SHAKSPER 2005: Wager

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@shaksper.net)
Date: 08/29/05 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.1416  Monday, 29 August 2005

[1] 	From: 	Marcus Dahl <marcus@blackheartstudios.co.uk>
	Date: 	Friday, 26 Aug 2005 12:54:15 +0100
	Subj: 	RE: SHK 16.1407 Wager

[2] 	From: 	Michael Egan <drmichaelegan@hawaii.rr.com>
	Date: 	Friday, 26 Aug 2005 06:12:45 -1000
	Subj: 	1 Richard II Title

[3] 	From: 	Michael Egan <drmichaelegan@hawaii.rr.com>
	Date: 	Sunday, 28 Aug 2005 09:06:31 -1000
	Subj: 	Re: SHK 16.1407 Wager

[4] 	From: 	Ward Elliott <WElliott@claremontmckenna.edu>
	Date: 	Sunday, 28 Aug 2005 19:41:56 -0700
	Subj: 	RE: SHK 16.1407 Wager


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: 		Marcus Dahl <marcus@blackheartstudios.co.uk>
Date: 		Friday, 26 Aug 2005 12:54:15 +0100
Subject: 16.1407 Wager
Comment: 	RE: SHK 16.1407 Wager

Dear All,

Normally I am quite conservative on the issue of naming of plays - but I 
have to disagree with Al Margary on this one.

Consider the title page:

THE FIRST PART OF THE REIGN OF KING RICHARD THE SECOND OR THOMAS OF
WOODSTOCK

The play's second title is 'Thomas of Woodstock'. I feel that the 
abbreviation 1 Richard II is justified from this as 1HVI is an 
appropriate abbreviation for The First Part of Henry VI.

And I say this as someone who also doubts whether Shakespeare was the 
play's author.

Calling the play simply 'Thomas of Woodstock' is a bit like calling 
Twelfth Night, 'What You Will'.

I would be interested to know more of Al's views on the play though - 
let's see some more evidence of doubt!!

All the best,
Marcus

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: 		Michael Egan <drmichaelegan@hawaii.rr.com>
Date: 		Friday, 26 Aug 2005 06:12:45 -1000
Subject: 	1 Richard II Title

I'm sorry to annoy Al, but he doesn't know the history of this anonymous 
and untitled MS (its cover is missing). The play's first and second 
editors (Halliwell and Keller) called it Richard II, Part One and so did 
E.K. Chambers in The Elizabethan Stage. In the 1920s a cabal of critics 
led by F.S. Boas began insisting that it should be retitled Woodstock so 
as 'to avoid confusion with Shake­speare' (Bertram Lloyd in the TLS) and 
the seal was set by A.P. Rossiter 's 1946 edition, Woodstock, a Moral 
History, which positively ruled Shakespeare out as the author.  In other 
words, the retitling was and remains part of the attribution debate--the 
key issue surrounding this little gem of a drama.

By the way, if Al's skepticism is based on Rossiter, he should think 
again. That particular text is profoundly flawed and indeed deliberately 
misleading, with excised lines and entrances, the removal of key 
characters, mistranscriptions, unwarranted edits, bizarre punctuation 
and what can only be described as conscious misdraftings calculated to 
conceal its true origins. Every one of these charges is documented on my 
forthcoming edition.

--Michael

[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: 		Michael Egan <drmichaelegan@hawaii.rr.com>
Date: 		Sunday, 28 Aug 2005 09:06:31 -1000
Subject: 16.1407 Wager
Comment: 	Re: SHK 16.1407 Wager

I'm sorry to have to report to the listserv that Ward Elliott and I have 
been unable to agree on a process to resolve the differences between us. 
The bet has been called off and the matter is now closed.

