Taking a fresh stick of unsalted Land O Lakes butter and a paper towel, I unfold one end of the butter and rub it on the paper towel. I do this in order to grease the sides and bottom of the glass pan that I am using, so I’ll need a lot of butter on the paper towel. I rub the paper towel on the eight by twelve inch glass pan, transferring the butter grease from the paper towel to the glass pan. This makes the glass look cloudy, like laying a sheet of gauze over a mirror. Greasing the sides and bottom of the pan is important for later on in the process because the butter helps to soften up the edges of the fudge and keep it from sticking to the sides of the pan. It also makes it easier to cut the fudge after it has hardened.

Taking one extra large bar of Hershey’s Special Dark and smashing it against the counter while it is still in the dark brown and gold foil wrapping is my favorite part of the process. It makes a sharp noise as I smash it against the counter. I repeat this several times until I can feel that the chocolate is in pieces inside the packaging. I unwrap the broken up chocolate bar over a large microwavable bowl, shaking the pieces out into it. I continue to break it apart until the chocolate is broken into small Lego -sized chunks. I do the exact same thing with the second Special Dark bar, using my hands to feel the hard smooth texture of the chocolate and the gritty feel of the chocolate flakes as I break it apart. It’s a very satisfying feeling. After the chocolate has been broken apart thoroughly, I spin around and grab one twelve ounce can of Carnation sweetened condensed milk and open it over the bowl, slowly coating the chocolate bits with the opaque milky off-white liquid.

I’m aiming for a rich bittersweet chocolate taste; the condensed milk added to the bittersweet chocolate will achieve this effect despite the almost overly sweet flavor of the condensed milk. After the chocolate has been covered and the sides of the can have been scraped clean into the bowl, I lick the drops that have spilled onto my fingers, the sweet taste mixing with the chocolate underneath my fingernails. A small preview of what’s to come.

The music switches to Ella Fitzgerald’s sultry voice as I take the bowl and microwave it on high for three minutes. I twist, spin, and shimmy to the music as I wait. After the three minutes are up, I let it sit for an additional thirty seconds before taking the bowl out of the microwave. The sides will be very hot so I always use pot holders. The mixture now looks like a white and brown tie-dye swirl inside of the bowl. I dip my finger into the middle of the swirl quickly, letting the taste of the warm mixture explode inside my mouth.

I entertain myself by taking a large spoon and stirring the mixture together to the rhythm of the music until there is no more tie-dye swirl. Next I measure out a teaspoon of Neilson- Massey Madagascar Bourbon vanilla extract. This could also be substituted for a teaspoon of mint or orange or any other flavor of extract, but tonight I’m in the mood for some plain chocolate fudge. So I use the Madagascar Bourbon (this extract is one of the purest kinds and is particularly well suited to chocolate, unlike the Mexican and Taitian blends of vanilla extract which are spicier and more suited to fruits). Stirring the teaspoon of vanilla into the mix, the way I know it’s been well mixed in is by the smell. The smell of vanilla will blend with the smell of the chocolate and this creates a unique aroma that makes my mouth water every time I make this kind of fudge.

Before the mixture begins to cool off and solidify, I put it back in the microwave for another minute, again letting it sit for thirty seconds afterwards before removing it. Louis Armstrong is just beginning to play on the CD player. There’s a slight crusty texture at the very top of the mix when I first take it out. Stirring the mix two or three times gets rid of it and the mix starts to slowly thicken into the consistency I want.

Wrapping a dish rag (the dish rag protects your hands from the heat of the bowl without slipping, like potholders can) around the sides, I lift the bowl and start to pour the mix into the greased eight by twelve inch glass pan. It does have a tendency to pool in one place when I start to pour, so I’ve found it helpful to have a spatula on hand to move the chocolate mix across the pan, so that all the corners of the pan are filled and making the fudge mixture somewhat level. While pouring the slightly thickened chocolate mix into the pan, I also use the flat spatula to scrape the sides of the bowl so that I don’t miss any of the mix. Using my finger to wipe up some of the leftover mix and taste it to see if it has reached that level of rich “chocolateyness” that I’m after. The different flavor blend together perfectly and I grin to myself, satisfied.

After I’ve gotten all of the mix that can be gotten into the pan, I let it chill in the refrigerator for two to four hours. It will harden up there from chocolate mix to actual fudge, making the magic complete. The last step is to take a piece of the fudge and enjoy the way that it melts in my mouth, the rich chocolate flavor with just a hint of vanilla hitting my taste buds and filling my nostrils with the smell of rich chocolate. I close my eyes in bliss as I take another bite.

For people not familiar with him, Green specializes in a glorious genre of professional fiction that I don’t really have a name for yet. It’s not quite Pratchett-esque crack, but it’s not your usual kind of urban fantasy. It’s fiction built on lovely implausibilities and injokes for people who are even remotely familiar with the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It’s not overly complicated (he’s not Jordan) but it’s delightful and addicting. They’re verbal renditions of television sitcoms (or comic book series) that are done right. They are fun and exciting and surprising and dark and light and tragic and hilarious in ways that you don’t see often in genre fiction. The characters are all memorable and brilliant. The dialogue is snappy and awesome. The settings can blow your minds. Parts of them are ridiculous but ridiculous in the same way that Doctor Who is, that comics are.

Several of his series inhabit a shared universe (Nightside, Secret Histories, and Deathstalker are all ones I know take place in the same universe, albeit in different times) so there is overlap and cameos here and there that just make the reading experience that much more enjoyable. If you like Jim Butcher, Charles Stross’ Laundry series, Doctor Who, Merlin, or Torchwood Season One, you should give Green a go. I recommend starting with Something From The Nightside. They are quick awesome reads that get better and better as the series progresses.

