Blogs with audiences bigger than this one’s maybe-a-hundred visitors a day get streams of outraged comments, which are often a lot of fun to read. I envy Jonah Goldberg and John Hawkins, who can liven their posts with amusing vitriol. The best (worst?) that I attract is simple slander.
It’s different on the Humanities.Lit.Authors.Shakespeare (“HLAS”) newsgroup, largely given over to the “controversy” over who wrote Shakespeare’s works. For your entertainment, here are a couple of recent evaluations of the mental and moral state of yours truly.
First, from one Paul Crowley, who abominates even his fellow Oxenfordians and has lately, for the sake of an obscure anti-Stratfordian sub-hypothesis, declared ex cathedra that literacy was equally common among men and women in Elizabethan England. Substantial research supports the commonplace and commonsensical view that elementary education for females lagged considerably during that period. Mr. Crowley’s rebuttals have amounted to no more than insistence that only his own theory is believable, leading me to remark:
Paul Crowley’s intuition is, of course, far more authoritative than the research findings of a professional historian, who is probably a Stratfordian and therefore, by Mr. Crowleys lights, necessarily ignorant.
To which the affronted Crowley delivered this crushing rejoinder:
Poor pathetic little Tom. Doesn’t he pull your heartstrings? He is quite incapable of responding directly to anything I say, so all we get is this unending whine.
At times, there seems to be a new and distinct sub-category or human beings: “homo academicus”, which regards the possession of ideas, or the capacity to think or question as deeplypernicious. . . . But, actually, it is quite ancient. Tom would have fitted into the Inquisition, the NKVD, the Taleban, or whoever was in power at the time, without the least trouble. He’d have done what he was told, since it would never have occurred to him that there was any other possibility.
Well, that puts me into my place!
Second, from a fellow who calls himself “Gangleri”, next to whom Mr. Crowley is the soul of rational discourse. Many years ago, by his own account, Mr. Gangleri discovered an Icelandic manuscript revealing the Saga-Shakespeare Cipher Key, which unlocks, inter alia the long-buried “truth” that William Shakespeare did not exist.
My skepticism seems to have irritated the discoverer, who has now applied his cipher technique to unveil my concealed crimes:
1. What do Tom Veal, 3879 [the sum of values of my name’s letters, as found by the S-SCK], and Macbeth, 2707, have in common, as in 3879 + 2707 = 6586?
2. And how might that relate to Prince Hamlet’s assertion in Act II, Sc. iithat “. . . murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ”?
Through Murder, 3586, at Seventh Day’s Dawn the Darkness, - 1000, of Ignorance is held to descend upon Creation. Yet, ‘the old man's blood’, alias Christ’s Blood that ‘streams in the firmament’ when Faustus gets set to buy the farm, translates into avenging Flaming Sword, 4000, at Seventh Day's End, as in 3586 - 1000 + 4000 = 6586.
That’s a little cloudy, but I think that I’m being accused of complicity in an 11th Century political killing. Luckily, I have a pretty solid alibi.
Addendum: Have I whetted your appetite for Ganglerism? Enjoy a more substantial excerpt:
Here is my reply of today’s date to a personal message on the Marlovian aspect of Shakespeare Myth:
Yes, the number system serves as a check to one’s construction of the record with respect to the Shakespeare Mystery – a mystery which, I am persuaded, is part and parcel of a long-standing Kabbalistic literary tradition of which I knew nothing at the outset of my work some 30 years ago.
And how does Christopher Marlowe, 11384, fit in this picture?
‘Marlowe’ is a multi-faceted figure as indicated below.
1. In Pythagorean Creation Myth, Triangle 3:4:5 represents the ‘foundation’ of Man’s Psyche, whose ‘resurrection’ after passing through the Darkness, - 1000, of Ignorance is denoted by the three sides of Triangle 3:4:5 raised to the third power, as in 27 + 64 + 125 = 216.
2. The Psyche’s two states are those of MAN-Beast, 666, and Right Measure of Man, 432.
3. JESUS, 3394, is Cosmic Creative Power ‘entombed’ in the Psyche’s ‘foundation’ as WILL, 3331, alias Cosmic Creative Power’s procreative instrument, whose ‘resurrection’ as Flaming Sword, 4000, concludes the Marlovian Drama by transforming erstwhile MAN-Beast into Right Measure of Man.
A WILL or Speare that ‘rises’, ‘shakes’ and ‘dies’ in a ‘well’ on Virgin’s Mons Veneris at Drama’s End.
As in 3394 + 3331 + 345 + 666 - 1000 + 216 + 4000 + 432 = 11384.
In postings to hlas, I have likened Marlowe ‘surviving’ his own ‘death’ to that of Jesus.
A concept which is water off a duck’s back for Stratfordians, who read their Bible and the Marlovian ‘record’ as History.
There is much more in this vein at the decipherer’s Web site, which bears the modest moniker “Light of Truth”.
Count me confused, for a number of reasons too numerous to mention.
Posted by: Jim Veal | Thursday, August 25, 2005 at 06:07 AM