For a brief moment I think I’ve had a peek into the world of faith!

I wasn’t interested in pursuing the evidence you offered. I was comfortable with my ignorance. By doubting Shakespeare, I automatically placed myself as somebody who has interest in fine arts and has read the classics. (akin to how vocal believers automatically place themselves among the Righteous).

If shakespeare didnt write all those plays (or if thomas edison didnt invent all those gadets himself), it lowers the bar a bit for the rest of humanity. Makes me feel a tad bit better about my lacking body of literature (inventions).

Neither do I, but classism does seem to be the rationale behind most of the doubts.

Which just makes me love Shakespeare all the more, somehow.

Ben, unfortunately I don’t have a copy of Bryson’s book, but do look it up. It’s entertaining and concise, as well as informative.

In his chapter on the authorship question he basically gives a history of the doubters and their claims. When you see their arguments all laid out, they turn out to be quite flimsy, often based on tortured interpretations of the evidence (ie, Ben Jonson–who knew the man!–made criticisms of some of Shakespeare’s work–but according to anti-Stratfordians Ben really MEANT his words to mean that he suspected S DIDN’T write said work.)

Saying that someone else could have written the plays is kind of like saying Obama could have been born in Kenya and the birth certificate from Hawaii is fake and the officials involved are engaged in a well-orchestrated cover-up.

Is it possible? Sure, anything’s possible. Is there any good reason to think so, or credible evidence to suggest such a thing? No.

The more parsimonious hypotheses in both cases (Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays; Obama was born in Hawaii)are good solid ones.

Not my hobby, I have no interest beyond what I’ve already stated. There is always “reason for doubt” but when you get into offering alternatives, it gets a bit harder to swallow.

for instance, during the same period (and some time before and after) it was common for artists to take on apprentices who learned to paint in the style of the master. The paintings produced by these apprentices were often signed by the master, even though not painted by him. It was assumed they were done under his guidance, part of the program, and therefore the credit accrued to the master.

But we know of these apprentices only if they went on to become masters themselves. The others, who didn’t make, are more often than not lost to history, unremarked. Their traces are difficult to discern and experts are still uncovering them. But we know they were apprenticed to a master.

These prominent names offered in lieu of Willy would be impossible to obscure.

But doubt? Sure. We don’t really know who Homer was. It’s plausible (though not likely) that Tolstoy’s wife wrote some of his later work—she was the only one who could decipher his handwriting.

But we know Chekov didn’t write it. Or Czar Alexander. Just as an example.

For what it’s worth, I suspect a lot of this has to do with the newness of the English theater at the time and the whole notion of celebrity among playwrights. There may well have been better writers than Willy whose entire oeuvre went up in flames in 1666, whose plays simply didn’t get performed anymore for whatever reason. It didn’t occur to people to record the lives of *writers* back then. We don’t know a hell of a lot about Marlowe, either, except for the work he apparently did as a spy for Elizabeth. If he’d been nothing but a playwright we’d be having the same debate about him.

It’s a nonissue for me. I frankly don’t have a problem with the notion that a “commoner” could do what he did. You cited Mark Twain—Sam Clemens did not have a particularly auspicious background, nothing that would have suggested the brilliance of his pen.

http://www.doubtaboutwill.org/declaration

We make no claim, in signing this declaration, to know exactly what happened, who wrote the works, nor even that Mr. Shakspere definitely did not. Individual signatories will have their personal views about the author; but all we claim here is that there is “room for doubt,” and other reasonable scenarios are possible. If writers and thinkers of the stature of Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and all the rest of the outstanding people named above, have expressed doubt that Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford wrote the works attributed to him, why is it even necessary to say that there is room for doubt? There clearly is doubt, as a matter of empirical fact — reasonable doubt, expressed by very credible people. Reasonable people may differ about whether a preponderance of the evidence supports Mr. Shakspere, but it is simply not credible for anyone to claim, in 2007, that there is no room for doubt about the author.

Big deal. One newsagency got the name of the hospital wrong and subsequently fixed it.

Re: ‘It has been shown that there are problems with the address in Hawaii given as where someone connected with him by the newspaper announcement was suppose to have lived.”

If you are referring to the neighbor who said that the Obamas did not live with her parents, she said that she knew that they lived somewhere ELSE in Waikiki Hawaii. However, they could have started living in the new address weeks after the time of birth. The witness said that they were living somewhere else, but she did not say that they were living somewhere else at the time of the birth.

Re: “His Sister who definitly was not born in Hawaii also has a Hawaian COLB.”

It thought this too at one time. But she doesn’t. She was not eligible because her mother did not live in Hawaii long enough. In any case the sister, Maya, is now a naturalized US citizen. IF her mother had been eligible could she have received a COLB? Yes. Could it have said: “Born in Hawaii?” No. The law does not allow the document to lie. Since Maya was born in Indonesia, the COLB would have had to have said: “Hawaiian COLB. Place of Birth: Indonesia.” That is what happens when foreign-birth CLOBs are issued.

However, the important fact is that when Obama was born even this was not possible. In 1961, when Obama was born, it was not possible to register a foreign birth in Hawaii. That was not allowed until 1982, more than twenty years after his birth. So, the original birth certificate in his file must be from Hawaii.

Re: “If Obama received financial aid from sources nobody cares to ask about it. If any were recieved under the guise as “foreign student” aid the man considered himself a dual citizen of the country that granted the financial assistance, or else he as an “American” duped these other nations who also believed he was a citizen of their nation.”

Obama was never a citizen of Indonesia, both the US State Department and the Indonesian government have said. There is no evidence that he was receiving foreign aid. If Occidental HAD given him financial aid as a foreign student, that would have been Occidental’s right. Occidental could have given him financial aid as a Transcendentalist (old American religion) if it wanted to, and that would not make Obama a Transcendentalist. In short, Obama was never a citizen of Indonesia. There is no evidence that he received financial aid as a foreign student.

