspicuous Homer (1611); Constantia Munda, in the gloriously titled The vvorming of a mad dogge: or, A soppe for Cerberus the iaylor of Hell (1617); the great jurist Sir Edward Coke (1618); and Charles Fitz-Geffry (1620): “But the end is the Crowne of the whole work; and the last Act (if any) carrieth away the Applause.”
Oblivious to the end, Stritmatter writes, “Evaluating this evidence honestly requires assessment of prior probabilities.” No. Evaluating this evidence honestly requires the ability to reason and to count.
Three out of nine. Two out of twenty-seven.
What the devil is going on here?
Only part of this grievous deficiency comes down to Stritmatter’s unintelligent search tactics, though a badly stated search will miss variants like “end doth crowne “ and “crowne of euery worke.”
The truly devastating error lies elsewhere, at the very foundations of his research. From the screen shot on p. 11, and by exactly which authors’ names he didn’t find, I could tell that he’s been using an incomplete, perhaps antiquated version of EEBO, EEBO lite. As he should have known—he supposedly studied for his doctorate—EEBO comprises two collections. EEBO-TCP Phase I is freely available to everyone who searches, on any device, from anywhere. It is not tied to any provider. But EEBO-TCP Phase II is “available only to EEBO-TCP partners.” Buried deep in the Help pages is the quiet bombshell: “Your institution may not be subscribed to all EEBO subsets.”
It appears that Coppin State is not.
EEBO-TCP Phase II accounts for three-fifths of all the titles in their database. So Dr. Stritmatter has been merrily searching away, without realizing that his corpus is missing more than half its texts. He’s been calling the winners of an election, in which three-fifths of the ballots have been randomly destroyed. He’s not playing with a full deck.
That noise you hear is the thunk-thunk-thunking of the Big Rock, bounding down and down and down the hill to the very bottom, and into the swamp.
This study is hopelessly, irrevocably, fatally flawed.
The honorable thing would be to withdraw the book, with refunds and apologies.
The rational thing to do would be to stop rolling that stone.
Being Sisyphus, there’s no hope.
