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:::What you do is not '''work''' in the normal acceptance of that word. Think rather of the idiom 'to work over'. Your default defence for your faults is, 'people can contact me if they want redress'. I.e. a man smears some innocent bystander, and then, when challenged by a third party, replies that the smeared person can always negotiate with him about terms and conditions for a ''possible'' reconsideration of the smear. It's one of the mind-games infantile people play, and no intelligent person would deign to recognize, in the Hegelian sense, the right of the malicious to dictate terms in a matter of civil redress. And now that you have come forth, checking your files, and saying you have information on my friend's personal life, (refusing to serve in the IDF) I think anyone who has taken your request to be allowed to edit here seriously, mull the implications. I.e. you have personally investigated the private lives of wikipedia editors, and use that private information against them. That last admission has just blown your alibi. Case closed, pal. [[User:Nishidani|Nishidani]] ([[User talk:Nishidani#top|talk]]) 19:58, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
::::It's fairly obvious that you won't be allowed to edit here ''and'' continue to say things off-WP about editors which you wouldn't be allowed to say on-WP. Your choice (if you are given a choice) will be between censoring what you have published and editing here. <span style="font-family: Perpetua, serif; font-size:120%"> ← [[User talk:ZScarpia | ZScarpia]] </span> 20:20, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
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Revision as of 20:32, 30 August 2010
The West Bank/Judea and Samaria Problem
Personal work section notes. I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.
- An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.
- The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.
- The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.
(ii)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.
'According to the aboriginal theory, the ancestor first called out his own name; and this gave rise to the most sacred and secret couplet or couplets of his song. The he 'named' (tneuka) the place where he had originated, the trees or rocks growing near his home, the animals sporting about nearby, any strangers that came to visit him, and so forth. He gave names to all of these, and thereby gained the power of calling them by their names; this enabled him to control them and to bind them to his will.'[1]
Wa’-yitser’ Yĕhôwāh’ (Adonai) ĕlôhīm’ min-hā'ădāmāh’ kol-‘ha’yath’ ha’-sādeh’ wĕ'ēth kol-ôph ha’-shāma’yim wa’-yāvē ‘ el-hā'ādām’ li-r'ôth mah-yiqrā-lô’ wĕ-kôl ăsher yiqrā-lô’ hā'-ādām‘ ne’pfesh ‘ha’yāh’ hû shĕmô. (20) Wa’- yiqrā’ hā'-ādām‘ shēmôth….
‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .' [2]
Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,
In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, the narrator Cherrycoke recounts, against the huge backdrop of seismic shifts in the political and scientific world of that time, the story of the eponymous figures who have undertaken to draw a scientific map of the wilderness and terrain between Pennsylvania and Maryland:
‘what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding and ultimately meaningless, - we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.”
Late in the novel, the Chinaman of the piece remarks:
‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’ [4]
The dispute here in wiki, like the historical reality it refers to, has its ‘Bad History’. In the novel, the apparently empirical task of defining boundaries is found unwittingly implicated in the later travails of American history, with its exceptionalism, erasure of native peoples, of possible alternative worlds, of Frostian paths never taken. American innocence and pragmatic realism, in the innocuous work of two surveyors, is swept up in the torment of power: cartographic principles embody an Enlightenment’s reach into the unknown, while, applied, to the ends of order and control, they inadvertently engender violent confusion and disarray. What is the ‘right line’ to take on nomenclature, when history’s line demarcating Israel and the West Bank was drawn by war, then the West Bank was occupied in the aftermath of war, and the world of Israeli settlers begins to redraw the map? One thing that happens is that the complexities have drawn editors into a minor war, as Pynchonesque as it is Pythonesque. There is one difference: most the cartographers say one thing, and Israel, the controlling power, asserts a different terminology. So what’s in a name?
Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’[5]. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.[6]. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:
'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'[7]
Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity [8]). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.
John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect
‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.” [9]
The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’[10], 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.
Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’[11]
Daphne Kutzner, in her analysis of the role of Empire in classic children’s fiction, looks at the question from the perspective of the intrusive Empire and its refraction of imperial renaming as reflected in popular books, notes that
‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’ [12]
Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora [13], the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.[14]
Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.[15]
Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands. [16]
Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.[17]. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.
The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias (Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.
(iii)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank
When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.[18]. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-
'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'[19]
One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and Wikipedia itself.
Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines [20] resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.
The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
(iv)The Negev Precedent With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' [21] Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-
We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.[22][23]
Political pressure and ‘the influence of patriotic arguments’ prevailed over those who, like S.Yeibin, thought the erasure of Arab names, many of which might preserve an archaic Hebrew origin. Yeibin thought this a disaster:-
‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” [24]<
Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.[25]
Reflecting on Benvenisti’s account in his larger study of language conflict in the Middle east, the Palestinian expatriate scholar Yasir Suleiman makes remarks that,
’By assigning Hebrew names anew to places on the map, the committee was therefore ‘redeeming’ these places from the corrupt and ‘alien’ Arabic names that they have acquired over the centuries’
and likens this process of linguistic erasure of Arabic and the reconstitution of Hebrew metaphorically to the nakba:-
‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’ [26]
The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew[27] language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichman, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:
‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our |psyche ’[28]
Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal of cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache)[29]. In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.
(v)The West Bank. History and Naming The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.
‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’ [30]
In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued. [31]
In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region[32] to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war.[33] The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power[34]. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank[35][36]. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.[37]
Gideon Aran describes the achievement:
‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.' [38]
The Camp David Accords negotiations of and the final agreement, in 1979, only underline how great was the linguistic rift between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's position and the American government intent on brokering an agreement.
‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'[39]
A huge amount of wrangling between the American negotiators and Begin revolved around this term.
‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’ [40]
Begin refused to back down from his ‘rock-hard’ intransigence on using ‘Judea and Samaria’ and at the Camp David signing ceremony, (March 26,1979) several interpretive notes were required to be added as annexes to the basic documents, one specifically dealing with the West Bank, which President Carter annotated with his own hand with the words:
‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’. [41]
An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovoked[42]invasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state[43] on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel[44]. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. [45] One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank. [46]
Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli Settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers[47] where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions'[48] Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.
Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area.[49].
This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), [50], thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.
A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo).[51][52]
(vi) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions
‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’ [53]
'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'[54]
After 1967 ‘Cartographers . .had many options, which tended to reveal their political proclivities. Those who were sympathetic to Israel labelled the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai as “administered territories” and used the phrase “Judea and Samaria” for Jordan’s former West Bank. They also included all of Jerusalem within Israeli territory,. Mapmakers who were ideologically neutral generally referred to “occupied territory” and maintained the term “West Bank”. . . In the post-1993 period a Palestinian Authority has been established in the West Bank and Gaza, yet there is no actual independent state of Palestine. Most international maps have stayed with the terms “West Bank” and “Gaza” but maps published by the Palestinian Authority describe these areas as “Palestine.” Furthermore, Palestinian Authority maps usually leave out Israel and assign its territory to “Palestine,” with the added designation that it is “occupied territory.”Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Harvey Sicherman, The power of projections: : how maps reflect global politics and history, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 pp.37-8
We are dealing with a defined territory and its naming. User:Ynhockey would make tidy distinctions, define the bound geographical territory (CIA Factbook) as just a political reality, and use Judea and Samaria for all other contexts. In his own work on Wiki, much of it admirable, we find many maps. Examine the following map he authored and uploaded, and which is employed on the Battle of Karameh
The central colour, a washed acquamarine tint, allows one to highlight the field of movement in the battle, and blurs the neat territorial division between the West Bank, and Jordan. But note that, in a wholly unnecessary manner, Israel is stamped in large bold characters and made to overlay the West Bank, which is placed diminutively in parentheses. Willy-nilly, the impression is that the West Bank is some territorial hypothesis or province within Israel. Whether Ynhockey meant to give the reader this impression or not is immaterial. Maps, as one source already quoted noted, reflect the cognitive bias of the mapmaker as much as an interpretation of a landscape, and here the bias is that the West Bank is under Israel, behind Israeli lines, a subset of that state. It is a fine example of what many cartographers and historians of cartography argue: the making of maps, and toponymic nomenclature in them, serves several purposes, to clarify, as here, a battle landscape, for example, but also to impose or assert power, or claims, or blur facts. Objectively, User:Ynhockey has loaded wiki with a map that cogs our perceptions, tilting them to an annexationist assumption. Indeed, unlike the Israeli government so far, his map actually looks like it has the West Bank annexed.
- ^ T.G.H.Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia,Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1971 p.126; cited by Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H.Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Knopf, 2002 pp.436f.
- ^ Genesis, ch.2, verses 19-20, with apologies for my transcription
- ^ For a fascinating study on both the figure of Adam in Islamic tradition, and on commentaries on this particular text specifically, see M.J.Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr and Hadīt Literature,’ in Joel L. Kraemer (ed.) Israel Oriental Studies, Volume XIII, BRILL, 1993 pp.112-174, p.140
- ^ Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Jonathan Cape, London 1997, pp.8,615
- ^ George Steiner, After Babel, Oxford University Press 1975 p.58
- ^ Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,, vol.1, tr.Ralph Manheim, Yale UP 1955 pp.119ff.,p.122
- ^ Isaiah 5:11. For this and other passages, see S.J.Tambiah ’s 1968 Malinowsky lecture, "The Magical Power of Words," (the ancient Egyptians, the Semites and Sumerians all believed that “the world and its objects were created by the word of God; and the Greek doctrine of logos postulated that the soul or essence of things resided in their names (pp.182-3). My attention was drawn to this particular essay by Tambiah by Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1984 p.96
- ^ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986 passim
- ^ John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Oxford University Press US, 2004, p.131
- ^ Abbiamo fatto l'Italia. Ora si tratta di fare gli Italiani
- ^ Regis Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject, University Of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 p.169 gives many Papuan examples. Compare his remark elsewhere in the same book, ‘In indigenous cultures . .(t)he most important means of taking control of the landscape is by naming, Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known.’ Ibid pp. 40-41
- ^ M. Daphne Kutzer, Empire's Children:Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children's Books, Routledge, 2000 p.120
- ^ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986
- ^ ‘Maps are a kind of language, or social product which act as mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world. But they are, perhaps first and foremost, guides to the mind-set which produced them. They are, in this sense, less a representation of part of the earth’s surface than a representation of the system of cognitive mapping which produced them,’ N.Penn, “Mapping the Cape: John Barrow and the First British Occupation of the Colony, 1794-1803.” in Pretexts 4 (2) Summer 1993, pp.20-43 p.23
- ^ John Atchison, ‘Naming Outback Australia,’ in Actes du XVI Congrès international des sciences onomastiques, Québec, Université Laval, 16-22 August 1987, Presses Université Laval, 1987 : pp.151-162 p.154-5
- ^ Susan Gay Drummond, Incorporating the Familiar, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1997 p.32 .
- ^ Alfonso Pérez-Agote, The Social Roots of Basque Nationalism, University of Nevada Press, 2006 p.xx
- ^ Selwyn Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement, Yale University Press, 2003 p.152
- ^ Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape:The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2000 pp.12-13 cf.'Suffused with the sense that “it is impossible for a present-day Hebrew map not to identify by name the places of Hebrew settlement mentioned in the Bible and in post-biblical Hebrew literature,” they set about identifying these sites and putting them on “Hebrew maps,” which they placed opposite the official Mandatory maps.’
- ^ Cf.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London 1987
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid, p.19
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, op.cit.p.14. The Arabic names were also found ‘morose’ and ‘offensive’ . As one member put it: ‘Many of the names are offensive in their gloomy and morose meanings, which reflect the powerlessness of the nomads and their self-denigration in the face of the harshness of nature’ (ibid.p.17). On the committee see also his memoir, Meron Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, tr. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, University of California Press, 2007 p.72.
- ^ Amar Dahamshe Off the linguistic map. Are Arab place names derived from Hebrew? in Haaretz 30.06.10
- ^ Benvenisti, ibid. p.17, p.18
- ^ ‘The name of the Ramon Crater, for example, perhaps the most dramatic geological formation in the Negev, “is derived from the Hebrew adjective ram (meaning elevated), “states an Israeli guidebook. The fact that its name in Arabic was Wadi Rumman (Pomegranate Arroyo), . . was not considered worthy of mention’ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.19
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, 2004 p.161, p.162.
- ^ cf.Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn,, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1930, Meridian Book reprint 1962. Shalom Spiegel was Sam Spiegel's more distinguished and erudite brother.
- ^ Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words, ibid p.140
- ^ Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (1951), in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Bd.4, Suhrkamp, 1980 p.123
- ^ Paul Francis Diehl, A Road Map to War, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999, pp.15-16.
- ^ 'The term West Bank was forced onto the international lexicon only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948'. Binyamin Netanyahu, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Warner Books, (1993) 2000 p.20. Netanyahu's dislike of the term (and his faulty memory for dates), is mirrored by the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, evidence if ever of the neutrality of the term: cf.‘I did not realize what it meant to be a refugee until I became one myself. When the Israeli army occupied Deir Ghassanah and the whole eastern part of Palestine in 1967, the news bulletins began to speak of the occupation of the Israeli defense forces of the West Bank. The pollution of language is no more obvious than when concocting this term: West Bank. West of what? Bank of what? The reference here is to the west bank of the River Jordan, not to historical Palestine. If the reference were to Palestine they would have used the term eastern parts of Palestine. The west bank of the river is a geographical location, not a country, not a homeland. The battle for language becomes the battle for the land. The destruction of one leads to the destruction of the other. When Palestine disappears as a word, it disappears as a state, as a country and as a homeland. The name of Palestine itself had to vanish. . .The Israeli leaders, practicing their conviction that the whole land of Palestine belongs to them would concretize the myth and give my country yet another biblical name: Judea and Samaria, and give our villages and towns and cities Hebrew names. But call it the West Bank or call its Judea and Samaria, the fact remains that these territories are occupied. No problem! The Israeli governments, whether right or left or a combination of both, would simply drop the term occupied and say the Territories! Brilliant! I am a Palestinian, but my homeland is the Territories! What is happening here? By a single word they redefine an entire nation and delete history.’ Mourid Barghouti, 'The Servants of War and their Language', in International parliament of Writers, Autodafe, Seven Stories Press, 2003 pp.139-147 pp140-1
- ^ Emma Playfair, International Law and the Administration of Occupied Territories: Two Decades of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 41.
- ^ Ran HaCohen, 'Influence of the Middle East Peace Process on the Hebrew Language' (1992), reprinted in Michael G. Clyne (ed.), Undoing and Redoing Corpus Planning, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp.385-414, p.397.
- ^ Shlomo Gazit, Trapped Fools: Thirty Years of Israeli Policy in the Territories, Routledge, 2003 p. 162
- ^ 'The terms “occupied territory” or “West Bank” were forbidden in news reports.'Ian S. Lustick, 'The Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectic of Religion and Nationalism in the Middle East', Logos, Vol.1, No.3, Summer 2002 pp.18-44, p. 39
- ^ 'Begin was happy to castigate the media and the intelligentsia for their views, real and imaginary, and their use of politically incorrect language. Israeli television was now instructed to use “Judea and Samaria’ for the administered territories, annexation became ‘incorporation’ and the Green Line suddenly disappeared from maps of Israel and the West Bank'. Colin Shindler, A History of Modern Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2008 p.174
- ^ 'The successful gaining of the popular acceptance of these terms was a prelude to gaining popular acceptance of the government’s settlement policies'.Myron J. Aronoff, Israeli Visions and Divisions: Cultural Change and Political Conflict, Transaction Publishers, 1991. p. 10.
- ^ Gideon Aran, 'Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Block of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Enumin),', in American Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 1994 pp.265-344, p.291, p.337
- ^ Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: a critical analysis of Israel's security & foreign policy, University of Michigan Press, 2006 p.441
- ^ William B. Quandt, Peace process: American diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1967, Brookings Institution Press, 2001, rev.ed.2001 p.130
- ^ William B.Quandt, Peace process, ibid. p.134. This was then accompanied by a formal note to Begin (September 22,1978), it which it was registered that ‘(A) In each paragraph of the Agreed Framework Document the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian People” are being and will be construed and understood by you as “Palestinian Arabs”. (B)In each paragraph in which the expression “West Bank” appears, it is being, and will be, understood by the Government of Israel as Judea and Samaria.’ William B. Quandt, Camp David: peacemaking and politics, Brookings Institution Press, 1986 p.387
- ^ Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897,Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd.ed. 2001 p.469
- ^ Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990 p.2
- ^ James Ron, Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel, University of California Press, 2003 p.180. Decoded, the statement means, 'invading Lebanon secures the West Bank for Israel and thus achieves the Biblical borders set forth more or less in the Tanakh's account of the early kingdoms'
- ^ Eric J. Schmertz, Natalie Datlof, Alexej Ugrinsky, President Reagan and the world, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997 p.44.
- ^ See Uri Bar-Joseph, Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century, Routledge, 2001 p.185
- ^ Numbers, 32:18
- ^ David C. Jacobson, Does David still play before you? Israeli poetry and the Bible, Wayne State University Press, 1997 p.50
- ^ Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The construction of modern national consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1998 p.14
- ^ Nigel Craig Parsons,The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa, Routledge, 2005 p.299
- ^ Jonathan Cook, Israeli Road Signs, Counterpunch 17-19, July 2009
- ^ Nir Hasson, Give Arab train stations Hebrew names, says Israeli linguist, Haaretz 28/12/2009
- ^ John Brian Harley, David Woodward, The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Humana Press, 1987 p.506, cited Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid.p.13
- ^ Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, ibid. p.13
On the fraudulence or illiteracy of those who propose an alternative candidature for Shakespeare's works. A note for Wikipedians unfamiliar with the facts.
Each of the following historical notices, which, taken together, according to the core principles of historiography suffice abundantly to confirm, if ever doubted, the traditional attribution of Shakespeare's works to Shakespeare, must be finangled, talked round, cast under suspicion, subject to the hermeneutics of conspiratorial blindsiding, denied or ignored by those who propose the fringe lunatic proposition that someone else, unknown to Shakespeare or his contemporaries, wrote the works contained in the First Folio. Uniquely, Shakespeare's evidentiary record is subject to a radical Pyrrhic scepticism that would deny the face value of the empirical documentary record. The challenge which the various and variegated proponents of the Shakespeare Authorship Question pose is not to Shakespeare's identity, which is secure, but to the fundamental principles of historical analysis, to historical writing itself. Were one to generalize the implicit working methods of these sceptics to the general field of documentary analysis, the discipline of history itself would be erased as an impossible undertaking, except as the quest for latent codes and ingenious signing ciphers, which however would subordinate the aesthetic thrust of great writing to an overriding neurotic tic of toying endlessly with cryptograms, just in case the author feared readers would believe, or disbelieve as the case may be, the evidence of the name on the frontispiece.[1] One seminal reason for the fact that their amateurish fumblings are ignored by mainstream scholarship is that they refuse to recognize (and thereby underwrite their incompetence as reliable commentators) how all history is written. No other writer or historical figure of distinction before modern times could survive the same pseudo-tests that have been devised by those enchanted by the afflatus of alternative candidature to attempt to undermine what the solid facts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean records attest. That the madness of methodless method is attached uniquely to him betrays one of the residual collateral consequences of the old cult of bardolatry, an inquisitive obsession with the identity and life of a poet about whom, as with most early writers and poets, little is known. To leaven out the bare record, therefore, one seizes on a better known contemporary and retrofits his biography to the works universally attributed to the otherwise little-known bard of Stratford, and by this antic ruse one fudges an impression that finally we know more about the author than the skimping austeries of history otherwise permit us to know. The result is farce, as with the Oxfordian candidate Edward de Vere, whose most recent biographer tells us that, among other things, this aristocrat, otherwise known for some stray scraps of limp to middling verse, (which, as thorough computerized testing has proven,[2] shares nothing with Shakespeare's style) was an 'egotist, thug, sodomite, atheist, vulture, traitor, murderer, rapist, pederast, adulterer, libeler, fop, playboy, truant, tax evader, drunkard, snob, spendthrift, deadbeat, cheat, blackmailer, malcontent, hypocrite, conspirator, and ingrate,'[3] all undoubtedly indispensable traits required to write the world otherwise written by the industrious middle-class gentleman, Shakespeare of Stratford, whom all of his contemporaries spoke of as endowed with an amiably sweet temper, natural wit and with a gift for rapid, fluent, mellifluous composition. Attachment to these theories belongs to the type of hysterical popular delusion surveyed by Charles Mackay in his path-finding essay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds(1841), which by chance happened, with premonitory intelligence, to have been published just 4 years before Delia Bacon started off the hare of the first hypothesis of alternative authorship.
Witnesses to Shakespeare:
‘intelligent and knowledgeable bibliophiles contemporary with both the historical William Shakespeare and the historical 17th earl of Oxford (as well as the historical Christopher Marlowe and the historical Sir Francis Bacon), consistently attributed the canonical Shakespeare plays and poems to William Shakespeare, never to Oxford (or Marlowe or Bacon), even in the privacy of their personal libraries and notebooks.’ [4]
Group A.
(a)’The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet', Prince of Denmarke, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort. ...
Harvey also refers to Shakespeare in a second note which runs:-
"Sir Edward Dier ... His Amaryllis, & Sir Walter Raleighs Cynthia," followed by Spenser, Constable, France, Watson, Daniel, Warner, Chapman, Silvester, Shakespeare, & the rest of owr florishing metricians.'
(a)’much ye same w{i}th y{a}t in Shakespeare.’
Alan Nelson comments:
Possibly it is indeed Buc's, and comparison is being made with Henry IV Part 2 (1600), which Henry V much resembles, particularly in its title-page, except that Henry IV Part 2 carries an attribution to William Shakespeare.
(b) In Buc’s personal copy of George a Greene (1599) we read an annotation dated sometime between 1599 and 1605, where the future Master of the Revels shows he inquired of two men of the theatre about the identity of the author, writing on the title page:
Written by ... a minister, who acted
the piners part in it himself. Teste W. Shakespeare (as W.Shakespeare has born witness (to me))
Ed. Juby saith that this play was made by Ro. Greene
In Alan Nelson’s words, the annotation proves that Buc consulted William Shakespeare, together with Edward Juby (of the Admiral’s Men) as reliable witnesses concerning theatrical events dating back to the Christmas season of 1593-94[5]
- (3) John Harington(?1561-1612), the Queen’s nephew and godson, in two lists of quarto plays in his possession in 1609 refers to
K. Leir of Shakspear.
King Leyr. W. Sh.
distinguishing it from the anonymous King Leire (1605), which he called "King Leire.: old." Furthermore, Nelson argues, that:’ Sir John Harington, in the privacy of his personal notebook (the Arundel-Harington manuscript), had no hesitation in naming Oxford as an author - but only of such poems as have been ascribed to him by Professor Steven May.’
- (4) Edward Alleyn, (1566-1626), Shakespeare’s fellow action, wrote in a list of books his own, that he possessed, ‘a book shaksper sonnetts 5d’
- (5) Humphrey Dyson(d. 1633), a notary with pervasive connections to people in the theatrical world of his day, was a book collector, and in his catalogue 6 quartos are listed, one being "Troilus and Cressida" whose title-page, after ‘Written by William Shakespeare’ he annotated in the following way
& printed amongest his workes.
Meaning he considered both Troilus and Cressida and the Folio to be Shakespeare’s works.
(a) regarding his London reading of Shakespeare’s plays in 1606 he registers that
'His recorded reading of Shakespeare is confined to 1606 (consisting in) Romeo and Iulieta Tragedie; loues labors lost comedie; the passionat pilgrime; The rape of lucrece, A midsommers nights Dreame comedie.’
(b) Drummond compiled a list of the books in his library, attributing both
"Venus & Adon." and "the rap of Lucrece" to Schaksp in 1611
(c) Books from his library preservd at Edinburgh University include two Shakespeare quartos: Love's Labors Lost (1598) and Romeo and Juliet (1599) , the latter of which, since the title page is anonymous, is annotated by Drummond as Shakespeare’s work.
Wil. Sha.
- (7) Robert Burton(1577-1640), who aside from being the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, was an Oxford academic playwright, owned Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece (1600) and Venus and Adonis (1602), the latter of which, on the title-page, carries an ascription in a contemporary hand: "by Wil. Shakespeare."
- (8) John Rous (1574-1652), in a note on books given to the Library by Robert Burton in his Last Will and testament" contains the following two confirmatory annotations
Venus and Adonis by Wm Shakespear Lond. 1602
The rape of Lucrece by Wm Shakespear Imp{er}fet.’
As Alan Nelson comments, ‘Rous's entries testify to his acceptance of the received attribution of these separately-published poems’ [6]
Group B. Fellow writers, historians and poets, contemporary to him, who mention Shakespeare.
- (9) Robert Greene, 1592[7], or as 'posthumously ventriloquised' by Chettle (Katherine Duncan-Jones: see 10), alludes to Shakespeare, 'Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow[8], beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is, in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.'[9]
- (10) Henry Chettle, 1592, in the epistle, 'To those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance'[10], appears to use Greene (above 9) to attack Shakespeare. Very quickly then, Chettle apologized for his remarks, in a second text.[11]
- (11) [[Richard Field|Richard Field (1561-1624), Shakespeare's fellow Stratfordian, now London printer, to whom he sold the rights of Venus and Adonis in 1593. It is to Barnfield that we owe the innovative spelling William Shakeʃpeare, for his fellow-Stratfordian's monicker,[12] Richard Stonley (1621-, Teller of the Exchequer under Queen Elizabeth who purchased a copy that year on June 12, entered the author's name in his diary as Shakspere.[13] Unlike modern sceptics, this clerkish Shakespeare contemporary could see no existential difference between Shakeʃpeare and Shakspere.
- (12)Richard Barnfield (1574-1620), a poet and Oxford graduate in the 1598 appendix of Poems in divers Humors to his The Encomium of Lady Pecunia (printeed by G.S. for John Jaggard) is to be found the earliest praise of Shakespeare.[14]
- And Shakespeare thou, whose hony-flowing Vaine,
- (Pleasing the World) thy praises doth obtaine.