All that being said, Shadows Fall, the book this review is really about, takes place in this shared universe. It’s referenced in several Nightside books, so I was really excited when I picked it up to read. I wasn’t disappointed.

Shadows Fall is a town, a town you can’t find on any map. A small town in the way back of beyond where legends–human and otherwise–go to live out their days as belief in them dies. Comic superheroes who never achieved true fame comingle with rock ‘n’ roll stars who died young; dinosaurs roam the park at night. This is where legends go to die and lost souls find peace.

I am fairly convinced that somewhere there exists a place like this somewhere in this world or the one to come.

Green sets up the novel with a classic horror genre beginning to it. Everything is happy and fine and it’s one of the town holidays and so everyone is out and about.

And then a murder happens. And the ball starts slowly rolling.

But this isn’t a horror novel, rather more a mystery quest with a heavy dash of modern apocalyptic fantasy. Or rather urban fantasy with elements of a mystery quest during a bloody invasion.

There are many different characters that walk in and out of the pages of the book and various plots and subplots that eventually are resolved in the last couple of pages. There are prophecies, priests, demons, Faerie, musicians, teddy bears, snipers, angels, fanatics, lovers, and undead.

My favorite part of the story is where a Golden Age era elderly superhero takes on a T-Rex in the courts of Faerie.

And I got chills down my spine when the Faerie went to war. It had the same feeling that the Entmarch did – that kind of wide eyed crap-this-is-really-happening sort of feeling. The kind of feeling where you know the world will never be the same after this – that if you live through it things will never be the same and you’ll tell your grandkids that you saw this and that and words can’t describe the feelings really.

It’s a fascinating read. Especially as you get to the end and you wonder how it all ties together.

The ending…is something I’m still working though honestly. It has shades of Lewis’ Last Battle but hmm it’s interesting to parse and too complicated to give anything but general impressions without reproducing the book here.

Overall? It’s not a perfect book, the concept is brilliant, but the execution is flawed – it is by no means a perfect book. It’s not the first Simon Green I’d recommend reading but it is quite something. Definitely worth the admission price and then some.

I chose Faith as my concept and this was my essay.

Believing Without Seeing

I was diagnosed at a very early age with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disease that affects both muscles and joints.  Its defining characteristics, according to the Wikipedia page, are chronic widespread pain and a sensitivity to light touch.  In addition to that, fibromyalgia also carries with it a “moderate to severe fatigue” element. This disease is commonly seen in people twice or three times my age. I started showing symptoms at the age of thirteen, and since then there isn’t a single day that’s gone by where I have not been in pain of some kind.  Like the urban legend of the Eskimos having more words for snow than the English do, I have many more descriptions for the varying levels of pain that I feel on any given day than someone fully healthy would.  The chronic pain is only one of my many ailments, fibromyalgia acting as a facilitator for many other conditions.  I’ve taken to carrying all of the necessarily daily pills and in some cases, ace bandages with me all the time.  The pills can only do so much, and the majority of time, I rely on my faith to help get me through the day.

Faith is a word with a long history of use and various shades of meaning.  This English word dates back to the thirteenth century, coming from the Middle English feith&lt, possibly also the Anglo-French feid, fei, and ultimately from the Latin fides, fidere, so the Merriam-Webster dictionary says.  It has a variety of meanings, from sincerity of intention and fidelity to one’s promises to a firm conviction in something for which there is no proof or there cannot be any proof.  It is also used to refer to a system of religious beliefs.   One of the best descriptions of faith comes from the Bible, in the book of Hebrew, chapter eleven, verse one, which states that “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

Faith is the cornerstone of all religions.  You believe that by doing these acts, saying these prayers, following these daily moral guidelines that God or Allah or Jupiter will bless you in this life and help you in the life to come.  You take it on faith that you are doing all that you are supposed to be doing and that you will be rewarded richly for it.   The book of John, chapter ten, and verse ten explains part of this, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”  In this verse, Christ is promising to give not just life, but an abundant life to those who follow him, who put their faith in him.   Similar promises can be found in the majority of the world’s various holy books.

Faith is much more than just an interesting concept, something that we intellectually understand, but do not put into practice in our daily lives.   Saint Augustine believed that faith was the basis of knowledge.  This was one of his major contributions to the field of philosophy, Crede, ut intelligas believe in order that you might understand.

A good example of this can be seen in how the development of knowledge progresses in children.  When I was younger, the only person smarter than my parents was God, or so I thought.  My parents knew so much, if they told me that Santa Claus was real, Pluto was the ninth (sometimes the eighth) planet in the solar system, and that the moon was made out of green cheese, I believed them.  I did not have the skills necessary to research their claims to see whether or not they were actually true, I just believed that they would not tell me something that wasn’t credible. Their parental teachings laid a foundation that all my future knowledge was built on.  My faith in their teaching was based off a belief in their credibility. Until I was old enough to begin looking things up myself (and slowly coming to the realization that my parents, as smart as they are, do not know everything and are not always right), I processed and evaluated everything that I learned through the filter of my parents’ teachings.  To follow this line of reasoning and making the assumption that children have limited empirical knowledge at birth, you could make the case that Augustine was correct and that faith is the fundamental basis of all of the knowledge that one has.

Adults defer to “authorities” in a given field of study, attributing the basis of some of their knowledge to the people who have extensively studied it.  They do not bother doing more research than they are trained to do even if they are interested. I’m fascinated by black holes, how they’re created, why they exist, and what the latest research is.  I read books and magazine articles and watch documentaries about them, and I take it on faith that the researchers know what they’re doing, and that I can trust the information that they give.  I do not have the time or resources to evaluate all of that knowledge exhaustively and empirically.  Neither do the vast majority of people on the planet.  We take it on faith that if someone has the appropriate credentials (or just sounds like he knows that of which he speaks) that they are somewhat credible.

Granted, I learned eventually that my parents were not as infallible as I had thought they were. Some of what they taught me when I was small, I have rejected out of hand (my parents and grandparents are diehard conservative Republicans, I, once I was old enough to really care about politics, decided to be a moderate Independent since I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of either political party, and I firmly believe in the power of a third party).  Some of it, I now know was wrong, the moon is not really made out of green cheese, it’s made mostly out of rock.  Pluto is no longer a planet.   Santa Claus has millions of helpers the world ‘round in the form of parents, godparents, and grandparents.   In the absence of other information, it was natural, even rational to believe the stories my parents told me, it becomes irrational only if I clung to those beliefs in the face of the counter-evidence.

There is a lot in life that requires faith.  The distinguished chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, argued that scientific discovery begins with the scientist’s faith that such a discovery is possible.  It requires a passionate dedication to a result that is unknown at the beginning.    Martin Luther King Jr. put it a different way, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”  Politics requires faith, you have faith that the government will honor its promises and the politicians elected will actually work to make the country work smoother and better, instead of digging us deeper into a hole.   Faith in the justice system, that the right people will be punished for their crimes and the innocent set free.  These are only a few areas in life where faith is a requirement or a factor.

Faith is not believing with no basis on evidence, faith is to commit oneself to act based off sufficient evidence to merit belief, but not always to have absolute solid proof. To have faith requires an act of will.  For example, many people saw the tightrope walker and acrobat, Charles Blondin, walk across the gorge below Niagara Falls on a tightrope, and they believed (on the basis of seeing it with their own eyes) that he was capable of carrying a man on his back safely across the tightrope to the other side and then back. But it was only his manager, Harry Colcord, who had enough faith in Blondin to allow himself to be carried across.

Faith in Islam is called Iman, and it stands for the person’s complete and total submission to the will of Allah.  It includes belief, profession of these beliefs, and the performance of deeds that are consistent with the position of being appointed the deputy of Allah here on this Earth.  It has two aspects, the first being that one recognizes and affirms that there is only one Creator of the universe and it is only to Him that worship is due.  This will come naturally as faith is an instinct of the human soul, so the Imams say.  This natural instinct is then guided by parents or guardians into specific religious or spiritual paths, sometimes it is not guided at all.   The second aspect of Iman is a willingness and commitment to submitting that Allah exists and to following His prescripts for living in accordance with His will.  The Qur’an is the dictation of these prescripts through the Prophet Muhammad.  The Qur’an is believed to have updated and completed all previous revelations that Allah sent through earlier prophets.  Faith is an all-encompassing way of life here; your life is organized around the religion.

It never failed to amaze me that I could be walking on the street in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, dodging cars and their crazy drivers, and ducking into shop after shop, browsing and making friends with the shop people, only to see at noon, all of the Moslem shops immediately stop where they were, bring out their small prayer rugs, and face in the direction of Mecca as a recording from the tower of the local mosque blared out over the city.  In Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, where the vast majority of the shops are Moslem owned and run (and those that aren’t are owned and operated by the Chinese or Cantonese, who have interesting daily practices of their own),  what seems like half of business stops for the fifteen minutes of prayer.  These prayers happen five times a day (dawn, noon, in the afternoon, sunset, and nightfall) and are a way of professing obedience to Allah’s will.   “Allahu Akbar!” they chant, “God is great.”   The muezzin’s voice calls from the minarets, “Ash-hadu al-la Ilaha ill Allah.”

Islamic faith rests around the assertion that, “There is only one God and Muhammad is His prophet.”   This basic tenet repeated daily, affirms the faith that the Moslems have in their religion.  The kind of faith that Moslems place in their religion is a very powerful thing, it can determine whether or not you marry, who you marry, it is at the center of more than one government.  It is what it is and there are no substitutes. Faith in Allah motivates ordinary people to do awesome and horrific things.  In the Islamic world, there is no such thing as the concept of “separation of church and state.”   Their religion is central to everything they do, the religious leaders are some of the most influential people in the government and in society. The people’s  faith and belief is cultivated until it is strong enough to compel them to do anything in the name of their religion and their god.  This kind of faith is awe-inspiring and dangerous, with the wrong kind of leader, it can be a very deadly weapon.  It is no mere concept; it is a very powerful force, a tool to be wielded.

Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician, once said, “In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.”   My best friend cannot understand why I believe in what I do.  It doesn’t make sense to her to believe in a deity who can’t be seen. We wind up having the same discussions over and over again and it does sometimes get a little frustrating.  My belief in God was taught to me initially by my parents, but as I grew, it was one of the few constants in my mobile lifestyle.  I believe that God exists and that he does work for the good of the people that serve him.   The Bible is his Living Word, and that when I die, God will take me up to heaven because he has prepared a place for me.   My friend once derisively remarked after one of our faith/religion discussions, “You can’t wait, can you?  Going to heaven and being buddy buddy with your Jesus?”    I just smiled at her, and honestly replied, “Absolutely. Leaving this battered beatup meatsack behind?  There is no pain in heaven, no tears, no sorrow, for the rest of eternity.  Darn skippy, I can’t wait. Waking up with no pain, no headaches, no constant sneezing that feels like it’ll rupture my eardrums?  Yeah, you could definitely say that I can’t wait to go be with God.”   She hesitated for a moment, “Then why stay here?  Why not just not wake up one morning if it’s that great?”   I laughed, I really did, and I’d half been waiting for her to ask me this, because people always ask me that, after they’ve heard my story and they know what I have to live with, day in and day out.

“Because as much as I want to be with God up in heaven, I have a purpose here on Earth. God’s got a plan for me and he’s not done with me yet.  And while it’s a struggle to get out of bed every single morning and go to class and go to work and get everything done that needs to be done, despite my handicaps…God’s got my back.  He never gives me anything that I cannot handle, that I am not capable of handling.   He’s the reason I can do what I do, even when the ten different specialists tell me to my face, that I should not be able of accomplishing one third of what I do on a regular basis.  When it gets bad, and it does get bad, he gives me the strength and grace to deal with it.  He protects me, guides me, he’s not this distant, invisible God to me. He helps me get back up when I don’t think it’s possible. I’ve had this condition for almost ten years, and while it does suck that I can’t do some of the things I’d love to do, I’m in better shape than the vast majority of people with the same condition. I don’t have to live off  prescription painkillers; I can get by with over-the-counter Aleve and possibly a muscle relaxant if it’s been a truly hard day.”  She mulled this over for a while before changing the subject to something else.

Most of the people I know have a hard time wrapping their minds around either my faith in God or how I can smile and be happy in the face of having this really awful disease.  I always tell them that the two of them are connected.  Yes, sometimes it is ridiculously hard to get out of bed, much less do anything else.  Some days I can walk two to three miles and not have a single problem and other days it’s almost too much to walk the fifteen feet to the bathroom.  My rheumatologist and my personal care physician both agree that my positive outlook is part of why I am still in fairly good shape.  There’s a depression element that comes along with the fibromyalgia, which is understandable – it’s not easy to live with chronic pain day in and day out.   I resolved early on that I was not going to let this disease beat me.  I was still going to live my life, I just now had to make certain adjustments to it.  It wasn’t easy to do then, it’s still not easy to do now.  Some days it gets the better of me.  My faith in God is what fuels my positive outlook, it is what helps me get out of bed in the morning and grab my bag and my breakfast and head on my way to campus.  It’s what helps me to grit my teeth and move past the tiredness to actually get things done, to move past the pain and actually focus and take notes in class or finish the project at work.  My faith keeps me ambulatory even when I don’t think I can take a single step.

Faith is more than just casual belief in a thing or system; it can be a mighty thing that moves mountains, a violent process that asks the willing death of its members. It is present in our everyday life, whether we acknowledge it as such or not.   It can be a guiding force or a crutch, a bright light or a mystery that can’t be solved.  It can be the  strength you need to get through a hard day.   Faith is.

Hi. I’m booknerdguru, sometimes paradox, and always Bethany. I’m twenty-something , about to graduate with a degree in History (specifically medieval history from the Crusades to the Renaissance) and I am a practicing evangelical straight demisexual switch.

To break that down for further clarification:

I am a born-again Christian who is active in my evangelical church.

I am straight.

I am a demisexual. Demisexuals are “halfway between” sexual and asexual: In general, demisexuals are not sexually attracted to anyone of either gender; however, when a demisexual is emotionally connected to (usually in love with) someone else, the demisexual experiences sexual attraction and desire to the same degree as a sexual person, but only towards the specific partner. I personally like the description of “technically sexual and functionally asexual.” Demisexuality is very much an “all or nothing” kind of deal when it comes to romantic relationships.

I am also blessed with Sensory Integration Disorder (a form of high functioning autism), Fibromyalgia, and severe food (corn, basil, almonds/pistachios/cashews) and plant allergies. I’m immuno-suppressed and take a lot of pills daily.

I am an introvert. This means that I refresh and rejuvenate from have quiet alone time, rather than being surrounded by people. I grew up in a family of mostly extroverts, so I can actually fake it for a time being.

Politically I’m a Moderate Independent – which pretty much means that my viewpoint on various topics can and will be different and I won’t preach a party line (other than “Please stop abusing my Constitution.”) .

If you ask me a direct question, I will give you a direct answer. This blog and my other one are essentially avenues through which I can interact with people and have weird/random/awesome/ fun/serious/deep thinky conversations with people.

Please be polite.

To begin with, what is a black hole?  According to astronomers, a black hole is defined as a “region in space where the gravity is so high that the fabric of space and time has curved back in on itself, taking the exit doors with it” (Tyson, 282).  Another description of them comes from the Encarta Dictionary, “areas in space with such a strong gravitational pull that no matter or energy can escape from it.”

Black holes are formed when a star dies.   A star is a massive fusion reactor, its size determined by the balance between the gravitational forces and the explosive forces.  When that delicate balance gets disrupted and the star starts to die, the nuclear fusion reactions stop and the gravitational forces pull material inward, which compresses the core.  This causes the core to heat up, triggering a supernova explosion.  The explosion propels the material and radiation far out into space.  The only thing that remains is the highly compressed and massive core.   The gravitational forces are so strong that not even light can escape and the black hole literally disappears from sight.   The force of the gravity is also enough to cause the black hole to slip through the fabric of space-time, creating a hole in space-time.  This is why they’re given the name of “Black Holes” (Freudenrich, 2).

