posted on July 28, 2022 07:41 PM by
u/TheAncientGeek
33
u/Sterauinzia48 pointsat 1659065804.000000
I don’t think I’ve seen the ugliness at the heart of Shakespeare
Truthism expressed so vehemently. Most of these Oxfordian essays lose
themselves in minutiae and da Vinci Code bullshit; Curtis spends
comparatively little time actually proving his point, because he thinks
it’s blindingly obvious that a loathsome prole (the attested friend of
Jonson, Marlowe, Fletcher; manager of the best theater company of the
age) couldn’t make anything of real beauty. The goal here isn’t to
convince, but to destroy. Shakespeare’s eminence is a direct challenge
to Yarvin’s faith in natural aristocracy, so he must be humiliated as a
“bumpkin,” a “rentboy,” comparable to the most contemptible figure
Yarvin can imagine: an African immigrant.
With Shakespeare the man put back in his place, Shakespeare the poet
can be taken at his true worth: as an aristo and an enthusiastic
supporter of Moldbuggian politics. True excellence flows from,
expresses, celebrates natural hierarchy; if that wasn’t actually borne
out by the Trump administration, it’s only because Yarvin’s friends
haven’t ground enough upjumped proles into the mud yet.
Great points! We have our own rustic bard types in American lit (Whitman, Twain), but apparently Yarvin has written all of that off as hopelessly debased. He's escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by popular participation in government and culture: Tudor England. If history doesn't support his read on that, then history's got to go.
Well, one imagines that rather than debased, Yarvin would view Whitman and Twain as the natural product of an upstart democratic non-culture. He’s never made it a secret that he thinks from the beginning America was an unjust rebellion against natural order. It’s not that he’s written them off, so much as they can’t be written into his narrative which *already* presupposes that American culture was never quote unquote “based”: less as a matter of purity vs corruption than having culture vs having none.
The galling thing for him, then, should be that his image of Elizabethan culture is *fundamentally* a product of that American inferiority complex which has it that the English aristocracy was/is a cultured one. Only Britain’s former colonies, and only some of them, have this cultural imaginary about what England/Britain is - even Brits who have it only have it in the retrospective post-Edwardian post-Empire sense borrowed from vulgar elegies to English pastoral (e.g. Waugh, Tolkien, Chesterton - these writers are all *Catholic*), written up on the stolen terms of urban or urbanised-and-disurbanised romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake) and stamped with a Union Jack some time after Churchill’s last hurrah, under the significant influence of trying to sell soft power Britain to the USA, where Boris Johnson was born. This is a sensibility and an image that would be alien even to Rudyard Kipling and Queen Victoria, because even at the peak of High Victoriana the nicest thing you were supposed to say of the English aristocrat was not that he was cultured but that if he was in any way adventurous he was a sensible administrator and wore his fluency in Greek and Latin lightly.
Anti-Stratfordianism was originally based on the distinctly middle class and Victorian (although it was kindled in no small part by, that word again, Americans) premise that William could not be Shakespeare because only a highly educated author would have had the bag of intellectual references to pull from which is in the plays, whereas Yarvin has it that uncultured democratic swine do not have *aesthetic* means. This can only spring from a fundamentally pop-cultural and 20th century (through the further lens of the 21st) stereotype of what one’s betters get up to, and what the English aristocracy have been up to this time. It’s no surprise that we identifies as aesthetically pleasing in Oxford’s recorded poetry is stolid, mannered, vaguely classical humdrum: written in 1955 it would be a bien pensant imitation of an imaginary Julius Caesar, whose prose is taught to latin pupils for its unimaginative simplicity.
It should be noted that claims of Oxfordian authorship emerge only later than anti-Stratfordianism itself. Earlier candidates (Raleigh, Bacon) are strutting imperialists with an ambiguous relationship to monarchy, Oxford the meekly poetic courtier is the perfect stand-in for Yarvin’s craven anxieties: he’s being oppressed and he likes it! Proper anti-Stratfordians - if one can speak of such a thing - don’t identify as replaced or even threatened by the unwashed masses, if anything they identify as heirs or colleagues to something which is and always will be just better by dint of sheer intellect or power: they don’t need reaction any more than they mourn the forgotten, made up, lightness of the English pastoral.
None of the things I’ve described on any side are good things, but Oxfordism in particular is the refuge of the aspiringly, needlingly, cultured: outsiders tied up in resentment at being on the wrong side of the glass, who have to make up a story about their being on the inside. You can include some portion of Blair’s cabinet, most of the British television industry, and Brexit Britain alongside the more pathological American admirers of Downton Abbey, even in their ascendancy which they see as a revanchist moment. Anyway, Curtis Yarvin bears an at least passing resemblance to Truman Capote, and he didn’t meet with a good end.