--Michael Egan

[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: 		Ward Elliott <WElliott@claremontmckenna.edu>
Date: 		Sunday, 28 Aug 2005 19:41:56 -0700
Subject: 16.1407 Wager
Comment: 	RE: SHK 16.1407 Wager

I think that the last major posting on the wager controversy was Larry 
Weiss's offer a week or so ago to redefine our wager, rework its terms, 
and serve as its judge without compensation.  While posting online, he 
was also trying to serve as a mediator by discussing terms with both 
sides offline.  I respectfully declined all three of his offers because 
they seemed to add new complexities, ambiguities, and transaction costs 
to the simple terms of our original bet, and also to those of our 
response to Michael Egan's counterbet, SHK 16.348, 19 August, 2005.  We 
defined the terms of our original bet to provide a clear test of two 
propositions testable in principle, only one of which is easily testable 
in fact.  The first proposition, testable in principle but probably not 
in fact, was that our tests, which say "could be" to a known, 
indisputably pure Shakespeare play like Hamlet - our Category 1 - would 
also say "could be" to a hypothetical, undiscovered, untested Lost 
Shakespeare play of equally indisputable Shakespeare authorship-if one 
were ever to be found. No such play was available then or now. We took 
note of it, and have many times said that we don't expect to see such a 
play soon, but we don't mind allowing for one.  The heart of the bet was 
the second proposition, which is easily testable both in principle and 
in fact:  that our taker could not find a single play among the scores 
or hundreds of untested Category 4 plays not by Shakespeare that would 
pass our tests as a Shakespeare could-be.  In context, and as reaffirmed 
in our last posting, our bet was that our taker couldn't find a Category 
Four play that would test out as a "could be."  Bill Godshalk once 
broached the idea of setting up a consortium to take us up on the bet, 
but no one has done so.

Instead, all the fuss has been about jointly-authored or disputed plays 
- Category 2 Dubitanda and Category 3 Apocrypha, which have nothing to 
do with our bet. I was a bit taken aback by Mr. Weiss's continued 
insistence on redefining our terms as if they applied to co-authored 
plays, even after our last posting, which addressed these directly. 
They don't. We have never claimed that our tests say "could be" to 
whole, co-authored Category 2 plays like Two Noble Kinsmen.  We haven't, 
they don't, and they shouldn't. If there is a co-author, and your tests 
show it, it's a credit to the tests, not a flaw. If the Bad Quarto of 
Hamlet is sufficiently contaminated by non-Shakespeare material, a 
question which we have not tested, since it would require the 
modernization of the text's spelling, it shouldn't test like pure 
Shakespeare either.  Certainly Mr. Egan has never made co-authorship an 
issue.  He doesn't argue that Woodstock is partly Shakespeare's, he 
argues that it is Shakespeare's.  Our problem with his counterbet was 
that he claims to have evidence so irrefutable that it moves Woodstock 
from its present consensus position as no better than Category 3, 
Apocrypha, to Category 1, pure Shakespeare, as uncontestably his as 
Hamlet.  He doesn't, and he hasn't yet, so his counterbet has everything 
to do with promoting his claim with smoking-gun, Elvis look-alike 
evidence and nothing to do with validating or falsifying our tests with 
the clear-cut silver-bullet tests we use.  If the shoe fits, it may or 
may not be Cinderella.  If it doesn't fit, it's probably not Cinderella.

In our last posting we said we had no interest in taking a long detour 
from our proper work by debating in detail each of Mr. Egan's 1600 
supposedly unique points of resemblance between Woodstock and 
Shakespeare.  Most of the resemblances I looked at on his webpage - 
which did not include all 1600 -- seemed plausible, but the proof that 
any of them were unique seemed to me conspicuous by its absence.

Nevertheless, we tried to accommodate him in a way that we hoped would 
take only a small detour from our proper work, meet Hardy's objections 
to having to serve or use SHAKSPER as a betting stakeholder, and respond 
to Mr. Egan's own offer to forget the bet and encourage our comments and 
Mac Jackson's.  We offered terms that would put the bet aside, let both 
sides make 6-page opening and closing statements, make Hardy the judge, 
let SHAKSPER members discuss and debate for a couple of weeks, and let 
the entire existing membership of SHAKSPER vote on it, if they want to 
take the trouble.  But the vote was to be over no later than the end of 
September, and with a stringent burden of proof set upon Mr. Egan, 
consistent with the remoteness of his ascription from current scholarly 
consensus, with his ringing assertion that his evidence is irrefutable, 
and with the extra overhead, inconclusiveness, and unnecessary bother of 
running a look-alike contest instead of a horse race.  Whether or not 
this kind of debate was worth a short detour on our part, we thought it 
surely not worth a long one.