The core becomes the central part of the black hole called the ‘singularity.’ The edge of the beginning of the black hole is called the event horizon. It is the point of no return, the boundary between the isolated volumes of space-time and the rest of the universe.  Once across the event horizon, there is no coming back.  What happens inside of a black hole is unknown to us, because our current theories about physics don’t apply to a singularity such as the one at the core of a black hole.  An accretion disk is formed from the gas and dust and other matter that is drawn towards the black hole.  It lies before the event horizon; the matter making up the accretion disk heats up as it is drawn to the event horizon and will radiate x-rays which reveal to us the black hole’s location and mass (Smithsonian).

By convention, the size of the event horizon is seen as the size of the black hole.  This is a clean quantity in which to calculate and measure (Tyson, 284).     The radius is called the Schwarzschild radius after Karl Schwarzschild, whose work led to the initial theories about black holes.

There are two types of black holes, Schwarzschild black holes and Kerr black holes.  The difference between the two of them lies in their cores.   Schwarzschild black holes have cores that do not rotate and consist only of an event horizon and singularity (and sometimes an accretion disk).  Kerr black holes, named for Roy P. Kerr are black holes whose cores rotate because the stars they formed from rotated and the law of conservation of angular momentum carries over the rotation from the dying star to the final stage as a black hole (Freudenrich, 3).   Because of the difference in the core, a Kerr black hole has more parts to it than a Schwarzschild black hole.

In addition to the event horizon and the singularity, a Kerr black hole consists of an ergosphere and a static limit.   The ergosphere is defined as “An egg-shaped region of distorted space around the event horizon” (Freudenrich, 3).  The distortion is caused by the rotation.  The static limit is the boundary between the ergosphere and normal space.  The difference between the ergosphere and the event horizon is that something can still escape from the ergosphere, provided that it could gain enough energy from the rotation to propel itself clear.

What would happen to someone or something that wandered too close to a black hole?   Say for example that you are falling feet first towards the black hole.   As you get closer to it, its force of gravity grows astronomically.  You would not feel this at all, because you are weightless.  What you do feel is far more ominous.  The black hole’s gravity force is accelerating your feet faster than your head, because your feet are closer than your head to the center of the black hole.  The difference between the gravity at your feet and the gravity at your head is called the tidal force.   The tidal force grows sharply as you get nearer to the center.   Your body would stay whole until the moment that the tidal force grew larger than your body’s molecular bonds.  Your body then breaks apart into segments that also break apart and divide until you are nothing but a stream of unrecognizable particles.  But that’s not the end of it, because the tidal forces are all moving you towards the exact same spot (the black hole’s center), you are not only getting ripped apart, but you are also getting squeezed through the fabric of space-time like toothpaste from a tube  (Tyson, 285).

There are several common misconceptions about black holes.  To use one example, black holes are not universal vacuum cleaners that will eventually suck up the entire universe.  A black hole is, put simply, a gravitational field and at a reasonable distance away, its pull is no more than a normal object of similar mass.  The black hole’s gravity only gets extreme when you come close to it.   Another common misconception about black holes is that black holes are not funnels.  They are often graphed as curvatures on a flat sheet, giving the appearance of a funnel (this is to show the strength of the gravity surrounding it), but black holes themselves are not funnels (Horizons, 239).

It is also a misconception that since light cannot escape from a black hole, it is impossible to get any energy out of it.   Matter flowing into the gravitational field accelerates inward and to help preserve angular momentum, it flows onto the accretion disk.   The accretion disk is so hot that it can emit x-ray and gamma ray bursts and as it spins, it also can spit out some very powerful beams of gas and radiation from the disk’s axis of rotation (Horizons, 243).

This history of black holes began two centuries ago with an English geologist, John Mitchell. Mitchell theorized that gravity could become so strong that not even light (which travels at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum) would be able to escape. He also theorized that if such a thing were possible, the object would have to be incredibly dense as well as massive.  He called such objects, “dark stars.”  His ideas were published briefly, but then discarded out of hand (University of Illinois). Simon Pierre LePlace predicted the existence of black holes in his work, Le Système du Monde, “… [It] is therefore possible that the largest luminous bodies in the universe may, through this cause, be invisible” (Amazing Space).

Then came Albert Einstein.   In 1916, he published a mathematical theory about space and time that became known as the general theory of relativity. He treated space and time as if they were one entity.  His equations showed that gravity could be described as a sort of curvature of space-time.   On the heels of this groundbreaking theory comes Karl Schwarzschild, who using Einstein’s theory, almost immediately found a solution to the equations that described the gravitational field around this nonmoving, electrically neutral lump of some matter. This was the first actual scientific description of a black hole.   His solution showed that if matter was packed together tightly enough, into a small enough volume, then space-time would curve back into itself.  Objects could still follow various paths into the black hole but nothing could escape, not even light, thus leaving the inside of the black hole completely beyond the observation of an outside viewer (Horizons, 238).

After Schwarzschild, came Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a pioneer in the study of white dwarf stars. This lead to a further understanding of the limits of mass, which would determine whether a star dies a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole.  Roy P. Kerr uncovered the solution to charged black holes with rotating cores in 1963.  In 1964, John Wheeler coined the term, “black hole.”   That same year, neutron stars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell-Burnell.

In 1970, Stephen Hawking defined the modern theory of black holes and Cygnus X-1 was found. Cygnus X-1 was the first decent black hole candidate located by astronomers.  It emitted x-rays and has a companion that has a mass greater than a neutron star, but is actually smaller than Earth is (Amazing Space).

Astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii are currently studying the black hole in the center of the Milky Way; in hopes that the data they gather from their experiments will give them a greater insight into what is still one of the universe’s biggest mysteries.  One of the huge Keck telescopes has been equipped with an incredible new tool that increases its power.  A laser guide has been added to the telescope, making it possible for the telescope to capture pictures clear as any taken from actual satellites in space.  The astronomers at the Keck Observatory have aimed the laser guide directly at the black hole located near the Sagittarius constellation at the center of the galaxy (Smithsonian).

The laser fires into what appears to be the heart of the black hole (actually ending some 55 miles above the surface of the Earth), the signal there allowing the telescope to compensate for the blur of Earth’s atmosphere.  The telescope will stay locked on to the same part of the sky for a period of four hours while a camera takes one 15 minute exposure after another.    The astronomers and graduate students working there are hoping that some of the new data they are collecting will put them one step closer to finding out how stars close to these black holes are born and how the black holes distort the fabric of space itself. (Smithsonian)

The team at Keck is using the laser as an artificial guide light, allowing them to explore more of the sky than they’ve previously been able to.  Erasing the distortions that come with air currents and the Earth’s atmosphere is possible with technology called adaptive optics.  Adaptive optics sharpens up the pictures and gets rid of the distortions, but it has one serious drawback.  The technology requires a strong and clear guiding light to use as a reference point.   So it would only truly work if pointed at something close to a bright star or planet, effectively limiting the scope of the astronomers’ work.    That barrier has been removed thanks to the laser’s artificial guide light (Smithsonian).

Andrea Ghez of UCLA, one of the astronomers at the Keck Observatory and leader of this particular team, describes the black hole and the area around it as “the thriving city center of the galaxy, compared to the suburbs where we are. Stars are moving at tremendous speeds. You’d see things change on a time scale of tens of minutes” (Smithsonian).   She and another UCLA astronomer, Mark Morris, hope to gather the first evidence that the stars do indeed travel along the weird orbital paths predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.  If this is so, then the stars would trace out something like a Spirograph pattern over time, gradually altering the points of their closest approaches to the black hole. Andrea Ghez and her colleagues are about eight years away from spotting that shift, according to an article about black holes in the Smithsonian magazine.

As the research progresses, some of the newest findings are quite startling to the teams of astronomers observing them.  One of them is the discovery of scores of massive young stars in the same neighborhood as the black hole.  Only five to ten million years old and roughly ten times more massive than our sun, no one can quite explain what they are doing there.  Normally, new stars are birthed in clouds of gas and dust, in a calm environment.  This place, the black hole’s neighborhood is anything but.   There’s no real reason to explain why these stars are there. The astronomers are baffled by this finding (Smithsonian).

It is theorized that these young stars will self-destruct in a few million years, leaving behind small black holes of their own.   These small black holes (only about 20 miles wide) would then swarm around the central super massive black hole.  Mark Morris stipulates that “You’ll have black holes swing past each other in the night, and stars moving through this demolition derby.  A near miss between one of these black holes and a star could scatter the star into the supermassive black hole or out of the galactic center entirely” (Smithsonian).

The new findings about black holes are helping astrophysicists and theorists to develop new models for how the universe was created and how it has evolved since then.  Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believes that all galaxies started with “seed” black holes (as of yet unexplained) and that these black holes were tens to thousands of times more massive than our sun.  These seed black holes collided more often and grew exponentially.  As they grew, they formed raging quasars which blasted gas out of the galaxy entirely.  After the gas was depleted, the supermassive black holes sat “dormant and starved,” says Loeb (Smithsonian).

Our Milky Way galaxy has never fueled a quasar and only absorbed some few, small galaxies.  But on the horizon, there lies a terrifying collision.  The Andromeda galaxy is squarely set on a collision path with the Milky Way.  Loeb and a colleague, T.J. Cox, believe the two will start to merge in about two billion years from now, forming what they call, “Milkomeda.”  The two galaxies’ supermassive black hole will collide and ignite a new quasar (Smithsonian).

Andrea Ghez says that “it’s hard to believe that black holes really exist, because it’s such an exotic state of the universe.”  She’s content with the data pulled from the three days of her planned observations.  They’ve got more than enough to keep busy and they’ve identified a few more big young stars to add to their analysis (Smithsonian).

Black holes are as deadly as they are fascinating and there is still much that we don’t know about them. Recent research, as evidenced by the efforts of Ghez and Loeb, have shown us that black holes can be used to explain parts of how the universe works, but largely they remain a mystery.

Bibliography:

Freudenrich, Ph.D., Craig.  “How Black Holes Work.”  26 November 2006.  HowStuffWorks.com. <http://science.howstuffworks.com/black-hole.htm> 04 April 2008.

Board of Trustees. “A Brief History of Black Holes”. University of Illinois. 04/04/2008 <http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/BlackHoleHistory.html>.

Amazing Space. “Pathway to Discovery”. Space Telescope Science Institute. 04/04/2008 <http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/BlackHoleHistory.html>.

Irion, Robert. “Homing In On Black Holes”. Smithsonian April 2008: 45-53.

Seeds, Michael A. Horizons: Exploring the Universe. Belmont, CA: Thomson-Brooks/Cole, 2008.

Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. Death by Black Hole. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2007.

The history of this topic stretches back to 1781-1785 to the Reverend James Wilmot, the rector of Barton-on-the-Heath in Warwickshire, which is near Stratford. The Reverend Wilmot was a scholar of sorts and finding little evidence in the Stratford district that related to Shakespeare’s authorship, suspected that Shakespeare could not be the author of the works that bear his name.  He was also familiar with the works of Francis Bacon and formed the opinion that he was the most likely author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. (“James Wilmot” )

The theory died down for several years, but was revived by Dr. William Henry Smith in 1856.  He wrote a letter to Lord Ellesmere, essentially a pamphlet expounding upon his reasons for believing that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. (Smith) Smith used several of Bacon’s letters, both to and from, that hinted of his authorship.   A year later, he published a book expounding this theory, entitled, Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth.

