| |||||
|
| Reservations | Contents |
|
Neville or Shakespeare?William Shakespeare lacked the education and factual information needed to write at least parts of the plays he gets the credit for. But his distant cousin Sir Henry Neville (1562?-1615) did not. He is put forward as a candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's works, due to the breadth of learning displayed in the Shakespeare plays. (WP, "Henry Neville (died 1615)") Scholars have long been puzzled by the great change in Shakespeare's writing career around 1601, when he wrote Hamlet and then the other great Tragedies. While this accords with nothing in Shakespeare's life, it was a clear response to Neville's traumatic imprisonment. There are many other parallels. ◦The Shakespearean Authorship Trust: Sir Henry Neville supplies details and holds up eight other authorship candidates. What has this to do with the Americanised guru Yogananda (1893–1952)? The guru-founder of Self-Realization Fellowship Church claims among other things that he had been William Shakespeare. Followers believe it, as if fit and fair evidence of past lives claims do not matter. [More]. In short, Yogananda claims of past lives are many, but proofs are not convincing or totally missing. The case for Sir Henry as the real author of the Shakespeare plays may complicate Yogananda's claims and use of the famous Shakespeare. If Yogananda had gone into the case for Sir Henry Neville, would he have said, "Read Neville"? and that "What I should have said was that I was Neville"? One may wonder, aber . . . speculations do not amount to much. Nor do unverified claims en masse either. "Experts generally regard claims of recovered memories of past lives as fantasies or delusions or a type of confabulation." (WP, "Past life regression") ◎ Past lives is a tricky subject.
Yogananda use of the author who wrote under the name of ShakespeareIn the first issue of the swami Yogananda's (1893-1952) East West magazine (1925) he enjoins followers to read Shakespeare along with the Bible and Bhagavad Gita: What to Read Next year, in 1926, Yogananda writes: Spiritual Recipe In a later volume he also tells (excerpts): Read a few lines from Shakespeare every day.
"Doctrination" by Past LivesIt is good to discern between sources.
Get thee to a nunnery - ShakespeareThey let past incarnations hail over you. Here is a sort of scheme that is used in several Yogananda circles. "Name some guy and say he was another famous guy earlier." There are many examples. Geoffrey D. Falk mentions several of them in Stripping the Gurus, in the chapter "To a Nunnery" (2009). There are many more examples in the book than these: Yogananda himself claimed to have lived at Stonehenge around 1500 BC . . . Also according to Yogananda, Hitler was Alexander the Great. In the same vein, [Yogananda's disciple] Kriyananda (1977) relates . . . Kaiser Wilhelm was Julius Caesar; Stalin was Genghis Khan; Charles Lindbergh was Abraham Lincoln; and Therese Neumann was Mary Magdalene. (Falk 2005, 246). "Made somewhat interesting by undocumented, former lives" might be easy. Some fill books with such rubble - and use hearsay to "explore," call their output "well-researched," and guessing up "subtle connections" - all without good enough evidence. Examples of flimsy teachings may be based on "I feel it", "I sense it", "Maybe Yogananda meant that". To see through the verbiage and avoid being hooked on flagrant claims might be good. Some pay good money for pieces of "doctrination", for nauseatingly loose claims, some of which come from Yogananda-followers tied in with Crystal Clarity/Ananda.
It might be best to be careful about telling of past lives if there is no validation to be got. To tell followers of past lives without good proof, might cause rumours to spread like wildfire. Unsound: Among crooners and cultists claims abound, but facts may be in another town. Buyer, beware: there are crocodiles beneath the surface in many a pond.
Kriyananda in that chorusYou are to hear a lot before your ears fall off. - Scandinavian One of Yogananda's disciples, the late Swami Kriyananda, writes in his book A Place Called Ananda how SRF's late editor-in-chief Tara Mata once said to him with a chuckle, "Even when he was William the Conqueror [who he told us he'd been in a former life] he never mastered the English language!" It is a joke, in that the English language had not yet been formed back then. [Kriyananda 2001, Chap 28] [More and sourced material]. Implied: That sort of "reborn Shakespeare" was definitely weak in English.
Sir Henry Neville
In the book The Truth Will Out by Brenda James and Professor William Rubinstein - first published in 2005 - Sir Henry Neville was put forward as a candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's works. The authors hold that Sir Henry Neville is likely to be the real author of Shakespeare plays, for it is hard to see how Shakespeare could have acquired what was needed for writing the plays. Further: "There is far more evidence to suggest that Sir Henry Neville wrote the works of Shakespeare than there is of Shakespeare himself," James tells.