- Whose Venus and whose Lucrece (sweete, and chaste)
- Thy name in fames immortall Booke haue plac't.
- Live euer you, at least in Fame liue euer:
- Well may the Bodye dye, but Fame dies neuer.
The last two lines, with the repeated Live euer probably account for the otherwise enigmatic dedication to Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609). Certain poems by Barnfield in the 1598 volume were attributed to Shakespeare in the 1599 edition of The Passionate Pilgrim by William Jaggard.</ref>
- (13) The poet Thomas Edwards, in (1593?) 1595 alludes top Shakespeare in referring to Adon.[15]
- (14) William Covell, 1595
- (15) the author of Willobie his Avisa,1594
- (16) Francis Meres (1665-1647), distinguished between Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford in 1598 in his Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury. Being the Second party of Wits Commonwealth.<Park Honan, ibid.pp.263</ref>
- (17) John Weever, 1599
- (18) the Cambridge author(s) of the Parnassus plays,1599,1601, in the third (The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus), Shakespeare's fellow actor William Kempe is made to say (a):
'Few of the university [men] pen plays well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.'[16]
and (b)
- 'Let this duncified world esteem of Spencer and Chaucer . .I'll worship sweet Mr.Shakspeare, and to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow,'[17]
- (19) Robert Chester's Loves Martyr (1601) appears, along with some other, short, poems by several theatrical poets, such as Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston. Among these there is one signed by 'William Shakespeare.' The untitled poem is known known as The Phoenix and the Turtle. The volume was printed by Shakespeare's fellow Stratfordian, Richard Field.[18]
- (20)John Manningham, a student at the Middle Temple, and a 'a friend of William Shakespeare's friend and "cousin" Thomas Greene, who was then finishing up his studies at the Middle Temple and would move to Stratford the following year,'[19] wrote down in his diary in March 1602, either having heard it from his room-matye Edward Curle, or from the Inner Temple gossip, William Towse, the anecdote on howthe anecdote on how Shakespeare intercepted Richard Burbage's assignation with a lady, so that William the Conqueror preceded Richard 111, the role Burbage was acting. [20]
- (10) Henry Chettle, who had criticized and apologized for doing so, Shakespeare in 1592 published his England's Mourning Garment in 1603 once more critical of Shakespeare for failing to mourn the Queen's death in verse.[21]
- (21) Anthony Scoloker, in the Epistle to the Reader of his Daiphantus, or the Passions of Loue, 1604, writes that 'It should be . .like Friendly Shakespeare's tragedies . . it should please all, like Prince Hamlet'.'[22]
- (22)John Poulett in a letter to his uncle Sir Francis Vincent from Paris, October 10, 1605, wrote:
'The danger in these sports makes them seem good, men seeme in them as actors in a Tragedye, and my thinkes I could play Shackesbeare in relating." [23]
- (23) William Camden, the leading historian of his day, 1605, refers to Shakespeare as one of the most 'pregnant wits' of his day. [24][25]
- (24) John Davies the poet in his The Scourge of Folly, called Shakespeare “our English Terence, . . making Shakespeare out to be a playwright, in 1610.[26]
- (25) John Webster in his The White Devil, mentions ‘the right happy and copious industry of Master Shake-speare in 1612.
- (26) Leonard Digges, raised 'in a village on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1590s'[27]refers familiarly to Will Shakespeare as England’s Lope de Vega, in sonnet-writing,1613. [28]
- (27)Thomas Freeman wrote an 'epigram' in praise of Shakespeare, 1614.[29]
- (28) Francis Beaumont in a letter to Ben Jonson, 1615 ca.[30]
- (29) Edmund Howes (fl. 1602–1631) in an amended edition of John Stow (ca.1525-1605's Annales (1580), in 1615, published a list of 'Our moderne, and present excellent Poets', where poets are listed 'according to their priorities as neere I could,' Shakespeare figures 13th among the 27 listed "M. Willi. Shakespeare gentleman." Priorities here means 'social rank'.[31]
- (30) William Basse, poem on Shakespeare 1616-1623[32]
- (31) John Taylor, mentions Shakespeare who ‘did in art excell’, in his The Praise of Hemp-seed, 1620[33]
- (32) Ben Jonson (a)gossiped about him to William Drummond in 1619, (b)wrote a long eulogy of him as the 'Soul of the Age' and 'Swan of Avon', 1623, and (c)mentions him as someone he loved and honoured ‘this side Idolatry’ in his posthumous notes 1641
- (33) Hugh Holland wrote a laudatory poem in the First Folio,1623
- (26) Leonard Digges, stepson of Shakespeare’s Stratford friend Thomas Russell, and a poet, scholar and translator wrote a poem in his honour for the First Folio 1623[34], and (b) mentions him in a text of 1640.
- (34) James Mabbe, poet and scholar wrote a poem to his memory in the First Folio 1623
- (35) Michael Drayton, Shakespeare’s fellow poet and native of Warwickshire, mentions Shakespeare in his elegy to Henery Reynolds,1627
- (36)An anonymous hand wrote the following verses in the 1620s into a copy of the First Folio, and also transcribed there verses from the Stratford monument, meaning he visited and checked them.
- Here Shakespeare lies whom none but Death could Shake,
- And here shall lie till judgement all awake,
- When the last trumpet doth unclose his eyes,
The wittiest poet in the world shall rise. [35]
- (37) John Milton wrote a sonnet on the 'admirable dramatick poet W.Shakespeare', 1630[36]
- (38) In the The Banquet of Jests, in 1630, a work attributed by some to Archibald Armstrong there is a jest (Jest no. 259) entitled Stratford upon Avon which runs: "One travelling through Stratford upon Avon, a Towne most remarkeable for the birth of famous William Shakespeare, and walking in the Church to doe his devotion, espyed a thing there worthy observation ...." [37] [38]
- (39) (a)A Lieutenant Hammond on tour from Norwich, in his diary 1634 made the following entry after a visit to "Stratford Towne":
‘In that dayes trauell we came by Stratford vpon Auon, where in the Church in that Towne there are some Monuments ... Those worth obseruing and which wee tooke notice of were these...A neat Monument of that famous English Poet, Mr. William Shakespeere; who was borne heere.’[39][40]Cite error: A
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- (40) Thomas Heywood, the most prolific dramatist, in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, 1635 mentions Shakespeare
- (32) Ben Jonson in his Timber or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, ('1641 but written before August 1637) wrote of Shakespeare's defects.[41]
- (41) William D’Avenant’s ode entitled "In Remembrance of Master William Shakespeare," appeared in 1638 in his Madagascar.
- (37) John Milton, in his L'Allegro (1632-1638) writes of: 'Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child.'
- (42) James Mervyn writes of 'Beaumont, Fletcher, Shakespeare, and a train of glorious poets'[43]
- (43) Thomas Bancroft’s two poems mention Shakespeare, 1639[44][45]
- (44)Benson's re-edition of the Poems, in 1640 contains an anonymous "An Elegie on the death of that famous Writer and Actor, M. William Shakespeare."
- (45))Benson's 1640 edition also contains a poem by John Warren on 'lofty Shakespeare'[46]
- (26)Benson's edition also contains a longer poem on Shakespeare by Leonard Digges,'"Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and his Poems", dated to between 1630 and 1634.[47][48]
- (46)Richard Hunt, a Stratford district vicar who identified the Stratford man with the great London actor William Shakespeare.[49][50][51]
- (47)Sir John Suckling,(1609-1642) in his posthumous Fragmenta Aurea (1646) completed some lines of a draft he found of Lucrece, perhaps coming into his hands from his friend William Davenant, 1606-1668, Shakespeare's godson, completed them, and attributed them to Shakespeare, as is clear from the title 'A Supplement of an imperfect Copy of Verses of Mr.Wil.Shakespeare' [52][53]
- (48) Sir Richard Baker in his Chronicle of the Kings of England, in 1643 under ‘“The Raign of Queen Elizabeth,” refers to Shakespeare in a concluding of “Men of note in her time”,[54]
- (49)John Hales,(1584 - 1656) before 1656 is reported by John Dryden to have said,'that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare'[55]
Group C. Fellow actors
- (4) Edward Alleyn, (1566-1626), Shakespeare’s fellow action, wrote in a list of books his own, that he possessed, ‘a book shaksper sonnetts 5d’
- (50) Henry Condell (1576?-1627)
- (51) John Heminges (1556-1630)
- (52) Augustine Phillips in his will, executed 5 May 1605, bequeathed, "to my Fellowe William Shakespeare a thirty shillings peece in gould,' as well as similar sums to other actors in the King's Men.[56]
Group D. Fellow Stratfordians who knew him in London
- (11) Richard Field, London printer and Shakespeare's fellow Stratfordian. Shakespeare makes a patent allusion to him in Cymbeline, Act IV.Sc.2,l.375, in the name Richard du Champ.[57]
- (53) Middle Temple attorney and Shakespeare's 'cousin',Thomas Greene, Shakespeare's Stratford houseguest for at least a year, wrote in his diary of having visited Shakespeare and his son-in-law John Hall (himself a Queens' College, Cambridge graduate in medicine), after the latter two had riddene down to the city, a day after himself, on 16th of Nov.1614. Stratford Shakespeare, against, is the London Shakespeare, and did not retire to the idiocy of rural life permanently, but kept travelling there.[58]
Group E. Noblemen.('Licensed players who enjoyed royal or noble patronage were categorised as high-ranking household servants'[59]
- (54) Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton was addressed by Shakespeare in two prefatory letters in the dedications appended to his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece to 1593,1594. In the second volume, Lucrece, Shakespeare writes of 'the warrant of your honourable disposition' which has been interpreted as suggesting payment.[60]
- (55)Queen Elizabeth 1 'rewarded' Shakespeare, along with his fellow actors, all servants of The Lord Chamberlain's Men, with a payment of £13.6s.8p and £6.13s.4d from the Exchequer from the Royal Chamber Accounts for performing before her in 1594,[61], at Greenwich Palace on the 26th and 28 Dec. of that year, payment being made on March 15, 1595.Cite error: A
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(see the help page)..[62] - (57)Francis Manners, the 6th. Earl of Rutland, and a former friend of Southampton's, hired Shakespeare to devise for the royal tournament at Belvoir an impresa (emblem with motto), along with Richard Burbage to paint it, in 1613. Shakespeare would not have been engaged to write the motto unless his abilities as a creative writer were acknowledged by such men of the nobility.[63]
- (58/59)William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke and his brother Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke were hailed as patrons in the preface to the First Folio (1623). In the preface to the 1647 folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, reference is made to the Pembroke brothers as 'patrons to the flowing compositions of the then expired sweet swan of Avon, Shakespeare'.[64]
- ^ 'Which is, given the absence of evidence, the only form of 'evidence' readily adducible by the school of cryptic night. As Charles Nicholl writes recently:'Of course, there is another reason why coded messages loom so large in the quest to prove that someone else wrote the works of Shakespeare. They are required precisely because of the absence of any overt messages – otherwise known as historical evidence – to that effect. It is one of the many weaknesses of the anti-Stratfordian case that not a whisper is heard of any such suspicion until the mid-nineteenth century. In the crowded, intimate, gossipy world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, in the letters and diaries and epigrams of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, in the ad personam jibes that were flung about “like hailstones” in the so-called War of the Theatres at the turn of the century, no one makes any allusion to this incredible sleight of hand being perpetrated, year after year, play after play, by the most popular writer of the day.'Charles Nicholl, 'Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.' The Times, 21 April, 2010
- ^ Ward E.Y. Elliott, Robert J. Valenza,'Oxford by the numbers: What are the odds that the Earl of Oxford could have written Shakespeare's poems and plays?'in Tennessee Law review,Vol. 72, (2004) pp.323-452
- ^ Joseph Sobran,A Flawed Life of Oxford, (review of Alan H.Nelson's Monstrous adversary: the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Univerity of Liverpool Press, 2003), in Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, Fall 2003.
- ^ Alan H.Nelson, Eight Witnesses to Shakespeare’s authorship of books attributed to him.
- ^ Alan H.Nelson, ‘Stratford Si! Essex No! (An open-and-shut case),' ‘Symposium: Who wrote Shakespeare? An evidentiary puzzle’, in Tennessee Law Review Fall, 2004
- ^ Alan H. Nelson, ‘Eight Witnesses to Shakespeare (seven new)’
- ^ The case for Greene, and against Chettle, has been made recently by Richard Westley, 'Computing Error: Reassessing Austin’s Study of Groatsworth of Wit,' in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2006, pp.363-378.
- ^ the image derives from Greene's own authentic writings, his Francesco's Fortunes(1590), where, blending and anecdote from Macrobius about an ambitious crow is taught to say Ave Caesar with an image from Horace (Epistles, 1.iii), where Celsus is warned:'not to pilfer from other writers any longer, lest those he has robbed should return one day to claim their feathers, when like the crow . .stripped of its stolen splendour . . he would become a laughing-stock.' (John Dover Wilson, 'Malone and the Upstart Crow', in Shakespeare Survey, 4 (1951), pp.56-68, cited Katherine Duncan-Jones, 'Shakespeare, the Motley Player,' in The Review of English Studies, N.S. Vol.60, No.247 pp.723-742, p.732.
