William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon

NBBDev — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 18:23:11 +0000

Who wrote the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare? This simple yet provocative question has long bedeviled Shakespearean studies. According to traditional scholars, the canonical texts can only trace to the singular genius of a glover’s son from the small town of Stratford-on-Avon. But dissident voices have disrupted this consensus for more than 150 years, and while skeptics who engage the “authorship question” have often been dismissed as marginal cranks or elitists (or, in contemporary parlance, as “deniers”), their ranks have included such luminaries as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud—as well as such acclaimed Shakespearean actors as Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance. The counterweight to the claim that “Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare” typically hinges on the promotion of a single alternate candidate. Popular contenders have included Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and more recently, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. In Willam Fortyhands, Samuel Crowell argues that this is the wrong way to approach the problem. The real problem, according to Crowell, rests in our fundamental perspective on the First Folio—the inaugural collection of Shakespeare published seven years after his death. Drawing on the history of Shakespearean scholarship, literary criticism, philosophy, and even science fiction, William Fortyhands seeks to show not only how our understanding of Shakespeare has been distorted, but how analytical tendencies have allowed the plays to be parceled out to other authors, only to find Shakespeare’s hand, even today, throughout Elizabethan literature. William Fortyhands is also a memorial—without a tomb—for Shakespeare’s many gifted and highly educated peers, whose contributions have been scanted in favor of simplistic narratives pitting Shakespeare against some single rival claimant. Among those profiled are the prolific bohemian Robert Greene, the brilliant satirist Thomas Nashe, the learned sailor and doctor Thomas Lodge, the outrageous and supremely poetic Christopher Marlowe, the whimsical and humane Thomas Dekker, the encyclopedic Michael Drayton, and the earnest historian Samuel Daniel. William Fortyhands throws a light on the creative efflorescence that was Elizabeth’s London—but from which only one name has emerged. __________ “Samuel Crowell” is the pseudonym of a former college instructor and self-described “moderate revisionist and loose cannon” who has been fascinated by the Shakespeare authorship problem since he was in grade school. He is a graduate of the University of California (Berkeley), where he studied philosophy, foreign languages, and modern European history, before continuing his studies at Columbia University. No stranger to historical controversy, Mr. Crowell is also the author of The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes and Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding (Nine-Banded Books, 2011). Click here to download the press sheet for William Fortyhands. Click here to read an interview with Samuel Crowell about William Fortyhands. Click here to visit Samuel Crowell’s website.

The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes

NBBDev — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 20:43:45 +0000

Among scholars and the general public, the prevailing consensus holds that millions of European Jews were sent to death in gas chambers as part of an official Nazi policy of mass extermination during the Second World War. So entrenched is this consensus that throughout the Western world those who publicly question its accuracy are now routinely subject to censorship, academic censure, and even criminal prosecution. In contemporary society, no other species of dissident scholarship is met with comparably illiberal reaction. In an intellectual atmosphere poisoned by acrimony and haunted by the specter of persecution, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes stands as a calm, deftly reasoned, and highly original affirmation of intellectual freedom. Drawing on extensive empirical and documentary evidence as well as methods of cultural criticism conventionally eschewed by field historians, Samuel Crowell argues that the “canonical” Holocaust gassing claim can be traced to a fateful crisis of modernism — a crisis revealed in popular texts and long-forgotten cultural ephemera. Spanning from the earliest broadcast rumors to the extermination narrative that was sealed at Nuremberg, Crowell’s probing analysis permits us to consider how a grim story emerged and evolved in the cyclonic momentum of an era marked by social upheaval, total war, and unprecedented technological change. Though it has achieved the status of an underground classic, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes has until now been available only in samizdat editions and on the Internet. This definitive edition has been updated and revised and includes a new introduction by the author. In addition to the title essay, supplemental texts include an appended restatement of Crowell’s important monograph, “Bomb Shelters at Birkenau,” as well as the never-before-published essay, “The Holocaust in Retrospect.” Excerpt: In short, it will be possible to see that the generation of a delusion of mass gas extermination did not require a conspiracy or a hoax, nor much conscious effort at all, but only a social and cultural climate that would facilitate such claims, at a time of war, hatred, and social anomie. We will see that such claims, reinforced here and there by a little helpful fraud, but above all by a simple willingness to believe the worst about one’s enemies, would allow dark rumors to be stated as fact and become themselves part of that social and cultural landscape of which we are only half-consciously aware. About the Author: Samuel Crowell is the pseudonym of a self-described “moderate revisionist” who has written extensively on the Holocaust controversy and other subjects. He is a graduate of the University of California (Berkeley), where he studied philosophy, foreign languages, and modern European history. Mr. Crowell continued his studies in history at Columbia University, and taught on the college level for six years. Links: Click here to download a promotional booklet including and exclusive interview with Samuel Crowell. The Samuel Crowell archive (CODOH) is here. Click here to read Samuel Crowell’s review-essay, “The Limits of Understanding.” 11/17/2018 UPDATE: This title is now sold out. You can download the entire text as a PDF file HERE. Still want a hard copy? Try your luck with the following vendor links:

Samuel Crowell – Nine-Banded Books

William Fortyhands: Disintegration and Reinvention of the Shakespeare Canon

The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes