The Shakespeare Authorship Debate and Historical Responsibility
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Narrated by:
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Ian Mortimer
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By:
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Ian Mortimer
About this listen
The text of a lecture first delivered by Dr. Mortimer in the chapter house of Exeter Cathedral in 2015 and repeated at the Reform Club, London, in 2018, and revised in March 2022 for this audio recording.
There is much rhetoric flung about these days by supporters and denigrators of William Shakespeare. Did he write the plays and poems that bear his name—or were they the work of another Renaissance genius, such as Marlowe or Bacon? Or was it the Earl of Oxford? Or a whole committee of intellectuals? Why is there so much doubt when the first folio of Shakespeare’s works clearly has his name on the cover?
However, of all the questions that arise from the Shakespeare authorship debate, one is more perplexing than any other. Why does neither camp apply the sort of analysis that professional historians are able to apply to the question? In any other debate about 16th century events, historians would be summoned in droves. But when it comes to Shakespeare, everybody feels he or she is at liberty to proceed without professional historical input—from literary scholars to amateur sleuths.
In this speech, Dr. Mortimer applies a professional historical methodological approach to the authorship question and demonstrates what direct evidence there is for the authorship and what is merely circumstantial. But his conclusion is just the first half of a powerful speech that demands greater rigor and discipline in history generally—and for society to act more responsibly toward understanding its own past.
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By: Clive James
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The Road to Monticello
- The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson
- By: Kevin J. Hayes
- Narrated by: David Baker
- Length: 25 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer - a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.
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Very Boring Book
- By Greg on 05-13-14
By: Kevin J. Hayes
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C. S. Lewis - A Life
- Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
- By: Alister E. McGrath
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series has captured the imaginations of millions. In C. S. Lewis - A Life, Dr. Alister McGrath recounts the unlikely path of this Oxford don, who spent his days teaching English literature to the brightest students in the world and his spare time writing.
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Awakening my curiosity and desire to read more!
- By Pearl Glacier on 03-13-13
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The Infidel and the Professor
- David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought
- By: Dennis C. Rasmussen
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship of two towering Enlightenment thinkers that had great consequences for modern thought. David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime, he was attacked as "the Great Infidel" for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism.
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a thoroughly enjoyable account of friendship
- By henryj on 02-21-20
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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Printer's Error
- Irreverent Stories from Book History
- By: Rebecca Romney, J. P. Romney
- Narrated by: J.P. Romney
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the Gutenberg Bible first went on sale in 1455, printing has been viewed as one of the highest achievements of human innovation. But the march of progress hasn't been smooth; downright bizarre is more like it. Printer's Error chronicles some of the strangest and most humorous episodes in the history of Western printing. Take, for example, the Gutenberg Bible. While the book is regarded as the first printed work in the Western world, Gutenberg's name doesn't appear anywhere on it.
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Porn for Ye Old Bibliophiles
- By George M. Liveakos on 03-24-17
By: Rebecca Romney, and others
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Ibn Khaldun
- An Intellectual Biography
- By: Robert Irwin
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world - a genius who ranks as one of the world's great minds. Yet the author of the Muqaddima, the most important study of history ever produced in the Islamic world, is not as well known as he should be, and his ideas are widely misunderstood. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides an engaging and authoritative account of Ibn Khaldun's extraordinary life, times, writings, and ideas.
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Issues with accuracy, pronounciation
- By Moh 3aly on 01-02-19
By: Robert Irwin
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Rome and the Mediterranean Vol. 1
- The Histories
- By: Polybius
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Polybius wrote his Histories "to find out by what means and by what political system the entire world was brought under the domination of Rome." Within the short space of about 50 years Rome went from being a provincial leader of an Italian confederacy to become the Mistress of the Mediterranean. Polybius was one of the first historians to attempt to present history as a sequence of causes and effects, based upon a careful examination of tradition and a keen scrutiny of the facts.
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You have to know what your are getting into
- By Dylan on 01-24-10
By: Polybius
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The Pun Also Rises
- How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
- By B. Lane on 01-10-13
By: John Pollack
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The Metaphysical Club
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months.
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The Great American Experiment
- By Victoria on 12-08-03
By: Louis Menand
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The Riddle of the Labyrinth
- The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
- By: Margalit Fox
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records.
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Discovery and Translation of Linear B Script
- By Sires on 01-11-14
By: Margalit Fox
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The Dream of Enlightenment
- The Rise of Modern Philosophy
- By: Anthony Gottlieb
- Narrated by: Anthony Gottlieb
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Dream of Enlightenment, Anthony Gottlieb expertly navigates a second great explosion of thought, taking us to northern Europe in the wake of its wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. In a relatively short period - from the early 1640s to the eve of the French Revolution - Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume all made their mark. The Dream of Enlightenment tells their story and that of the birth of modern philosophy.
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Enlightenment meets Neuroscience
- By Rodger on 12-05-19
By: Anthony Gottlieb
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Altered my perception of History
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Altered my perception of History
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What listeners say about The Shakespeare Authorship Debate and Historical Responsibility
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rick
- 02-14-23
Excellent not just for the explicit topic
Ian Mortimer delivers a lecture here on the evidence for Shakespeare’s writing his own plays. He carefully differentiates between direct and circumstantial evidence and weighs the value of every piece. He also looks at the evidence against his role and carefully dismisses every argument. I especially liked that he went into the importance of evidence. the modern tendency to say, I’m just asking questions about any old nonsense, without actually relying on evidence is getting out of hand. There’s no point in asking questions about things that you cannot support with any evidence at all. You need to start questions from evidence, not from fantasy. Since this is based on a lecture he gave, the delivery is excellent as you would expect.
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- Desiree Matlock
- 07-22-22
It says debate but is only a refutation
I wanted something that covered all sides of the debate evenly. But while this is a well reasoned and compelling statement in defense of the Stratfordian position, it does not in any way cover the debate suggested by the title. I have nothing against this work except that the title is false advertising. I was looking for a coverage of the history of Shakespeare’s authorship as a debate and I thus cannot be faulted for assuming this misleading book title would provide the authorship debate itself.
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