- :quid mihi Celsus agit, monitus multumque monendus
- privatas ut quaerat opes, et tangere vitet
- scripta Palatinus quaecumque recipit Apollo,
- ne, si forte suas repetitum venerit olim
- grex avium plumas, moveat cornicula risum
- furtivis nudata coloribus?
- Κολοιὸς δἐ, συνιδὼν ἑαυτὸν δυσμορφἰᾳ περικείμενον, ἄπελθὼν καὶ τὰ ἀποπἰπτοντα τῶν ὀρνέων πτερὰ συλλεξάμενος,ἑαυτῷ περιέθηκε καὶ προσεκόλλησε.Συνέβη οὖν ἐκ τούτου εὑειδέστερον πάντων γεγονέναι.Ἑπέστη οὖν ἠ ἠμέρα τῆς προθεσμίας καὶ ἥλθον πάντα τὰ ὂρνεα πρὸς τὸν Δία. Ό δἐ κολοιός ποικἰλος γενόμενος ἧκε καὶ αὑτός. Τοῦ δἐ Διὸς μέλλοντος χειροτονῆσαι αὑτοῖς τὸν κολοιόν βασιλἐα διὰ τῆν εὑπρέπειαν, ἀγανακτἡσαντα τὰ ὂρνεα, ἒκαστον τὸ ῖδιον ἀὐτοῦ πτερὸν ἀφείλετο. Οὓτω τε συνέβη ἀῦτῷ ἀπογυμνωθέντι κολοιόν πάλιν γενέσθαι.
- Tumens inani gragulus superbia
- pinnas, pavoni quae deciderant, sustulit,
- seque exornavit. deinde, contemnens suos
- immiscet se ut pavonum formoso gregi,'
- illi impudenti pinnas eripiunt avi,'
- fugantque rostris.
- ^ The passage closely echoes Nashe's 1589 attack,prefixed as an epistle to Greene's Menaphon, on uneducated arriviste poets who 'intrude themselves to our eares as the alcumists of eloquence', and 'who (mounted on the stage of Arrogance) thinke to out-brave better pennes with the swelling bombast of bragging blanke verse'.Howard Baker, 'The Formation of the Heroic medium,' in Paul J.Alpers (ed.), Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, Oxford University Press, 1967 pp.126-168 p.130.
- ^ Appended to Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, and argued by by John Jowett to be Chettle's work (but see Richard Westley, above (9),) in his 'Johannes Factotum: Henry Chettle and Greene's Groatsworth of Wit,' in Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, 87 (1993), pp.453-486. Cited Katherine Duncan-Jones, 'Shakespeare, the Motley Player,' in The Review of English Studies, N.S. Vol.60, nO.247 pp.723--742, p.730 n.24
- ^ 'About three moneths since died M. Robert Greene, leauing many papers in sundry Booke sellers hands, among others his Groats-worth of wit, in which a letter written to diuers play-makers, is offensiuely by one or two of them taken, and because on the dead they cannot be auenged, they wilfully forge in their conceites a liuing Author: and after tossing it two and fro, no remedy, but it must light on me. How I haue all the time of my conuersing in printing hindred the bitter inueying against schollers, it hath been very well knowne, and how in that I dealt I can sufficiently prooue. With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I neuer be: the other, whome at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had, for that as I haue moderated the heate of liuing writers, and might haue vsde my owne discretion (especially in such a case) the Author beeing dead, that I did not, I am as sory, as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he exelent in the qualitie (i.e.,profession) he professes: Besides, diuers of worship haue reported, his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that aprooues his Art.' Cf.Katherine Duncan-Jones, ibid.p.736
- ^ Park Honan, Shakespeare. A life,, Oxford University Press,1999 p.172. Honan writes: 'Field probably inserted a neutral e between the two syllables of the last name - 'Shak' and 'ʃpeare' - because, in a Tudor press, both k and the long letter ʃ kerned (that is, the face of each letter projected beyond the tiny body behind it, and when set together such letters bent or broke in printing)'.
- ^ Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: a compact documentary life,Oxford University Press US, 2nd.rev.ed. 1987 p.176.
- ^ in a piece entitled A Remembrance of some English Poets, alongside Spenser, Daniel and Drayton.
- ^
- Adon deaftly masking thro,
- Stately troupes rich conceited,
- Shew'd he well deserved to,
- Loues delight on him to gaze,
- And had not loue her self intreated,
- Other nymphs had sent him baies.
- ^ Tom Reedy and David Kathman, 'How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts,'
- ^ Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: a compact documentary life,' 1987 p.176
- ^ Tom Reedy and David Kathman, 'How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts,'
- ^ Tom Reedy and David Kathman, 'How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts,'
- ^ Park Honan, ibid.p.263
- ^ ::Nor doth the silver tonged Melicert
- Drop from his honey muse one sable teare
- To mourne her death that graced his desert,
- And to his laies opend her Royall eare.
- Shepheard remember our Elizabeth,
- And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death.
- ^ Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare by Hilliard: A Portrait Deciphered, University of California Press, 1977 p.133
- ^ Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life 286
- ^ 'These may suffice for some poeticaldescriptions of our ancient poets; if I would come to our time, what a world could I present to you out of Sir Philkip Sidney, Ed. Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Hugh Holland, Ben.Jonson, Th.Campion, Mich. Drayton, George Chapman, John Marston, William Shakespeare, and other most pregnant witts of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire.'Cited James G. McManaway,Authorship of Shakespeare, ibid.p.31
- ^ Coriolanus is generally dated after 1605 on the basis of a number of verbal parallels Menenius' fable of the belly and Adrian IV's 'wise speech' in Camden. See Philip Brockbank (ed.) Coriolanus, Arden ed.(1976)Cengage Learning EMEA, 2001 pp.24,27f.
- ^
- To our English Terence, Mr. Will. Shake-speare.
- Some say (good Will) which I, in sport, do sing,
- Had'st thou not plaid some Kingly parts in sport,
- Thou hadst bin a companion for a King;
- And, beene a King among the meaner sort.
- Some others raile; but, raile as they thinke fit,
- Thou hast no railing, but a raigning Wit:
- And honesty thou sow'st, which they do reape;
- So, to increase their Stocke which they do keepe.
- ^ Jonathan Bate,The Genius of Shakespeare, Oxford University Press US, 1998,p.72
- ^
- Will Baker:Knowinge/that Mr.Mab:was to/sende you this Booke/of sonets, wch with Spaniards/here is accounted of their/lope de Vega as in Englande/we sholde of or:Will/Shakespeare, I colde not/but insert thus much to/you, that if you like/him not, you muste neuer/neuer reade Spanishe Poet.' Leo:Digges'. Cited Paul Morgan, 'Our Will Shakespeare' and Lope de Vega: An Unrecorded Contemporary Document,' in Allardyce Nicoll (ed.),Shakespeare Survey, (16),Cambridge University Press, 2002 reprint, pp.118-120: Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: a compact documentary life, ibid.p.313
- ^
- To Master W. Shakespeare.
- Shakespeare, that nimble mercury, thy braine
- Lulls many hundred Argus-eyes asleepe,
- So for for all thou fashionest thy vaine;
- At the horse-foot fountain thou has drunk full deep:
- Vertue's or vice's theame to thee all one is;
- Who loves chaste life, there's Lucrece for a teacher;
- WHo list read lust, there's Venus and Adonis,
- True modell of a most lascivious leatcher.
- Besides in plaies thy wit windes like Meander,
- Whence needy new-composers borrow more
- Thence Terence doth from Plautus and Menander.
- But to praise thee aright I want thy store;
- The let thine owne works thine own worth upraise,
- And help t'adorn thee with deserved bays.
- But to praise thee aright I want thy store;
- ^
- . . . here I would let slip
- (If I had any in me) scholarship,
- And from all Learning keep these lines as clear
- As Shakespeare's best are, which our heirs shall hear.
- ^ Tom Reedy and David Kathman, 'How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts,'.
- ^
- Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
- To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lie
- A little nearer Spenser to make room
- For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.
- To lodge all four in one bed make a shift
- Until Doomsday, for hardly will a fifth
- Betwixt this day and that by fate be slain
- For whom your curtains may be drawn again.
- If your precedency in death doth bar
- A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher,
- Under this carved marble of thine own
- Sleep rare tragedian Shakespeare, sleep alone,
- Thy unmolested peace, unshared cave,
- Possess as lord not tenant of thy grave,
- That unto us and others it may be
- Honor hereafter to be laid by thee.
- ^
- In Paper, many a Poet now suruiues
- Or else their lines had perish'd with their liues.
- Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
- Sir Philip Sidney who the Lawrell wore,
- Spencer, and Shakespeare did in Art excell,
- Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel,
- Siluester Beaumont, Sir Iohn Harington,
- Forgetfulnesse their workes would ouer run,
- But that in Paper they immortally
- Doe liue in spight of Death, and cannot dye.
- ^
- TO THE MEMORIE
- of the deceased Authour Maister
- W. S H A K E S P E A R E.
- Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellowes give
- The world thy Workes : thy Workes, by which, out-live
- Thy Tombe, thy name must when that stone is rent,
- And Time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment,
- Here we alive shall view thee still. This Booke,
- When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke
- Fresh to all Ages : when Posteritie
- Shall loath what's new, thinke all is prodegie
- That is not Shake-speares; ev’ry Line, each Verse
- Here shall revive, redeeme thee from thy Herse.
- Nor Fire, nor cankring Age, as Naso said,
- Of his, thy wit-fraught Booke shall once invade.
- Nor shall I e’re beleeve, or thinke thee dead.
- (Though mist) untill our bankrout Stage be sped
- (Imposible) with some new straine t’out-do
- Passions of Juliet, and her Romeo;
- Or till I heare a Scene more nobly take,
- Then when thy half-Sword parlying Romans spake.
- Till these, till any of thy Volumes rest
- Shall with more fire, more feeling be exprest,
- Be sure, our Shake-speare, thou canst never dye,
- But crown’d with Lawrell, live eternally.
- ^ >Tom Reedy and David Kathman, 'How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts,'
- ^
- What needs my Shakespeare for his honour'd Bones
- The labour of an age in piled Stones?
- Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
- Under a star-ypointing Pyramid?
- Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
- What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
- Thou in our wonder and astonishment
- Hast built thyself a live-long Monument.
- For whilst to th'shame of slow-endeavouring art
- Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart
- Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd Book
- Those Delphick lines with deep impression took,
- Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,
- Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving;
- And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie,
- That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.
- ^ Alan Nelson, Tennessee Law Review, remarks: ’These words merely set the scene for the joke itself, which is so lame I pass over it. I repeat the contemporary characterization, however, of Stratford-upon-Avon: "a Towne most remarkeable for the birth of famous William Shakespeare."
- ^ James G. McManaway,Authorship of Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library 1962 p.31
- ^ Alan Nelson, in Tennessee Law Review, ibid.
- ^ James G. McManaway,Authorship of Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library 1962 p.31.
- ^ De Shakespeare nostrat[i]. — I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line*. My answer hath been, " Would he had blotted a thousand," which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted ; and to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature ; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. "Sufflaminandus erat" as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him: "Caesar, thou dost me wrong." He replied : "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause;" and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.' *An allusion to Heminges and Condell's remark in the First Folio that '(Shakespeare's) mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers'.John Freehafer, 'Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry,' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, (Winter, 1970), pp. 63-75, p.67.
- ^
- "In Remembrance of Master William Shakespeare."
- Beware (delighted Poets!) when you sing
- To welcome Nature in the early Spring;
- Your num'rous Feet not tread
- The Banks of Avon; for each Flowre
- (As it nere knew a Sunne or Showre)
- Hangs there, the pensive head.
- Each Tree, whose thick, and spreading growth hath made,
- Rather a Night beneath the Boughs, than Shade,
- (Unwilling now to grow)
- Looks like the Plume a Captain weares,
- Whose rifled Falls are steept i'th teares
- Which from his last rage flow.
- The piteous River wept it selfe away
- Long since (Alas!) to such a swift decay;
- That read the Map; and looke
- If you a River there can spie;
- And for a River your mock'd Eie,
- Will find a shallow Brooke.
- ^ John MacKinnon Robertson, The Baconian Heresy a Confutation (1913)Kessinger Publishing, reprint 2003 p.21
- ^ J Shapiro, 2010, 265-273
- ^ David Kathman, ‘Shakespeare's Eulogies,’
- ^ J. M. Robertson, The Baconian Heresy a Confutation, ibid p.21
- ^ John Freehafer, 'Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry,' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, (Winter, 1970), pp. 63-75, p.64
- ^
- Vpon Master WILLIAM S H A K E S P E A R E,
- the Deceased Authour, and his P O E M S .
- Poets are borne not made, when I would prove
- This truth, the glad rememberance I must love
- Of never dying Shakespeare, who alone,
- Is argument enough to make that one.
- First, that he was a Poet none would doubt,
- That heard th’applause of what he sees set out
- Imprinted; where thou hast (I will not say
- Reader his Workes for to contrive a Play:
- To him twas none) the patterne of all wit,
- Art without Art unparaleld as yet.
