Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Shakespeare authorship question/Evidence: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:29, 25 January 2011

Revision as of 20:32, 25 January 2011

Line 481:

==Evidence presented by Paul Barlow==

I've been editing Shakespeare Authorship pages for a long time. The situation has become increasingly difficult over the years and is now becoming intolerable. The behaviour of [[User:NinaGreen]] has been the catalyst for this Arbitration request, simply because she has consistently "carpet bombed" pages with endless obfuscations and misrepresentations of policy, evidence of which has already been submitted. Before her, the principal contributor was [[User:Smatprt]], now topic-banned, and before him we had [[user:Barryispuzzled]], now banned, who drove away the first active editor of the page, [[user:The Singing Badger]]. Smatprt, before his ban, was busy attempting to place references to SAQ on as many pages as possible. Here, for example, he wants to add claims that there are hidden meanings in a book by [[Francis Meres]] into the article on Meres. This version would have meant that most of the article promoted a fringe theory [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francis_Meres&diff=389555508&oldid=389527299]. The material had previously been added by [[User:BenJonson]], who is also an active Oxfordian editor [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francis_Meres&oldid=349835297] and who has added Oxfordian arguments to as many articles as he can, proudly listed on his [[User:BenJonson|user page]]. SAQ authors find "hidden" references to Oxford, Bacon or whoever in the works of many Elizabethan writers. Oxfordians also need to challenge conventional dating of some plays. This has seriously distorted some articles. Others such as the [[Ur-Hamlet]] article, give undue weight to minority views to advance the Oxfordian position. To most readers (and editors) these interventions will probably not be recognisable, but they are systematic and they seriously distort the presentation of Shakespeare on Wikipedia. BenJonson and Smatprt had a habit of finding scholarship - no matter how old or marginal - that supports their preferences and then adding it to articles as a mainstream view. Here is one example, just spotted. The article on [[Anne Cecil]], Oxford's wife, states that "both traditional Shakespearean scholars[11] and Oxfordians[12] have '''often''' identified Anne as the original of Ophelia in Hamlet" (my bolding). This assertion was added by BenJonson [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anne_Cecil&diff=prev&oldid=350218728]. The footnote to "traditional" scholarship is "George Russell French, Shakspeareana Genealogica (1869), 301; Lillian Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession, 122-124". This creates a spurious consensus from two sources, one utterly obscure from 1869, the other, though no date is given, is from 1921. Neither represent mainstream opinion at all as represented in recent scholarly literature on ''Hamlet'', or even mainstream opinion in 1921. And in fact on checking the 1921 source one finds that it actually argues that [[Elizabeth Vernon]] is the main model for Ophelia. [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ufWzA7BKQncC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Lilian+Winstanley%22&hl=en&ei=oYE8TbKyA860hAfkg5HXBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=ophelia&f=false] Note also the phrasing. Mainstream scholars are "traditional", implying some sort of old-fashionedness in comparison to "Oxfordians". I've gone onto this one obscure example in detail just to illustrate the pervasive nature of the problem. It is very time-consuming to ferret out all this material, check sources, find what they are and what they actually say. This systematic misinformation discredits Wikipedia, a fact that is already being publicly commented upon by Shakespeare scholars.

It should be noted that with the exception of the defunct account [[user:Barryispuzzled]] (a Baconian) all this activity is coming from Oxfordians. Articles on other authorship candidates lie undisturbed. Arguments for them are not shoehorned into articles. So we have the added irony that even the range of SAQ arguments are being misrepresented in our articles. One fringe of a broader fringe has taken over the space.