Though we declined his offer to revive the wager, redefine it, and judge 
it, Mr. Weiss was commendably and honorably doing what he could offline 
to get the two sides to agree on some kind of terms.  He wanted to make 
the debate work. He understood that people are often more open and 
flexible offline than on. He offered many useful suggestions.  And he 
made quite a bit of headway.  With his help, Mr. Egan and I were able to 
agree on two important points: a resolution to be debated, and an 
implicit burden of proof: "Resolved:  that Michael Egan has presented 
clear, convincing, and irrefutable  evidence that the anonymous 
Elizabethan play known variously as Richard II, Part One, Woodstock 
and/or Thomas of Woodstock is by Shakespeare."

But then the process broke down.  Mr. Egan did not want the question to 
go to the SHAKSPER membership in just a month.  He had to have a panel 
of properly-compensated experts, with the high attendant overhead costs 
of recruiting a mutually acceptable panel and determining how they would 
be paid, and he found intolerable our efforts to shorten and simplify 
the process by limiting the length of statements and having the whole 
thing decided by the SHAKSPER listserv by the end of September.  We saw 
no reason to agree with these added complexities.  We didn't see why we 
should pay for a blue-ribbon panel to judge his thesis, not ours, and we 
didn't want to get embogged in an endless, expensive, time-consuming 
wrangle where he didn't think he could explain his own side in less than 
a month.  We didn't say so, but it seemed to us that, if he had just 
written a 4-volume work on the subject, he should be able explain it 
compactly. But maybe the four volumes, together with the paucity of the 
evidence he has offered on the subject on SHAKSPER, are signs that he can't.

This was his response:

"Dear Ward

You're obviously a fake and phoney, jut as I thought. I'm not prepared 
to waste any more time on these fruitless so-called negotiations [sic]. 
  As I previously noted, you will constantly find objections to avoid 
putting the issue to a fair test. 'A short route good for September 
only' is just so much flim-flam. I insist neither on a long route nor a 
short one, just a process that takes as long as it needs to take. The 
issue is truth and it won't be hurried. You say: 'too much risk for us 
to take on.' Quite so.

We'll meet again. You can count on it.

--Michael Egan"

We took it that that means a no, and told him so offline.

This, by the way, is the same Michael Egan who was calling us "minatory" 
for defending Alfred Hart's word counts last year, against his charge 
that they differed from his own counts and were therefore worthless.  It 
seemed to me an unfortunate example of the "my way" fallacy.  So, in a 
sense, has been this whole controversy over the two wagers.  Mr. Egan 
started by interpreting our bet his way, then went on to make it his 
bet, then his non-bet, but always and unbudgeably his way.  His way is 
still too long, vague, and contentious for us to want to pursue 
voluntarily, far too reliant on declamation and jeers to make his point, 
and far too short of convincing substantiation to be worth a long detour 
on our part-and now he's telling us it's that or nothing.  That's not 
such a hard choice.  If he wants a no on our offer, that's his choice.

We are grateful to Larry Weiss for working offline to clarify these 
issues.  It looks like he has saved us not only the long "my way" detour 
Mr. Egan insists on, but also the much shorter one we were willing to 
give him.  Whether it will spare us his future jeers and name calling 
remains to be seen.  But jeers and name calling are not evidence; they 
are not even arguments.  We are still awaiting his evidence that the 
"unique verbal parallels" with Shakespeare are actually unique, and we 
still need his explanation why the many and gross stylistic 
discrepancies between Shakespeare and Woodstock listed in our studies 
don't make Shakespeare an improbable author.

Yours,
Ward Elliott

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S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook, editor@shaksper.net
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>

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