Carnivalesque #80

Welcome to the latest edition of the (early modern) Carnivalesque -- Anchora is pleased to be taking time during this Thanksgiving week (at least here in the States) to give thanks for our favorite recent blog posts.

Faking Shakespeare (Part 3): Authentic Shakespeare, Authentic Ireland

What you see here is not, alas, evidence that Shakespeare, his patron the earl of Southampton, his fellow actor and sharer John Heminges, and Queen Elizabeth herself all got together one day in order to practice their signatures on the same sheet of paper. But it is a real piece of historical evidence -- an authentic and authenticated Shakespearean forgery, created (by request!) by the famous forger William Henry Ireland.

Faking Shakespeare: Spenserian Baconiana

I once came across the following local headline: "Anti-bacon billboard to go up in Des Moines." I work at the University of Iowa, so this was not unexpected, considering the local industry -- but my mind turned to Shakespearean authorship conspiracy theories Before the earl of Oxford became the darling of the anti-historical conspiracy set, it was Francis Bacon who carried the day. One reader of the Iowa copy of Edmund Spenser's 1617 Works was particularly interested in attempting to identify the hand of Francis Bacon