- Next Nature onely helpt him, for looke thorow
- This whole Booke, thou shalt find he doth not borrow,
- One phrase from Greekes, nor Latines imitate,
- Nor once from vulgar Languages Translate,
- Nor Plagiari-like from others gleane,
- Nor begges he from each witty friend a Scene
- To peece his Acts with, all that he doth write,
- Is pure his owne, plot, language exquisite,
- But oh ! what praise more powerfull can we give
- The dead, then that by him the Kings men live,
- His Players, which should they but have shar’d the Fate,
- All else expir’d within the short Termes date;
- How could the Globe have prospered, since through want
- Of change, the Plaies and Poems had growne scant.
- But happy Verse thou shalt be sung and heard,
- When hungry quills shall be such honour bard.
- Then vanish upstart Writers to each Stage,
- You needy Poetasters of this Age,
- Where Shakespeare liv’d or spake, Vermine forbeare,
- Least with your froth you spot them, come not neere;
- But if you needs must write, if poverty
- So pinch, that otherwise you starve and die,
- On Gods name may the Bull or Cockpit have
- Your lame blancke Verse, to keepe you from the grave:
- Or let new Fortunes younger brethren see,
- What they can picke from your leane industry.
- I doe not wonder when you offer at
- Blacke-Friers, that you suffer : tis the fate
- Of richer veines, prime judgements that have far’d
- The worse, with this deceased man compar’d.
- So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,
- And on the Stage at half-sword parley were,
- Brutus and Cassius : oh how the Audience,
- Were ravish’d, with what wonder they went thence,
- When some new day they would not brooke a line,
- Of tedious (though well laboured ) Catilines;
- Sejanus too was irksome, they priz’de more
- Honest Iago, or the jealous Moore.
- And though the Fox and subtill Alchimist,
- Long intermitted could not quite be mist,
- Though these have sham’d all the Ancients, and might raise,
- Their Authours merit with a crowne of Bayes.
- Yet these sometimes, even at a friends desire
- Acted, have scarce defrai’d the Seacoale fire
- And doore-keepers : when let but Falstaffe come,
- Hall, Poines, the rest you scarce shall have a roome
- All is so pester’d : let but Beatrice
- And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice
- The Cockpit Galleries, Boxes, all are full
- To heare Maluoglio that crosse garter’d Gull.
- Briefe, there is nothing in his wit fraught Booke,
- Whose sound we would not heare, on whose worth looke
- Like old coyned gold, whose lines in every page,
- Shall passe true currant to succeeding age.
- But why doe I dead Sheakspeares praise recite,
- Some second Shakespeare must of Shakespeare write;
- For me tis needlesse, since an host of men,
- Will pay to clap his praise, to free my Pen.
- ^ Paul H.Altrocchi, 'Sleuthing an enigmatic Latin annotation,' in Shakespeare Matters, Summer, 2003, pp.16-19
- ^ Alan H. Nelson and Paul H. Altrocchi, 'William Shakespeare, “Our Roscius”,' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 4, Winter 2009, pp. 460-469.
- ^ 'It's possible . .that Hunt's addition of Shakespeare as its third worthy suggests that histheatrical fame hadf also contributed to the town's ercantile prosperity, in which case literary pilgrimages may have begun every earlierthan we thought.' Katherine Duncan-Jones, 'Shakespeare, the motley player,' ibid.p.729
- ^ In Suckling's version we have:
- Out of the bed the other fair hand was
- On a green satin quilt, whose perfect white
- Looked like a daisy in a field of grass
- And showed like unmelt snow unto the sight..
- Without the bed her other fair hand was
- On the green coverlet, whose perfect white
- Show'd like an April daisy on the grass,
- With pearly sweat, resembling dew of night.
- Her eyes, like marigolds, had sheath'd their light,
- And canopied in darkness sweetly lay,'
- Till they might open to adorn the day.'
- ^ Suckling also wrote in 1636:
- The sweat of Jonson's learned brain
- And gentle Shakespeare's easier strain.Caroline Healey Dall, What We Really Know about Shakespeare, (1886), BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2009 p.129
- ^ ‘After such men, it might be thought ridiculous to speak of Stage Players; but seeing excellency in the meanest things deserves remembring, and Roscius the Comedian is recorded in History with such commendation, it may be allowed us to do the like with some of our Nation. Richard Bourbidge, and Edward Allen, two such Actors, as no age must ever look to see the like: and, to make their Comedies compleat, Richard Tarleton, who for the Part called the Clowns Part, never had his match, never will have. For Writers of Playes, and such as had been Players themselves, William Shakespeare, and Benjamin Johnson, have specially left their Names recommended to posterity.’ Cited Alan H. Nelson and Paul H. Altrocchi, 'William Shakespeare, “Our Roscius”,' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 4, Winter 2009, pp. 460-469, p.468.
- ^ J. Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poetry (1668), cited John Freehafer, 'Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry,' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, (Winter, 1970), pp. 63-75, p.70.
- ^ Tom Reedy and David Kathman, 'How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts,'
- ^ 'It seems that Shakespeare here makes a complimentary allusion to the printer of the two poems which strongly influenced the style of Cym. The French form may be due to the fact that Field's wife was French or it may be a form that he himself sometimes affected. Hew certainly called himself 'Ricardo del Campo' in his Spanish publications'. J.M.Nosworthy (ed.), 'Cymbeline, Arden Shakespeare, 195, note ad loc.
- ^ Park Honan, ibid.pp.232,239,387; Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: a compact documentary life,ibid.p.283.
- ^ Katherine Duncan-Jones, 'Shakespeare, the Motley Player', ibid.p.727
- ^ Park Honan, 'Shakespeare. A life,' 1999 p.
- ^ Peter Quennell, Shakespeare: The poet and his background, (1963) Penguin 1969 p.148: 'To William Kempe, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, servaunts to the Lord Chamberleyne, upon the Councille's warrant dated at Whitehall XVth Marcij 1594, for two severall comedies or enterludes shewed by them before her majestie in Christmas tyme laste part viz St. Stephen's daye and Innocents daye...' (Public Record Office, Pipe Office, Declared Accounts No. 542, f. 207b).
- ^ Sir George Home, of the Great Wardrobe, in his accounts, lists "Players" who received four yards of red cloth apiece for the King's investiture of King James on 15 March 1604. The list runs: "William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillipps, Lawrence Fletcher, John Hemminges, Richard Burbidge, William Slye, Robert Armyn, Henry Cundell, and Richard Cowley." Tom Reedy and David Kathman, 'How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts,'
- ^ 'Item 31 Martii to Mr Shakespeare in gold about my Lord's impreso 44s. To Richard Burbage for painting and making it in gold 44s.'Peter Levi, ibid. p.345. Park Honan, ibid.193. This was doubted by Mrs Stopes in 1908, who thought the payment was to another William Shakespeare, and Price backs this argument. But there is no evidence for that William Shakespeare predating 1617.
- ^ Scott McCrea, The case for Shakespeare: the end of the authorship question,2005 p.10
sandbox refs
Is there a particular reason you are combining multiple references into one on that page? nableezy - 20:07, 4 June 2010 (UTC)
- I'd prefer the format you suggested, and indeed am in your debt for creating it. It makes a neat distinction aesthetically between source and commentary that appeals to me, but it doubles up footnoting. This last point is problematical because we are under constraints to keep the article within reasonable limits. The text is relatively short, the templates have leavened it out to 120k, the division of end and footnotes adds to the appearance of padding and finally, I thought it the proper move to prepare before my co-editor, Tom Reedy, who apparently would like the notes to follow the source citation, starts his review (in the Elizabethan sense of that word). His argument is, I imagine, that those who eventually will examine this version, and compare it to the other, will appreciate the sources quoted in extenso directly in the footnote they click onto, rather than having to double click to see the source in the footnote, and then the content of that source in the endnote.
- Of course I did this in deference to the other editor's needs to have an integrated text before him, and ease the process of editorial review. When we have both completed a final revision, this important distinction can be reconsidered for re-inclusion. Thanks however for the templates, which are on the record if it is decided to split the text into footnotes and endnotes (technically of course, endnotes should contain only material that elaborates on what is unclear in the text, whereas footnotes should just provide the material backing the text as it is.) I'm glad you're keeping those lynx-eyes out on our activities. We need'em.Nishidani (talk) 09:38, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- Im talking about you having some refs that look like <ref>{{harvnb|blah|1990|p=12}}:{{harvn|bblah2|2000|p=210}}</ref> instead of <ref>{{harvnb|blah|1990|p=12}}</ref><ref>{{harvn|bblah2|2000|p=210}}</ref> There a particular reason for that? nableezy - 16:31, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- There was a pretext for that, and pretexts are not good reasons. Basically. I put refs saying more or less the same thing in the same line space, to ratchet down the escalating ref ladder at page bottom. A fucking dopey lurk I admit to create a false impression that we're thinking light rather than weighed down by referential ballast. It's a hang over from the academic pleistocene or plasticene, i.e. mean them days back in the 60s when one page bottom reference gave several sources in succession. I'll see what Tom reedy does, but it should be raised at the end of his review. I imagine he'll go to this in Johnny Weissmuller fashion, with machete hacking away at the huggermugger jungle of bloats and quotes and notes. Nishidani (talk) 17:01, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- Nothing wrong, old boy, with combining refs like that - I hate seeing a long string of ref superscripts, which apart from its ugliness, screams out that someone is trying to justify a highly dubious point. There is good precedent on Wikipedia for doing this - just take a look at some of the articles Avi specializes in, and you'll see plenty of examples of refs being consolidated. --NSH001 (talk) 21:23, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
- P.S. now back from my silent protest at outrageous lying. (It would be just too much of a dereliction of duty to neglect Chrissie, who as well as a few more world titles, is, I'm sure, eventually going to get her own Featured Article on Wikipedia's front page.) --NSH001 (talk) 21:23, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
- Well if Avi does it, that relieves me somewhat since it furnishes a good precedent. But, in my book, Nab is the master of the aesthetic template. Look at that wonderful way he pulled the Franz Baermann Steiner into exquisite formal shape, with endnotes and footnotes neatly separated, from the rudis et indigestaque moles I lumbered it up as. It works wonders for short pages: perhaps the longer article requires a different format. But personally I like the blue-runged ladder effect - it reminds me of Wittgenstein's advice.
- Yep. It's depressing. One looks forward to the World Athletic championship kermesse coming up with rather less anticipative brio, when one is reminded of what is going on, unreported or spun to giddy mendacity, in that nook of disgrace we all worry about. I only hope Erdogan has the sense to break the gulag's grip by a personal visit. Nishidani (talk) 07:35, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
- There was a pretext for that, and pretexts are not good reasons. Basically. I put refs saying more or less the same thing in the same line space, to ratchet down the escalating ref ladder at page bottom. A fucking dopey lurk I admit to create a false impression that we're thinking light rather than weighed down by referential ballast. It's a hang over from the academic pleistocene or plasticene, i.e. mean them days back in the 60s when one page bottom reference gave several sources in succession. I'll see what Tom reedy does, but it should be raised at the end of his review. I imagine he'll go to this in Johnny Weissmuller fashion, with machete hacking away at the huggermugger jungle of bloats and quotes and notes. Nishidani (talk) 17:01, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- Im talking about you having some refs that look like <ref>{{harvnb|blah|1990|p=12}}:{{harvn|bblah2|2000|p=210}}</ref> instead of <ref>{{harvnb|blah|1990|p=12}}</ref><ref>{{harvn|bblah2|2000|p=210}}</ref> There a particular reason for that? nableezy - 16:31, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
You had previously contributed to discussion regarding this subject. There is currently a concern, primarily on my part, whether this article takes a stand which seems to indicate that the name was used to refer to a single, specific group, which I believe the evidence of sources does not support. You appear to be rather knowledgable in the field, and I believe any input you might have on the article talk page could be very valuable. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 19:21, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
- Oh dear, other Price-war (Diana Price wrote an absurd book on the only subject I feel obliged to finish off before retiring)!
- At a glance, the article needs to be edited by someone who understands English. I'll keep an eye on it, John. In brief though, I agree that, given the thin, circumstantial evidence, the idea that the Ebionim were a single discrete sect strikes me as necessarily hypothetical. As in the earlier discussion some years ago, I think the problem is with pop-professors drum-beating a personal fantasy which, as in the Shakespeare Authorship Question, has no ground in evidence, but a huge ballast of argument in conjecture. It is always tedious having to deal with editors who cannot distinguish wishful thinking from the austerities of scholarship.Nishidani (talk) 19:58, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
- Understood. In this case, I think there is a very strong possibility of bias toward neo-Ebionitism, which, not having won itself a separate article, has had its proponents try to add the perspectives of same to this article. But thanks for the added attention. John Carter (talk) 20:05, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
Wiki quote of the day
'At a young age, Dobson's family moved from North Carolina to Germany; his father had spent the latter part of World War II in a POW camp and had grown adjusted to German hospitality.' Michael Dobson Nishidani (talk) 16:44, 18 June 2010 (UTC)
List of pages created by deVereans or where they are active in promoting their fringe beliefs
Assistance would be appreciated in helping me keep track of the metastases.
- Shakespeare authorship doubters
- Shakespeare Fellowship
- De Vere Society
- Derek Jacobi
- The Ashbourne portrait
- Anonymous (film)
- Roland Emmerich
- Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship
- Chronology of Shakespeare's plays – Oxfordian
- Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
- List of Oxfordian theory supporters
- Shakespeare authorship question
- Talk:Shakespeare authorship question/sandbox draft
- Talk:Shakspeare authorship question/sandbox 3
Ashbourne
I didn't upload the original image, so the original uploader created the title. I assume he/she copied the image from the Oxfordian 'shakespeare fellowship' website. I changed the image to the cleaned version, a process that retains the original image-file name. There's really no doubt that it's Hamersley. But Oxfordian editor Softlavender kept trying to add the wholly discredited claims of Bissel. There is an article written by an amateur in the Oxfordian newsletter Shakespeare Matters. Softlavender used it as a source. It attempts to prove that the painting must date from before 1612. To my horror, when I raised the matter on reliable sources noticeboard this newsletter [1] was deemed reliable, mainly because of the usual smokescreen created by Smatprt, who asserted that various notable scholars are on the editorial board. The author knows nothing about the history of art. At that point I gave up in disgust. Paul B (talk) 21:54, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
- I think if you want to change the image title you have to re-upoad it under the new title. Paul B (talk) 22:00, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
- Perhaps we can ask for Sir Les Patterson to be brought in to adjudicate. Paul B (talk) 22:06, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
- I asked Les and, pissed as a Pantagruelian fart as he was, he said he was always happy as as pig in excrement to assist the Yartz, and slurped an email my way saying that the Folger page image on their US page is in the public domain, according to what one can deduce from the details here.
This image is in the public domain because under United States copyright law, originality of expression is necessary for copyright protection, and a mere photograph of an out-of-copyright two-dimensional work may not be protected under American copyright law.
- So I'll cast around, fishing eventually in Cairene waters outside Saul Bellow's town for technical assistance to get it re-uploaded according to the neutral Folger description (The Ashbourne portrait of Shakespeare/Sir Hugh Hamersley:1612) when I get round to sorting this out. Thanks in the meantime.Nishidani (talk) 13:04, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
- I'm glad Sir Les was so helpful. I'll slip him a case of four-X and one of the fag-butts that fall regularly from Jackson Pollock's paintings. Jackson's mastery of the long slow dribble was rivalled only by the power of his fag-butt flip, which produced those necessary moments of repose in his works: subtle muted tones amid the vivid slashes of pigment.
- However, despite my gratitude to Sir Les, I take the view that the title of the file doesn't matter much. Even File:OXFORDWASSHAKESPEAREREALLYIMNOTKIDDING.jpg would not distress me too much. After all its not normally visible to the reader. Paul B (talk) 13:52, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
- I gave the antipodean lair a tingle on the blower to convey that, and all I caught was an emphysemic wheeze and something that sounded like Yabby Warberk before the line cut. It took me donkey's ages to figure out that must be how they pronounce downunder (or is that, downchunder?) the name of the bloke who stored all them books in that library in Woe-burn Square, the chap who always harped on about Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail, as Carlo Ginsburg reminds us in his study of Giovanni Morelli, reading which got Umberto Eco to write Il Nome della Rosa and which in turn means that I take it you are alluding to the suggestion to return to the beginning (as T.S. Eliot told us in Little Gidding), namely le point de dépardew, which is Shakespeare, i.e., 'a rose, or a jpg, by any other name would smell as sweet'. Which, deconstructed, means I suppose, that the subtext is 'let sleeping dawgs lie' through their teeth and not unleash, by the skittish provocations of truth-sleuthing, the hounds of wikiwarring.
- So be it. Back to the vegie patch, with Voltaire, mumbling those lines about 'dahlias sleeping in the empty silence'. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
- (I think by the way, that the offer of 4-x might get up Sir Les's conker. His taste in suds use to run strictly to Fosters, as you can see here which, as he once burped, was the only Lager that keep a self-respecting Aussie POW anchored on enemy turf.Nishidani (talk) 15:18, 21 June 2010 (UTC) )
Shame on us all
Strange that should have been your sentence I altered. I arrived that the page by way of the P.N. Oak article, which is on my watchlist. IPs regularly pop up to promote the fantasies of the utterly shameless Oak. I noticed that the most recent 'contributor' had also altered the Wendy Doniger article, so I had a look at it.
While I appreciate that shame cultures do differ significantly, I think the phrase "Hindu shame" may be confusing, especially when used in the phrase "Hinduism was being demonized to create Hindu shame amongst Indian youth". This might be read to imply that "Hindu shame" was also created in non-Hindu Indians. If we can meaningfully use the concept of "shame" for both Hindus and non-Hindus, then I'd suggest that it is unnecessary to speak of specifically "Hindu shame". We might find soon find ourselves writing of "French shame". Paul B (talk) 16:43, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
Antisemitism in the New Testament
Hi Nishidani,
As I've mentioned before, I'd very much appreciate it if you wouldn't follow me to articles to oppose my edits there. I'm sure you understand. Thanks! Jayjg (talk) 16:34, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
I don't follow you to articles, and if you repeat this ridiculous furphy again, I'll get really pissed off. I have a 4 decades long scholarly interest in the origins of Christianity and in Judaism, as anyone can see from the Ebonism page work I did, and know the literature well. You just don't figure on my radar of interest. I have had that bookmarked for I don't know how long, have often been tempted to actually write the page because it is just a piece of polemical trash trashing another religion, but haven't the time. You know almost nothing of the subject, I gather, otherwise you would actually pull that page out of the slough of meretricious polemical and fatuous despond in which it languishes.
If you do want to rid the page of its absurd caricatures of Judeo-Christianity, then lay off the internet and googling and read the following books:-
- (1) Douglas R. A. Hare The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the Gospel According to St Matthew, Cambridge University Press, (1967) 2005
- (2) Marvin R. Wilson Our father Abraham: Jewish roots of the Christian faith, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1989
- (3) Miriam S. Taylor Anti-Judaism and early Christian identity: a critique of the scholarly consensus, BRILL 1995
- (4) Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: a Christian defense of Jews and Judaism, Doubleday, 2008
- (5)Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community, Uni of Chicago Press 1994,
instead of just sitting on articles that cry shame on whoever wrote them or monitors them without touching the cancerous disinformation they are seeded with. Take your complaint elsewhere, and stop annoying this page.Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
- It does at least appear odd, though, that you've never edited the article at all, until I'd made my recent edits. It's the kind of thing that even someone assuming the best of faith would have trouble explaining, given our history. If you regularly followed me to articles to support me, or even to sometimes support and sometimes oppose, then I suppose I wouldn't feel quite so harassed by it; but our history has been one of your almost exclusively opposing me whenever you interact with me. Also, your comment on the Talk: page of the article, "Well here we go again, wikilawyering to a purpose, i.e. to keep the prejudices of the page intact.", is a comment about contributors, not content, and thus violates policy. If you really wanted to show good faith, would it not make sense for you to remove or strike that? Cheers! Jayjg (talk) 17:53, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
- You love policy, I love content that reflects quality, I don't need to show good faith, I don't practice psychoanalysis professionally, as opposed to informally, and therefore I will politely overlook your confession that you feel harassed by the fact we have crossed paths twice in a year, and ignore the regal implications of your admitting that you think there is something improper in another editor 'opposing you' and, fourthly, civil editing is as much about being neutral to the topic, as it is about being courteous to one's peers. You have a long history of using the rules to maintain badly sourced smear material on pages, such as this and Shahak. So in turn I suggest you grow up, and remove your original remarks from this page. The effect of your original innuendo is that, whereas you may edit any page dealing with Christianity and Judaism, I mustn't, because you happen to be there. A patent absurdity, apart from the sense of exclusive privilege it breathes.Nishidani (talk) 18:19, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
::::Nishidani, I think it would be helpful if you would review the straw man article. I have neither "confessed" that I "feel harassed by the fact we have crossed paths twice in a year", nor did I "admit" that I "think there is something improper in another editor 'opposing you'". Please review my previous comments for their actual meaning; it's both unfair and rather rude to deliberately misrepresent what I've written. The issue here is not that an editor opposes me on any particular matter, but that specific editors only oppose me, and show up at pages they've never edited before, just after I've edited them, for that express purpose. These are quite different, and it's pretty disingenuous to pretend otherwise. There are 3 million pages on Wikipedia; please don't regularly edit ones that I've just edited a few minutes earlier, and that you've never edited before, solely for the purpose of opposing me. In addition, Wikipedia has content rules for a reason; more specifically, to restrain editors from using Wikipedia to promote their personal POV. It would be better for Wikipedia if you respected and abided by those rules, rather than insisting that they are only there for the purpose of "Wikilawyering". Original research really isn't allowed, even if you insist it's in a good cause. Jayjg (talk) 20:24, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
- I've just penciled out your remarks, for the simple reason that you repeat, as you have over the years, silly charges based on baseless suspicions. I regard the explicit accusations that I am soapboxing, promoting my POV on wiki, and engaging (most laughable of all) in violations of WP:NOR, as what the thin-skinned in here call 'personal attacks', esp. since all I did was provide a needed source for a statement on a page you have edited for the last 6 months, but have never challenged, never even put in a [original research?] marker, though the sentence has been there for a year. What's your problem, son. Do you dislike the fact that I provide scholarly references for pages that lack them?
- 'Promoting my POV on wiki'. Sure. Great laugh, wry thoughts of the pot calling the kettle black etc. In any case, the Argentinian-Mexico game has just finished and I must follow the analysis of the game here. I'll revert your wikilawyering abuse of the page tomorrow. In the meantime, could you study the subject? What you call 'Original Search' is a commonplace of Biblical criticism. It's like asking for a source for the statement 'A is followed by B' in the alphabet.'Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 27 June 2010 (UTC)
Anti-Semitism in the New Testament
Wow. That conversation is worthy of the Twilight Zone. — goethean ॐ 13:02, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
- And you wuz thinken them hindutva ethnonationalists were some tuff cookies! In these areas, the wiki machinery breaks down completely. Lobbies, muscle and pettifogging win the day by a war of attrition, till one gasps hopeless in one's death throes, with your namesake 'Mehr Licht!", only to get Hobbes' black light'. Unfortunately, That article is there purely as a screed for taking cheap pot shots. Don't waste your time even reading any more. A decision has been made, and it will be enforced. I really don't give a fuck either way, since I don't unlike many editors rely on wikipedia as my sauce of information. Gott gibt die Nüsse, aber er knackt sie nicht auf. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 13:15, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
Question for administrator
{{adminhelp}} So far I can get no technical clarification about what seems to be to be a new interpretation being applied to WP:NOR.
The subject type is where two themes are dealt with Antisemitism in the New Testament (A (Antisemitism)+B (the New Testament)
I have summed up that interpretation in propositional form.
A+B articles must have every edit sourced to A+B RS, and every edit of the type A must be taken from a page in the vicinity of one also mentioning B, or vice-versa.
The discussion is taking place on the WP:NOR page here, recapitulating an earlier conflict on a related issue here and here. Everything has been discussed there but this. Informed input on this specific interpretation would be appreciated. Nishidani (talk) 08:02, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
- Interesting idea (and seems to make sense to me). However, I think you may get better response to placing an {{rfctag|policy}} tag on the NOR noticeboard page where you are discussing it. I would suggest you add a section break to the current discussion and clearly state your proposed policy change and add the rfc tag. After all, you don't just want admin help - you want to establish consensus. Admin shouldn't have any stronger voice in establishing consensus than any other user, and admin certainly shouldn't be the only ones involved. I'll leave your adminhelp template active here so you get at least another pair of eyes in case I am missing something. 7 08:43, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
- I see that the Request for Comment has begun, so I'll cancel out the {{adminhelp}} - I agree with 7 that RFC is a good way to proceed with this discussion. And please do note that We need outside input from neutral admins is not correct; you need input from any and all Wikipedians; admins have no special authority in forming a consensus. Chzz ► 12:26, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
- I am talking about present policy, where consensus already exists. I ask for informed administrative input for a simple reason. Administrators know policy, and this is not about forming a new policy by consensus, but simply of clarifying what policy is. But thanks.Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
The case was closed as ‘Resolved’ by Professor marginalia.
The case wasn’t resolved, since the question, as formulated here has yet to be answered.
So my technical request is, where does one go from here? A new WP:NOR policy has been developed, in my view, and serious administrative oversight should review that policy.Nishidani (talk) 21:32, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
Re. Thanks
Hiya.
In reply to your kind message of thanks; please remember that there is no deadline. I see that discussions are ongoing, and I advise keeping calm. Tea helps.
It's clear that this is not resolved, but eventually it will be. Administrators, however, cannot magically solve it; the only answer in the long-term comes from discussion, and reaching consensus. If the 'request for comment' does not resolve things, there are other options, such as the mediation cabal - but please do allow a reasonable time (at the very least, a week) for the RfC to attract further comments.