Smith’s book was not the only book expounding this theory to be published that year.   Delia Bacon also published a book on the Baconian theories.  In her book, however, she postulated that Shakespeare was in fact represented as a group of writers, a group that included Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser.  The group’s agenda, according to Bacon, was to transmit an anti-monarchial system of philosophy by concealing it in the text of the plays.

The issue lay buried for another few years, until 1867, when a bundle of bound documents were found in Northumberland House.  Some of the sheets had been forcibly removed, but among the contents of the bundle were several oratories and disquisitions written by Bacon.  The manuscripts of Richard II and Richard III were among the sheets that had removed.  Bacon and Shakespeare’s names had also been repeatedly scrawled on the outermost sheet.  The bundle had been found by John Bruce and the Earl of Northumberland had it sent to James Spedding, an author and the chief editor of Bacon’s works.

Spedding wrote a thesis on the bundle of documents, it was here that he cautiously appraised the date of the documents to be somewhere around 1592, making it the earliest mention of Shakespeare (or as Ben Jonson christened him, “The Swan of Avon”).   The Northumberland bundle shows us that Bacon had possession of the manuscripts of the plays, but it does not prove that Bacon himself wrote the plays. There is still no information on either how he came to possess the manuscripts or how they came to be removed from the bundle.

Constance Mary Fearon Pott was the first to notice that several of the ideas and turns of phrases in Bacon’s book, Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, were similar to some of those used in Shakespeare’s plays.  In 1891, she published her Baconian theory, developing an idea that another author, W.F.C. Wigston had believed, that Francis Bacon was the founding member of a society called the Rosicrucians.   The Rosicrucians were a secret sect of occult philosophers.  They claimed that they had invented literature, art, and drama (including the entire Shakespearean canon) before affixing the symbols of the rose and cross to their work.

The theme that Bacon had left encoded messages inside of the plays was a constant one throughout the late 19′Th century and early 20′Th century.   Elizabeth Wells Gallup claimed to have found evidence not only that Bacon had written the plays but that he was also the son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester through a secret marriage, through the use of what Bacon had called a “bi-lateral cipher.”   This cipher used two fonts as a way of encoding messages in binary code.

Ignatius L. Donnolly, Congressman and author also published a book with his ideas of ciphers in The Great Cryptogram.   No one else has been able to find these hidden messages and cryptographers, William and Elizabeth Friedman, in their 1957 book, The Shakespearian ciphers examined, showed that the use of such a cipher was unlikely to have been actually employed by Bacon. (Friedman)

Friedrich Nietzsche and mathematician Georg Cantor were both supporters of the Baconian Theory.    Cantor published two pamphlets in 1896 and 1897 supporting the theory.    American physician Orville Ward Owen was so convinced that he’d solved the ciphers, that he began excavating the riverbed of the River Wye (near Chepstow Castle) , searching for the original Shakespearean manuscripts. (Friedman)

Walter Conrad Arensberg, art collector and founder of the Francis Bacon Foundation (founded in California in 1937) believed that Bacon had concealed messages in not only one but a variety of different ciphers.  The encoded messages all related to a secret history of the Rosicrucians and some of their more esoteric secrets. He published an assortment of decipherments from 1922 and 1930; his final conclusion was that there were definitely concealed messages, even if he had failed to find them.  He left his collection of Baconiana to the foundation after his death.

More recent Baconian theorists tend to ignore the rather esoteric following that the theory had attracted in earlier years.  Bacon’s main reason for secrecy had been held that he desired high office and being publically known for a dramatist would have impeded  his efforts in that arena. However, this modern theory, made popular by Nigel Cockburn in his 1998 self-published book, The Bacon-Shakespeare Question, instead posits that Bacon desired secrecy because of the completion of his Great Instauration project.   In order to advance the scientific component of the project, he intended to set up new schools of instruction and experimentation to gather the data required (the scientific “Histories”) to which Bacon would then apply his inductive method to them.  To fully realize all of this, he needed to attain a high office, thereby garnering enough influence to make it workable.

Bacon also supposedly is claimed to have set out the otherwise-unpublished moral philosophical component of his project in the Shakespearean canon (the moral “Histories”). In this way, he believed he could influence the nobility through dramatic performance with his observations on what constitutes “good” government (a good example of this is seen in the relationship between Prince Hal and the Chief Justice in Henry IV, Part 2). He modeled this after the ancient idea of instructing through play-acting. (Cockburn)

In 2008, Barry R. Clarke self-published his theory, inspired by no small part by Cockburn’s book.  The Shakespeare Puzzle – A Non-Esoteric Baconian Theory, takes some of Cockburn’s conclusions and goes a step farther with them.  Exploring further into Bacon’s authorship of True Declaration (a production done by the Virginia Company and a possible source for The Tempest) and contrary to what Cockburn postulated,  makes the claim that Ben Jonson knew Bacon’s secret as early as December 1609. (Clarke)

The Baconian Theory is taken seriously by some scholars and not at all seriously by others.  We may never actually know who really wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare, whether it was the man from Stratford, Francis Bacon, or someone else entirely.   As long as Shakespeare’s works are widely read and available, there will always be some who doubt the authorship of the plays.

Bibliography

Clarke, Barry R. The Shakespeare Puzzle- A Non-Esoteric Baconian Theory. Barry R. Clarke, 2008.