> Julius Caesar, whose prose is taught to latin pupils for its unimaginative simplicity.
I think "unimaginative" is unnecessarily pejorative. The Commentaries, particularly on the civil war, are great reads. Simplicity can be a great virtue: just look at Hemingway.
Imagine if Trump was President, and all the best novels and films and
poems in the country were produced by members of the Trump
administration—or at least, the Trump entourage.
Is there a great physicist in the country? Trump will invite him on the
Trump plane. Trump will send him Trumpbux. Trump will appoint him to
cool gigs and stuff.
And in this imaginary world, this success metric works. In a working
monarchy, the monarch is the center of everything awesome. All awesome
people rise toward the court, which is simply a fancy-dress ritual for
the coolest, most important people in the country.
I used to think Yarvin was mostly a put-on artist, but now I’m
thinking he actually is sincere, and really does pine for monarchy
because it is so “awesome”. Strip away the intellectual pretension and
he’s like a starstruck preteen girl, yearning to swoon in the presence
of power.
I can’t even respond to the “imagine if Trump were the exact opposite
of what he is” hypothetical. Yes there have been monarchs who were
patrons of the arts and whose courts were centers of intellectual life.
Does he really think Trumpism is going to lead us to that? Maybe he is
that dumb.
Trump just [sparkles.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites)
(E: added link, and a bit of nuance, I dont think Yud is nrx).
Actual link he links to:
https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/what-is-desire-by-edward-de-vere/
What is Desire? by Edward de Vere
Professor Steven May lists this poem as ’”wrongly attributed” to
Oxford.
E: ah the joke is on me, as that was the earl of oxfords name or
something. Still odd it is listed as wrongly attributed.
Unrelated to this, interesting how the reactionairy side always must
convince people that everything they know is wrong, weird undercurrent
of mega contrarianism.
it is a documented historical fact that the author of these lines
lived for at least 28 years after writing them. What did he write in the
next three decades? A mystery
A mystery? Not according to Wikipedia which lists a few later poems
published. (Not that not publishing anything proves he published under a
false name of course, people sometimes do otemher things, or works get
lost etc).
And if he gets to claim this dude was an anti democratic reactionary,
he prob should explain this pro worker poem
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Labour_and_its_Reward mfucker was a
commie! (Please dont take this seriously, going ’this historical person
is the same as my modern political theory and would be on our side is
stupid imho, it is more a joke about cherrypicking).
> Unrelated to this, interesting how the reactionairy side always must convince people that everything they know is wrong, weird undercurrent of mega contrarianism.
Not to 'both sides' but Revisionist History and You're Wrong About are two great podcasts that fall into that genre but aren't, you know, reactionary. There are a lot of ways in which popular knowledge *is* wrong and, yeah, those are going to be opportunities for reactionaries to sow the seeds of the narrative that they want to advance.
Certainly it isnt just reactionaries who do it, and there also is a lot of things we do indeed get wrong. But reactionary revisionism always swims far right ;).
It’s crazy how this turned from “huh this is a cute little conspiracy
theory” to unnecessary racism and anti-affirmative action in the span of
a single paragraph.
Is it just me or is the Oxford poem he claims is Shakespeare-quality
actually kinda bad? Like “His war is peace, his peace is war”? Really?
That’s something a high school poet writes and feels really smug
about.
you: "his war is peace, his peace is war"
the poet she told you not to worry about: "O for a Muse of Fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention — A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment."
>"O for a Muse of Fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention — A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment."
Total tangent: Henry V is one of the great works of art and the opening chorus always fills me with excitement.
I wanted to start a conspiracy theory that Yarvin couldn’t actually
have written anything that is attributed to Moldbug but it turns out I
can’t find examples of good writing anywhere.
Well apart from being an undead ghoul who will instantly die as soon as he runs out of people to hate, Bannon has a lot of cultural interests and weird influences, seinfeld, biosphere, world of warcraft, Titus Andronicus.
I could be wrong however, he could also have locker in which he was jammed as a horacrux somewhere. (Im the ready player one of sneerclub).
I've definitely heard and read lit-prof types defending *Titus Andronicus.* Sure, it's amazingly bloody, but the paying public wanted Senecan tragedy, and that's exactly what Shakespeare gave them. The workmanship is rough, but at the very least it shows potential. Titus, undone by pride and rigidity, is a proto-Lear; he is driven mad, yet when the time comes plays himself madder than he is, prefiguring how Hamlet would deliberately adopt an "antic disposition" and, when his passions were at their highest, perhaps cross the line for real. Aaron, the cunning, witty, manipulative, magnificent bastard, may (depending on the chronology) foreshadow Richard III.