After all, it's only a wiki; it's not a matter of life and death :-)
I hope you were supporting Holland?
Best of luck with it all, Chzz ► 01:53, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
Misrepresentation of source in Ebionites
Please see Talk:Ebionites#Misrepresentation of Tabor regarding the use of Tabor's book in that article, and offer whatever opinions you would like. Of course, I would also more than welcome your actually checking the book itself to verify that my assertions are accurate. John Carter (talk) 19:05, 9 July 2010 (UTC)
Etymological fun....
Working on Betelgeuse...the etymology is quite fun. Any comments or input would be just fine :) Casliber (talk · contribs) 21:30, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
thanks
And are you done with Elkana? The interesting bits await, though I did not want to add anything that may make it off-limits prior to you finishing any work on it. nableezy - 18:36, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
- Pointless really, though I'd hardly really begun on it. After the recent travesty of interpretation of WP:NOR regarding Antisemitism in the New Testament, which passed unnoticed, it means technically that anything I, or anyone else a group of editors thinks unwelcome on this encyclopedia, edits in can potentially be challenged as a violation of the new WP:SYNTH protocol established there. Increasingly, mustering the numbers is trouncing serious content editing, and there seems to be no way this can be reversed. Sorry. I will limit myself to janitorial work, reverting what I consider to be vexatious, on one or two pages. On yours too, if you don't mind, since it is one of the few pages I still read, since it seems to attract an extraordinary number of similar minds intent of querying your presence here. By all means revert me if my judgement errs. Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
- I figure if most of those people dont want me banned I aint doing what I should be. It has long been a rule of mine not to revert you, so no worries there. nableezy - 19:29, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
- Pointless really, though I'd hardly really begun on it. After the recent travesty of interpretation of WP:NOR regarding Antisemitism in the New Testament, which passed unnoticed, it means technically that anything I, or anyone else a group of editors thinks unwelcome on this encyclopedia, edits in can potentially be challenged as a violation of the new WP:SYNTH protocol established there. Increasingly, mustering the numbers is trouncing serious content editing, and there seems to be no way this can be reversed. Sorry. I will limit myself to janitorial work, reverting what I consider to be vexatious, on one or two pages. On yours too, if you don't mind, since it is one of the few pages I still read, since it seems to attract an extraordinary number of similar minds intent of querying your presence here. By all means revert me if my judgement errs. Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 19 July 2010 (UTC)
July 2010
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/39/Stop_x_nuvola_with_clock.svg/40px-Stop_x_nuvola_with_clock.svg.png)
- This ranks as the nicest thing that's happened on this page for a long time, perhaps since its inception. I hope Nableezy is not watching, or he'll forumshop me to another less rahmanic admin for using the word 'nice'! Nishidani (talk) 17:03, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
- That should be "an admin with less rahma". nableezy - 17:11, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
- This ranks as the nicest thing that's happened on this page for a long time, perhaps since its inception. I hope Nableezy is not watching, or he'll forumshop me to another less rahmanic admin for using the word 'nice'! Nishidani (talk) 17:03, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
Rahmah
Good grief, lad! What d’ya mean by ‘rahma’?
Correct my adjectival neologism by all means sir.
But your suggestion adds to this wiki-drama:
For, not transcribing that final-h, you err.
For Rahma only makes your reader think
Along the lines a heretic would ponder
It rhymes with Brahma, (just follow this wiki link),
And makes the Arabic start to wander
Further east, by Marvell ’s Ganges, where
ramā-āśrayaḥ to the native ear
Means ‘Personality of Godhead’ in prayer.
I’m sure this ain’t what you yourself would hear.
Or perhaps, again, it’s just I who err. East and West,
Faiths differ, but the faithful, everywhere,are blessed.
Felafel
I did feel there was something peculiar about it as you may have seen from my first talk page edit. And my mouton and mutton chops analogy did indicate that I thought the whole thing was overcooked. I'll have a think about what if anything I want to do. At least ther aren't also the Turkish v Greek edit wars along too as happens at hummus.--Peter cohen (talk) 12:00, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
Hebron
I don't know why the sea is boiling hot, but Hebron has a new footnote. Thank you.
Also, please try not to dance so close to the edge of your topic ban. Thanks. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 14:27, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
- I was referring to your request. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 14:34, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
- I don't know whether the ancient history of some of the most contentious real estate in the world falls under the ban. I just want to avoid any problems from those who seem to thrive on creating Wikidrama. In any event, I was happy to clear a long-standing "citation needed" tag. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 14:47, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
On the subject of Christianity without Christ
Hi Nishidani, I wonder if you can enlighten me as I kindly requested on AN/I earlier this morning, on the Christianity variants that do not require to recognize a real Christ. I report my comment here, in case you didn't see it.
“ | Well, here for example it seems that the views of Jesus are indeed very different, to the point of considering it a mere human example (and I knew that, I know about unitarianism for example). I knew already that there is a vast variety of views on anything, and even non-dogmatic ones. But no Christian view I can find is agnostic (or accepts agnostic views) on the existence of Jesus. Nishidani says that I am wrong in this respect, referring to Anglicanism. Well, the article on Anglicanism says that for example a key point is apostolic succession, and I can't think of a way to combine belief in apostolic succession with the possibility agnosticism on Jesus. It doesn't strike me as "fundamentalist" the notion that Christians, whatever their interpretation, believe in the existence of a person nicknamed Christ -it seems a mere matter of definition. A definition of Christianity that doesn't include Christ seems self-contradictory, and I haven't seen it supported anywhere (I can think of some movement following the Gospel teachings and being agnostic on Christ, but this would be more "Gospelism" than Christianism - Unitarian universalism could fit the definition, but in fact it is not considered a Christian denomination).
Now, it is of course possible that the articles above, and me, are simply wrong -if so, I would sincerely enjoy being educated on the existence of these "Jesus-agnostic" variants of Christianity. And if so, I would happily accept sources from scholars following these variants as if they were secular, in the respect of the point we're debating here. But first we should check that they come from these particular variants. Also, if these variants exist, we should document them in Christianity and Jesus in Christianity articles, that lack these important points of view. So, educate me, sounds interesting. --Cyclopiatalk 13:08, 3 August 2010 (UTC) |
” |
I am sincerely curious of knowing examples of Christian denominations who are actually agnostic on Jesus existence. Can you help me provide examples and sources? As above, if this is true, this would make a great addition to Christianity articles, possibly worth an article in itself. --Cyclopiatalk 21:32, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
- Sorry I missed this, as I do so much, as I don't follow wikipedia much these days. It's late here. I was thinking, apart from many religious people I've met, in theory of Thomas Altizer, Paul Tillich (an acquaintence of a friend of his once told me he was a great reader of pornography!, not that that means anything), and several others. If I'm awake tomorrow, I'll see what I can do fossicking among old books and files. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 21:45, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
- Thank you, would be much appreciated. --Cyclopiatalk 14:23, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
- It was, on memory, that great man, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose posthumous writings were to galvanize discussion of Christianity without religion. He lived and died a Christian life, and died a 'Christian' death at the hands of the Nazis, while doubting the whole traditional communitarian and doctrinal aspects of faith - an imitation of Christ independent of belief in the historicity of Christ. When I was a relatively young man, in the 60s, people like Thomas Altizer and his colleague William Hamilton, and England's John Robinson made waves, more the latter if that metaphor is to be used, because Altizer and Hamilton's negative theology with its Hegelian sophistication, was not pitched to a congregation and only made waves in theological faculties. God was dead, Altizer esp. argued and had effetively 'died on the cross', the crucifixion being interpretation as a 'kenosis' or emptying of transcendence, and by implication the idea of a subsequent 'resurrection' was a primitive or superstitious attempt to hold in check this radical 'event'. A vast literature followed. Robinson's 'Honest to God' really made a splash among congregations via newspaper accounts. How it affected them I don't know. I don't follow these things much if at all, but just rely on memories of reading 4 decades ago. You asked for denominations or congregations of atheistic Christians, and I can't help out really. I do know from frequent encounters, discussions and experience that many individual thinkers associated with Christianity, one thinks of poets like W.H. Auden and TS Eliot wouldn't think that they needed to believe in God or an historic Christ to be Christians. One gets the same impression reading John Updike's many novels. It was a matter of affirming one's deep identity with the tradition from which they emerged. I do recall John Robinson arguing that theism was a major threat to the survival of Christianity, but both my copies of his and Altizer's work have been, as I often discovered been lost in transit, or pilfered by lodgers. Don't take the Catholic quip I remembered, about Anglicans, too seriously. It's a caricature. Sorry I can't be more helpful. But if you google, as I just did now, 'Christian atheism' on Google Books you will find a substantial number of leads. Regards Nishidani (talk) 15:45, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
- Sorry I missed this, as I do so much, as I don't follow wikipedia much these days. It's late here. I was thinking, apart from many religious people I've met, in theory of Thomas Altizer, Paul Tillich (an acquaintence of a friend of his once told me he was a great reader of pornography!, not that that means anything), and several others. If I'm awake tomorrow, I'll see what I can do fossicking among old books and files. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 21:45, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
- Thank you, very enlightening, but there is a small misunderstanding. I didn't ask for Christian atheism -I know it somehow exists. I asked for Christianity disjoined from an historical Jesus, which is a different matter (you can be an atheist but thinking of following a real person's advice). That's why I was puzzled by Altizer, who, if I understand correctly (I admit I am ignorant on these authors) didn't deny the existence of Jesus. Nevertheless, nice refreshing of perspective, albeit I doubt an Anglican priest, for example, would really be happy of denying the existence of Jesus (at least on average). --Cyclopiatalk 15:54, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
An Aside on Herod's temple
I disagree with your representation of why Herod's temple is not given its own nomenclature in Jewish tradition, but ANI is not the place for it and the RfC is for discussing what to do, not what not to do. If anything, in Jewish tradition, Herod's temple was considered grand. As the talmud says "He who did not see Herod's building did not see a beautiful building in his entire life" meaning that Herod's work was the epitome of beauty. The reason why it is considered part of the second temple is that there was no destruction/exile/break; it was a re-doing of the existing temple as opposed to the Babylonian destruction of Temple 1 and the exile that predated Temple 2, and the Roman destruction of Herod's temple (which existed coniguosly for 420 years in various architectural forms) and the now current 1941 year exile. That is why it is not counted as a new temple in Jewish tradition, nothing to do with how Herod is viewed. The Hasmoneans also rededicated the temple, it wasnot considered new then either, and the Hasmoneans are held in higher regard than Herod. -- Avi (talk) 20:05, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- I just realized you were quoting someone else (comes from reading too quickly), sorry. So, I disagree with that scholar's interpretation :) -- Avi (talk) 20:08, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
- Avi, I've been trying most of my life to growth out of the natural cultural restrictions of my own aleatory origins. I've always thought Herod, and many others, got a bad press from the Christocentric scholarship dominating my milieu. You know, my wife's colleague, a teacher in primary school, used to occasionally open the school day in Catholic Italy by asking her charges to pray 'Now kids, today, let's say a prayer for Saint Herod' (i.e., the mythical slaughterer of children), meaning don't make teaching you today as exasperating as it was yesterday. :)Nishidani (talk) 20:15, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
I was wondering whether this would be something you'd have an interest in? Very troubled article questioning the existence of Jesus, arguably a POV fork of Historicity of Jesus to keep pesky radical questioning on another page. Hard to write an accurate summary of the issues in less than 100,000 words, but in outline several editors with vested interests trying to make the theory sound more nutty than it often was. It did have its nutty aspects, and it also had less extreme versions, where sensible thinkers simply questioned the strength of the evidence that he existed. I've been trying to get it in shape, but I'm hampered by lack of knowledge (always irritating!), so I'm trying to do the reading, but it's a slow job. I thought it might be up your street. If you have no interest, as always feel free to ignore. :) SlimVirgin talk|contribs 01:51, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
- Thank you! That's very helpful already. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 16:14, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
Odd we have no page on
Hans Keilson, one of the most brilliant authors on the Holocaust. Tenders to undertake the work would be welcomed.Nishidani (talk) 16:24, 7 August 2010 (UTC) (Stub now created by Kdammers, 8th Aug 2010)
-Other distinguished figures for whom biographies are conspicuously missing from wikipedia-
Thanks
Thanks for the message. Here is the link to the sockpuppet in question [[2]]. No doubt whatsoever this is Barry, again. Smatprt (talk) 22:04, 21 August 2010 (UTC)
Interesting
I would not dream of racking YOUR style, I find it quite endearing. :) RewlandUmmer (talk) 13:59, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
- Well, as they say by Marvell's Ganges, le style, c'est l'ओं मणिपद्मे हूं Nishidani (talk) 14:54, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
- Case closed. Once more the Bonkers Street Irregulars have nailed the artless Moriarty of SAQ sockpuppetry. Nishidani (talk) 13:36, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- On a closing note. Aristophanes did not enter the Acharnians into a dramatic competition using the pseudonym Detalis. The word 'Detalis' is the usual secondary source corruption, of the kind you find on every other page in SAQ pseudo-scholarship. It represents the Greek Daitaleis, which refers to a play written by Aristophanes, not to a person. The play translates as 'The Banqueters', and was produced by Kallistratos. And now to bed.Nishidani (talk) 21:58, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
- Case closed. Once more the Bonkers Street Irregulars have nailed the artless Moriarty of SAQ sockpuppetry. Nishidani (talk) 13:36, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
Good work Pleasure watching you deliver the final coup de grace (hope I got that right ... my Italian isn't too bright) to that serial sockpuppeteer RuelandHummer. He's not the fattest pig in the poke, as you rightly observe ... about as concealed as a builder's bottom. You stood up for law and enforcement when your Wiki needed you and even got the chance to rub his snout in the mud. Good work! FranceIsHog (talk) 11:20, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- They that thrive well take counsel of their friends
- When thou didst name the boar, not to dissemble. .