William ShakespeareShakespeare was born, raised, married, and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, a market town about 100 miles northwest of London with around 1,500 residents at the time of his birth. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway. They had three children. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which became the leading playing company in London, and later known as the King's Men. Shakespeare kept a household in Stratford during his London career and appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. He was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, informs Wikipedia ("William Shakespeare"). However, the documented life of William Shakespeare lacks the education, aristocratic sensibility, or familiarity with the royal court some say is apparent in the works. His background seems quite incompatible with the cultured author displayed in the Shakespeare canon, which exhibits an intimacy with court politics and culture, foreign countries, and aristocratic sports such as hunting, falconry, tennis and lawn-bowling. Also, some argue that the works show little sympathy for upwardly mobile types, for example Shakespeare's father and Shakespeare himself, and that Shakespeare's plays portray individual commoners comically and as objects of ridicule and groups of commoners alarmingly, if congregated in mobs. Several scholars think that Shakespeare acted as a another's front to shield the identity of the real author or authors, who because of some disabling characteristic - social rank, state security, gender, or some other reason - could not safely take public credit. Why do some think so? Most of all it is because Shakespeare's eminence seems incongruous with his humble origins and obscure life. The works exhibit such great learning, profound wisdom, and intimate knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean court and politics that no one but a noble or highly-educated court insider could have written them, it is held. But for all that, most academic scholars accept that William Shakespeare was the primary author and do not accept that anyone but William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author. One fair reason seems to be that his authorship was not questioned during his lifetime or for centuries after his death. (WP, "William Shakespeare" and "Shakespeare authorship question") Sir HenrySir Henry Neville was put forward as a candidate for the authorship of Shakespeare's works due to the breadth of learning displayed in the Shakespeare plays. Authors Brenda James and Professor William Rubinstein, professor of history at Aberystwyth University, find an exact correlation between the subject of the plays and where Neville was at any given time. The chronology of Neville's life and the chronology of the plays always match up, asserts Professor Rubinstein. Further, Neville, unlike Shakespeare, had access to a detailed story of the Bermuda shipwreck of 1609, which seems to be the basis of The Tempest. There are also striking similarities of style and vocabulary between Neville's private and diplomatic letters and the Shakespeare plays and poems. Word frequency analysis also reveals a statistical correlation. Besides, some scenes of Henry V are written in French, which Neville spoke, but Shakespeare did not, and so on. New documents known to have been written by Neville while in the Tower of London, contain detailed notes which later made their way into Henry VIII. James and Rubinstein propose that Henry Neville, who was a distant relative of Shakespeare, is the true author, for the courtier and diplomatist Neville had travelled extensively to places described in the plays, in particular Italy; was fluent in Italian, French, Latin, and most other current European languages; had a detailed knowledge of both court protocol and law; and in many other respects matched the educational knowledge and societal norms exhibited by the author of the plays. James and Rubinstein find an exact correlation between the subject of the plays and where Neville was at any given time. He was once the English ambassador to France, and events in his life also shed new light on the development of the plays. He visited Vienna, where Measure for Measure is set, and northern Italy, where a series of Italian plays, such as Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice were set. The chronology of Neville's life and the chronology of the plays always match up, asserts Professor Rubinstein. Further, Neville, unlike Shakespeare, had access to a detailed story of the Bermuda shipwreck of 1609, which seems to be the basis of The Tempest. There are also striking similarities of style and vocabulary between Neville's private and diplomatic letters and the Shakespeare plays and poems. Word frequency analysis also reveals a statistical correlation. Besides, some scenes of Henry V are written in French, which Neville spoke, but Shakespeare did not, and so on. For example, new documents known to have been written by Neville while in the Tower of London, contain detailed notes which later ended up in Henry VIII. So Brenda James and William Rubinstein claim to have discovered compelling evidence to prove Shakespeare was a well-paid frontman for the real author, the true creator of the bard's celebrated plays and sonnets, and that he used "William Shakespeare" as his pseudonym through a particular arrangement. And William Shakespeare has been called "the last person you would imagine able to write such matter" - (WP, "Henry Neville (politician)") Shakespeare authorship material in support of Shakespeare: [ [◦Source] |
|
Clark, Sandra, ed. 1999. The Penguin Shakespeare Dictionary. Rev. updated ed. London: Penguin Books. Falk, Geoffrey D. 2009. Stripping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment. Toronto, ON: Million Monkeys Press. James, Brenda, and William Rubinstein. 2007. The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare. New York: Harper Perenneal (2005). Kriyananda, Swami 2001. A Place called Ananda. Rev. 2nd ed. Nevada City: Hansa Trust. Richard, Poor. 2007. Dwapara Yoga and Yogananda: Blueprint for a New Age. The Noble New/Lulu.com.
Symbols, brackets, signs and text icons explained: (1) Text markers — (2) Digesting.
|
 |
Section | Set |  |
 |
User's Guide ᴥ Disclaimer © 1998–2019, Tormod Kinnes, MPhil [Email] |