Marcus: Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour.
Titus: Why, I have not another tear to shed.
Anthropomorphic personification of the year 2022: Yep, that's a mood.
Once you’ve read James Shapiro’s Contested
Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, you see quite how terrible the
arguments against the obvious truth are. (Not that I ever doubted
anyway, but it’s a handy book to keep all the arguments in one
place.)
Is nobody going to comment on the FIRST LINE misspelling “post” as
“poast?” Like, I know it’s elitist to hold typos and spelling that hard
against people but if you’re gonna try and sound alike an intellectual
worth taking seriously you should probably stop peddling discredited
conspiracy theories and also spell check literally the second word in
your god-damned “poast.”
So of course it is a memey reference, the guys remains the ready player one of nrx. (See also the weird inconvenient truth reference).
E: could also be a typo, he fixed the 18xx one for example.
I don’t think I’ve seen the ugliness at the heart of Shakespeare Truthism expressed so vehemently. Most of these Oxfordian essays lose themselves in minutiae and da Vinci Code bullshit; Curtis spends comparatively little time actually proving his point, because he thinks it’s blindingly obvious that a loathsome prole (the attested friend of Jonson, Marlowe, Fletcher; manager of the best theater company of the age) couldn’t make anything of real beauty. The goal here isn’t to convince, but to destroy. Shakespeare’s eminence is a direct challenge to Yarvin’s faith in natural aristocracy, so he must be humiliated as a “bumpkin,” a “rentboy,” comparable to the most contemptible figure Yarvin can imagine: an African immigrant.
With Shakespeare the man put back in his place, Shakespeare the poet can be taken at his true worth: as an aristo and an enthusiastic supporter of Moldbuggian politics. True excellence flows from, expresses, celebrates natural hierarchy; if that wasn’t actually borne out by the Trump administration, it’s only because Yarvin’s friends haven’t ground enough upjumped proles into the mud yet.
I used to think Yarvin was mostly a put-on artist, but now I’m thinking he actually is sincere, and really does pine for monarchy because it is so “awesome”. Strip away the intellectual pretension and he’s like a starstruck preteen girl, yearning to swoon in the presence of power.
I can’t even respond to the “imagine if Trump were the exact opposite of what he is” hypothetical. Yes there have been monarchs who were patrons of the arts and whose courts were centers of intellectual life. Does he really think Trumpism is going to lead us to that? Maybe he is that dumb.
Lol ‘this poem by oxford’
Actual link he links to: https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/what-is-desire-by-edward-de-vere/
E: ah the joke is on me, as that was the earl of oxfords name or something. Still odd it is listed as wrongly attributed.
Unrelated to this, interesting how the reactionairy side always must convince people that everything they know is wrong, weird undercurrent of mega contrarianism.
A mystery? Not according to Wikipedia which lists a few later poems published. (Not that not publishing anything proves he published under a false name of course, people sometimes do otemher things, or works get lost etc).
And if he gets to claim this dude was an anti democratic reactionary, he prob should explain this pro worker poem https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Labour_and_its_Reward mfucker was a commie! (Please dont take this seriously, going ’this historical person is the same as my modern political theory and would be on our side is stupid imho, it is more a joke about cherrypicking).
It’s crazy how this turned from “huh this is a cute little conspiracy theory” to unnecessary racism and anti-affirmative action in the span of a single paragraph.
[deleted]
Is it just me or is the Oxford poem he claims is Shakespeare-quality actually kinda bad? Like “His war is peace, his peace is war”? Really? That’s something a high school poet writes and feels really smug about.
I wanted to start a conspiracy theory that Yarvin couldn’t actually have written anything that is attributed to Moldbug but it turns out I can’t find examples of good writing anywhere.
The first/longest reply to the piece (by self identified reactionary Franklin Carroll whom I don’t otherwise know) is pretty funny and accurate
You have to be such a goon to think that arch, mannered fucking caesura is Shakespeare
Now this is some classic Moldbug. He’s usually pretty boring these days.
Once you’ve read James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, you see quite how terrible the arguments against the obvious truth are. (Not that I ever doubted anyway, but it’s a handy book to keep all the arguments in one place.)
“BUT HOW CAN FALCON IF NOT POSH?!”
Is nobody going to comment on the FIRST LINE misspelling “post” as “poast?” Like, I know it’s elitist to hold typos and spelling that hard against people but if you’re gonna try and sound alike an intellectual worth taking seriously you should probably stop peddling discredited conspiracy theories and also spell check literally the second word in your god-damned “poast.”