- Tusk, tusk, is it Rewland?. You're piggybacking a razorback, you know. You set up a poor scene for wiki, and Barry might sue it, for socks whine. But I won't bore you with a further barrow-load, so . . Nishidani (talk) 11:28, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- One could say, it's not him that's being hung out to dry, only his socks - and no doubt he has plenty more in his closet! Wonbrainsell (talk) 17:08, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- I suggest that in the well-earned permanent vacation off wiki you have worked so hard to secure, when next in Oxford, you go to the Bodleian and check out whether hogs wear socks. Perhaps your browsing might lead you to Jeffrey Henderson's The Maculate Muse Yale UP, 1975 p.8, line 1 words two and three. Old Anon would have had the last word.
- There was a young pig from Racine
- Whose botanical interests were keen.
- He planted two socks
- In a bright window box,
- Where one blossomed and sprouted a bean.
- Goodbye Mr Bean.Nishidani (talk) 17:22, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- OK, so like Moses, you spend your time reading stone tablets. How about coming down from the mountain and challenging your prejudices. The tempestous Chapter 5 of the book you commented on will demonstrate why your man Shakey is a has-Bean! Check the given references for yourself. Knowledge is not set in stone but continuously evolving. People who think otherwise are the greatest obstacle to its progress. Often they are too frightened to think otherwise. Wonbrainsell (talk) 10:44, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- Goodbye Mr Bean.Nishidani (talk) 17:22, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- On wikipedia I spend most of my time reading brittle flints from tabloids, culled by stoned editors as though these shards were magic pills to depetrify the fossilized prejudices of the public mind. I get stoned for challenging the dreck. Wish to chip away at the monuments of scholarship? To be effective you have to master the stonemasonry of historical reconstruction, otherwise all you will end up doing is chisel out dust, and get stoney blight, whose symptoms are already visible in the book, which I read.
- Moses came down from the mountain to challenge the prejudices of his people. It will no doubt turn out to be a mystery of unending fascination to the crypto-logical hermeneut that Deuteronomy has him come down from a mountain (הֹר: hor) in order to assail those who were 'whoring after strange gods'. I deplore the apotheosis of Shakespeare, but find attempts to deify Bacon even rasher.Nishidani (talk) 11:17, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
- One could say, it's not him that's being hung out to dry, only his socks - and no doubt he has plenty more in his closet! Wonbrainsell (talk) 17:08, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Ooh I've been naughty
If you look at the bottom of my talk page, you'll see that I have been following reprobates such as yourself for too long.--Peter cohen (talk) 11:02, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- Dear me, Peter. Everyone so twitchy about guaranteeing the rights of newbies, socks and assorted gimcrack dickheads, that they rush to trample on proven editors. Even to remonstrate about disconcerting and public announcements, after extenuating discussions, leads to the honest reporter being accused of bad faith, and the stirrer vindicated as a decent chap, as we see from another recent case. But, yes, lad, I'll put your name down on the agenda for possible inclusion into the wikireprobates' club. You can keep tuned to deliberations on our discussions, as no doubt they will be intercepted and reported, as antisemiotic outrages, by the D.A. of the FIDJetters, as Lord the most Eggsilent Bacon might have put it. Sorry I can't help, being on the wrong ban-wave. I suggest in the meantime you steel yourself with Wagner's Ring while chanting apotropaically the words of Giselher to Wolfhart: owê, daz ich sô grimmen vîent ie gewan!(O weh, daß ich so grimmen Feind je gewann!). Nibelungenlied, l.2409. Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- Well there is a motion to site ban him at AN/I now. BTW I notice that there are some red links to his real name. The real fun could start if that article is ever created. The possibility would no doubt lead to persecution fantasies where he imagines that he will not only follow Lev Davidovich Bronstein by being purged from Wikipedia but might also lead to his having a similar fate. His friends at HRCARI at least have the guts to use their real names.--Peter cohen (talk) 13:29, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- I can't say anything on this. I just find that my personal registry of newbies jumping into a controversial area shows a huge blip for the last month, and when one fingers just one or two, massive threads develop and wikilawyer the evident problem out of existence. I don't think this place is serious about creating equitable conditions for intelligent editing. If anything, people who trouble themselves to call attention to the rot end up with suspicions thrown their way, as the usual suspects, and their recruited allies, settle in to making editing a misery.Nishidani (talk) 15:59, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- Well there is a motion to site ban him at AN/I now. BTW I notice that there are some red links to his real name. The real fun could start if that article is ever created. The possibility would no doubt lead to persecution fantasies where he imagines that he will not only follow Lev Davidovich Bronstein by being purged from Wikipedia but might also lead to his having a similar fate. His friends at HRCARI at least have the guts to use their real names.--Peter cohen (talk) 13:29, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
- Dear me, Peter. Everyone so twitchy about guaranteeing the rights of newbies, socks and assorted gimcrack dickheads, that they rush to trample on proven editors. Even to remonstrate about disconcerting and public announcements, after extenuating discussions, leads to the honest reporter being accused of bad faith, and the stirrer vindicated as a decent chap, as we see from another recent case. But, yes, lad, I'll put your name down on the agenda for possible inclusion into the wikireprobates' club. You can keep tuned to deliberations on our discussions, as no doubt they will be intercepted and reported, as antisemiotic outrages, by the D.A. of the FIDJetters, as Lord the most Eggsilent Bacon might have put it. Sorry I can't help, being on the wrong ban-wave. I suggest in the meantime you steel yourself with Wagner's Ring while chanting apotropaically the words of Giselher to Wolfhart: owê, daz ich sô grimmen vîent ie gewan!(O weh, daß ich so grimmen Feind je gewann!). Nibelungenlied, l.2409. Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
Hi, Nish, Are you willing to contact me offline?--Peter cohen (talk) 17:20, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
- By all means feel free to drop me a note, Peter Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
Request for mediation accepted
The request for mediation concerning Shakespeare authorship question, to which you were are a party, has been accepted. Please watchlist the case page (which is where the mediation will take place). For guidance on accepted cases, refer to this resource. A mediator should be assigned to this dispute within two weeks. If you have any queries, please contact a Committee member or the mediation mailing list.
For the Mediation Committee, AGK 14:55, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
Message delivered by MediationBot, on behalf of the Mediation Committee.
ID
There's a very controversial article about Intelligent design, a featured article but not up to current standards, staunchly guarded, and arguably just an attack page. Efforts to fix it are reverted, including adding any opposing view to the lead (e.g. from Nagle: academic, atheist, not involved). Not sure whether it's something you'd be interested in. It's an article that really makes me not even want to be a Wikipedian anymore: not just because of the content, but because of the defence of it. Anyway, I probably foolishly opened a discussion about its issues as I see them, which you can see here if you have any interest in commenting. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 16:37, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
- Wikipedia articles are not intelligently designed. This is another example of the old problem of systemic bias, as with (. . . you know what), and recently the Christ-myth pages and now this. (The Shakespeare Authorship Question could be included. It is an American obsession, basically). In all four cases, the political reflexes of an idea that has a wide, 'fascinated' claim to attention in American political society and culture broadly speaking reverberate beyond the Atlantic to be met with incomprehension by outsiders.
- There's much to object to there. Who wrote that piece about 'to be consistent a scientific hypothesis' has to be (a) parsimonious (b) useful (c) empirically testable and falsifiable (d) based on multiple observations (e)correctable and dynamic (f) progressive (refines previous theories!!!) (g)provisional or tentative?
- This WP:OR (or is it a selective summary) ignores large disputes within the philosophy of science, on most of those terms. Nagel put it well when, in the article you cite, just above the piece you quoted, he wrote: 'A scientific hypothesis can be false and unsupported by the evidence'.
- I have to, for the moment, devote what residual refractions of intelligent design remain in dry synapses to the close and meticulous examination of the way my palate and olfactory senses will rreact to a plate of pasta in an exquisitely confectioned, and certainly intelligently designed sugo. I'll keep an eye on things there, but can't promise to get involved. I'm tiring of arguing the obvious against editors who are so prepossessed by defence, that they attack eeverything, and show no interest in the free play of ideas or realities. Regards Nishidani (talk) 18:30, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
- I just did the same—with the palate and olfactory senses, and a few other body parts—to a (very small) bowl of warm strawberry-and-rhubarb pie with vanilla ice-cream. A much more productive use of my time! The free flow of ideas seems to have died on WP, but if it's not protected here, there is no point in volunteering any further for the project. I don't want to be involved in the production of a series of superficial attack pages. I realize they will always exist (in their millions), but when established editors start defending them it's time to go. SlimVirgin talk|contribs 18:52, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
Greetings and a Question
Hi Nishidani, it's been a long time. Hope all is well with you. I have a question about the Three Nets of Belial. I am doing some research on the Three Nets of Belial (fornication, riches, and pollution of the Temple) in the Covenant of Damascus and how these parallel the pericopes in the Gospel of Mark on Divorce, the Rich Man, and the Cleansing of the Temple. There is also a parallel between the prohibition on Korban in the CD and the pericope on Korban in Mark. Do you recall seeing any research on the subject? There's nothing on it in Wiki. Do you know if Eisenman covers it in The New Testament Code? You are probably the only editor on Wiki who has read the whole book. Any references would be much appreciated. Cheers. Ovadyah (talk) 03:10, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
- Hi. Sorry, but I haven't yet read Eisenman's second volume. To judge by the experience of reading the first, it will take at least a full month to read properly. Since the 2nd volume merely expands on the 500 pages his publisher rejected from James, the brother of Jesus, you can still get a reasonable glimpse of his argument on these elements in that earlier volume pp.504-510, however. On qorban in Mark, and generally on these arguments, John Bowman's The Gospel of Mark: The new Christian Jewish Passover Haggadah, E.J. Brill 1965 is still worth close scrutiny. I'll probably get round to reading E's second volume in the first half of next year. If I come across any thickening of his argument there, I'll let you know.Nishidani (talk) 12:02, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Please refrain from attacks and trying to bait me on my page
Thank you. --DavidAppletree (talk) 19:09, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
- Well, that is a turn up for the books, as they used to say. I am asked to refrain from attacks and 'baiting' by someone who refuses to remove from his website a page dedicated to attacks, baiting and smearing. For Appletree a request that he recognize, and apologize for, his poor behaviour towards at least some decent wikipedians is in itself evidence of a bad attitude on my part, and of an 'attack' mode. Nishidani (talk) 19:23, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
Apropos This
- No attack. Just a reminder of your record for smearing decent people, which most people here, even administrators, while bending over backwards to give you re-entry here, appear not to know. It's quite simple. If you want in, erase mention of him and a few others, whose records as editors and administrators were grossly distorted and smeared. By all means feel free to keep the tripe up about myself and add to it. I enjoyed the caricature, since I read a lot of theatrical farces with undisguised pleasure in my spare time. Nishidani (talk) 19:16, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
- I'm not going to censor my work just b/c you and some others don't like my POV on something. I'm not going to apologize for my POV when I feel I've done nothing wrong. If any of the people mentioned on my site have a problem with something, they are free to contact me directly about it and if they want me to make changes that I feel are reasonable, I'll consider them. End of story. And no, I don't think a guy who refuses to serve in the IDF is so "pro-Israel." And many people are in agreement on Morris. --DavidAppletree (talk) 19:42, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
- What you do is not work in the normal acceptance of that word. Think rather of the idiom 'to work over'. Your default defence for your faults is, 'people can contact me if they want redress'. I.e. a man smears some innocent bystander, and then, when challenged by a third party, replies that the smeared person can always negotiate with him about terms and conditions for a possible reconsideration of the smear. It's one of the mind-games infantile people play, and no intelligent person would deign to recognize, in the Hegelian sense, the right of the malicious to dictate terms in a matter of civil redress. And now that you have come forth, checking your files, and saying you have information on my friend's personal life, (refusing to serve in the IDF) I think anyone who has taken your request to be allowed to edit here seriously, mull the implications. I.e. you have personally investigated the private lives of wikipedia editors, and use that private information against them. That last admission has just blown your alibi. Case closed, pal. Nishidani (talk) 19:58, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
- It's fairly obvious that you won't be allowed to edit here and continue to say things off-WP about editors which you wouldn't be allowed to say on-WP. Your choice (if you are given a choice) will be between censoring what you have published and editing here. ← ZScarpia 20:20, 30 August 2010 (UTC)