Re: “Do the codes for Hawaiian citizenship run parallel to the rest of the USA or does each state have the ability to declare by their particular interpretation.”

The code in Hawaii is the same in all other states, if you were born in the state, you are at birth a citizen of the state and a citizen of the USA. Obama was born in Hawaii. The evidence is overwhelming. There is legal evidence, the birth certificate that he posted — which is the official birth certificate of Hawaii. There is confirmation: The two officials who looked into the file and confirmed that there is an original birth certificate in the file (and in 1961 that could not have been a foreign birth certificate because they were not allowed to be filed until 1982).

There are the notices in the two newspapers that were sent out by the government of Hawaii for births IN Hawaii, and not for births outside of Hawaii, and finally, there is this witness who recalls being told of the birth at the time because she wrote of the unusual event of a baby being born to a woman named Stanley to her father, also named Stanley. (http://www.buffalonews.com/494/story/554495.html)

“Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886), 21st president of the United States, was rumored to have been born in Canada.[28] This was never demonstrated by his political opponents, although they raised the objection during his vice-presidential campaign. Arthur was born in Vermont to a U.S. citizen mother and a father from Ireland, who was eventually naturalized as a U.S. citizen. It should be noted that his mother, Malvina Stone Arthur, while a native of Berkshire, Vermont, moved with her family to Quebec, where she met and married the future President’s father, William Arthur, in 1821. They continued to reside in Canada until sometime in 1828, when William Arthur became a Baptist minister, and successively tended to eleven parishes in the Vermont and upstate New York region. Their marriage and lengthy residence in Canada may well explain the confusion about Arthur’s place of birth, as perhaps did the fact that he (like his mother) was born in Berkshire, and thus literally within less than a day’s walk of the Vermont-Quebec border. Additionally, during middle age, Chester Arthur began to claim he had been born in 1830, rather than in 1829, which may have further raised suspicions about the nature of his birth (despite the fact his parents took up residence in the United States in 1828.”

Further, it seems that no private citizen has the legal standing to challenge a question over presidential citizenship. It’s up to Congress, and since the question itself has never—I repeat NEVER— been settled either in court or in legislation, if Congress has elected not to pursue this issue now, that should settle it. Because, you see, legislation would have to be drafted. The Constitution is unfortunately murky. They were more concerned throughout the 19th Century over children of foreign parents born here than vice versa, and they ended up deferring to English Common Law—one of the reason illegal immigrants are often keen to have their children on American soil. The reverse has been bandied about but never settled.

For all intents and purposes, though, Obama is an American. His experience is American, his education is American, the privileges of citizenship in his case have never been question. It has been settled by time if not adjudication. And frankly, folks, under the circumstances this is no more our business than the name of the first girl he necked with in a car (or even went further with). Congress has seen fit not to challenge it, so we ought to just butt out.

Now, you want clarity, write your congressman and demand legislation that settles this question. For now it’s murky. As to where Obama was born, gimme a break. He was born in Hawaii. This comes under the law of too much fuss over too little issue. The shenanigans required to obfuscate these records to such an extent might be indulged by people with a lot of money, but they would be expensive and frankly just too damn much trouble for some bi-racial kid who at the time would be seen to have no future. It’s bullshit. (Yeah, that’s becoming one of my favorite words, but I’m losing patience to be polite over this kind of crap.)

No, but his mother did.

Karl, consider the possibility that all this information is stuff that has been answered but no one among those you’re listening to gives a shit about those answers.

And further, it may be possible that all this is a misrepresentation. It’s not like folks like this have never lied before!

—”Did Stanley Ann Durham(Obama) have the ability to convey United States Citizenship to her son?

Yes, if he really was born in Hawaii.

No, if the birth took place in Kenyan because he left the country at the age of four.”

Wrong. You figure it out. You have a filter, however, that won’t allow this. Your mischaracterization of executive order concerning presidential records proves that.

And lastly, why the fuss? I’m sure you were loudly condemning the 2000 election as a miscarriage of electoral process, weren’t you? Or were you? Or were you simply pleased a rightwing asshole got elected, NO MATTER HOW, and thought those who were challenging its legality were just sore losers and pishers?

I reiterate, if there was something wrong with Obama’s citizenship, Hillary Rodham Clinton would have made it biggest missile in her arsenal against him. A democrat would have exposed it. She did not.

This is one of those issues where books can be written about all the questions that seem unanswered, but in truth there’s nothing to it. I listed earlier all the conspiracy theories that will not die because of a gap here or a missing paragraph there. This is one of them. Guaranteed.

But you go ahead and have fun with it, it must give you something to pass the time. Or perhaps, as Erich suggests, put that incredible skepticism to better use and revisit all that palaver you spouted about Jesus.

And you might want to consider the merest possibility that your entire motive in this has nothing to do with the legality of the election but with your discontent with the outcome.

In fact, if you were birther-skeptical as a general rule, you would doubt your own existence. You’d doubt that your shadow was your shadow.

You seem to have a big switch that you periodically flip. In the up position you believe anything and in the down position you believe nothing at all.

How do you know where you were born? Why would you have the audacity to trust the accounts of family and friends? Why would have be so naive to trust your own birth certificate. Maybe it was forged.

PBS has recently aired Michael Woods’ “In Search of Shakespeare”, which is marvelously well researched (only to be expected from Mr. Woods) and shows that we know far more about Bill than we thought (though, as you point out, still not much), but also that there’s enough of a “paper trail” to establish both single authorship and that Shakespeare was actually Shakespeare.

But as I said above, everyone has to have a hobby.