Cockburn, Nigel. The Bacon-Shakespeare Question. Bacon Book, Inc, 1998 .

Friedman, William and Elizabeth. The Shakespearian ciphers examined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Smith, William Henry. Bacon and Shakespeare. London : John Russell Smith , 1894.

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . “James Wilmot” . 19 September 2008. 10 October 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Wilmot&oldid=239446428>.

Death in comic books is not generally a big thing.  With all of the resurrections and the alternate timelines and the amount of retconning[1] that goes on in the comic book sphere, fans of a particular superhero generally don’t worry about the hero dying.  At best, it will be just a temporary plot device, serving some greater purpose.  Superman has died before and come back to tell the tale, so have several other major superheroes in the Marvel and DC universes.   The death of Captain America has caused quite a stir both in and out of the comic books world. The timing of Captain America #25 (March 2007) will forever be remembered as a lasting social commentary on post 9/11 events such as the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act (Robinson).

Captain America has long been held as a national icon, a symbol of national pride.   His whole creation has been one long patriotic run.  His first appearance in 1941 was as a super soldier fighting Nazis, a superhero embodying American patriotism.   His red, white, and blue costume was a representation of the ideals America was fighting for in World War II; freedom, justice, democracy, and the American way.   He faded out in the 1960′s when patriotism and the simple truths that Captain America stood for were put on the shelf as Americans started to reevaluate their politics, country, and lifestyles.  The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War caused heroes, as well as the rest of the nation to lose the innocence they’d had before  (Robinson).

Heroes could no longer afford to be squeaky clean good, models of good manners and pure to a certain extent. They all had flaws, in some cases very serious ones (like Tony Stark’s alcoholism) or minor ones (Hank Pym’s (Ant-man) scatterbrained tendencies).  The X-Men were foils for the civil rights movement, Spider-Man worries about finding his own identity, balancing both a normal life and his superhero life.

Captain America was brought back forty years later for the controversial multi-series story arch, Civil War.  He was essentially a man out of time and place.  Many regarded him to be the “perfect superhero.”  This has been seen as his fatal flaw by some.  Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has been quoted as saying that “He [Captain America] hasn’t been living in the modern world and the world does move” (Holmes, O’Beirne and Perreira). This could partially explain why Captain America was chosen to die at the climax of the Civil War arch.

The Civil War story arch parallels 9/11 and the subsequent events happening afterwards.   Set after the events of House of M[2] and Avengers Disassembled[3], it begins with an accidental explosion in Stamford, Connecticut, an explosion that was caused by superheroes.  Thousands of innocent people were killed, which prompted the government to enact the Superhuman Registration Act.    This act called for the registration of all the superheroes with the government, giving up their anonymity and revealing their secret identities.  The punishment for not registering was imprisonment in the Negative Zone (an alternative dimension where all matter is negatively charged).

It caused a great divide between the superheroes.  The pro-registration side was headed up by Tony Stark (Iron Man), one of Captain America’s best friends.  Their position was that registration was best for everyone’s safety and that the government was correct in their insistence for all superheroes to be registered. He also quietly orchestrated a campaign that created conditions to scare and mislead the public and government officials into supporting the act and all the programs that it entailed.    The anti-registration side, headed up by Captain America, claimed that the Act violated their civil liberties.    He became the leader of a group of now-rogue superheroes after refusing to help Tony Stark and the S.H.I.E.L.D. agency in enforcing the new Patriot Act parallel.   This led to the two sides fighting bitterly against each other.

Captain America ended up surrendering, giving himself up once he realized what it would truly cost to “win” this war.  He was assassinated on the steps of a courthouse on the day of his arraignment.   This highly symbolic move was no accident.    Captain America’s alter ego, Steve Rogers was a super serum enhanced soldier fighting right alongside the common soldiers in World War II.  Even after he’d left the army and joined the Avengers working with S.H.I.E.L.D, he was still identified as a soldier, a hero who’d fought Nazis while protecting the American ideals.   Killing Steve Rogers in the manner that they did (two shots from a sniper rifle), the writers of the comic were making a strong statement.

His death came as something of a shock to one of his co-creators, Joe Simon. “”We really need him now,” the 93 year old told the Associated Press (Holmes, O’Beirne and Perreira). Comic books have long been held as a type of social commentary, but the Civil War story arch took it farther than other comic books have gone before (with the notable exception of Alan Moore’s Watchmen).

Post 9/11 Americans have been faced with the decision whether they value their personal freedoms or their own security more.  Just like the superheroes in the Civil War story arch must choose between keeping their secret identities and heroic intrigue and joining in with the safer, larger, and nameless forces of the government.  Everyday Americans are still weighing the pros and cons of freedom versus security.  Marvel declared a loser with the highly symbolic death of Captain America who embodied the ideals of freedom and civil rights.   His costume and shield have been taken up by another.  So in a sense, Captain America isn’t dead, but what he stood for and the ideals he fought for are.

Bibliography

Holmes, Larry, Jonathan O’Beirne and Glenn Perreira. “Shocking event for Captain America – CNN.com.” 07 March 2007. CNN.com. 28 September 2008 <http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/03/07/captain.america/index.html>.

Robinson, Bryan. “ABC News: What the Death of Captain America Really Means.” 8 March 2007. ABC News. 28 September 2008 <http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=2934283&page=1>.

[2] A follow-up to the events of the Avengers Disassembled storyline, in which the mutant superhero Scarlet Witch suffered a mental breakdown and tried to alter the fabric of reality to recreate her lost children. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_M

[3] Avengers Disassembled, referred to in some participating series as Disassembled, is a crossover event between several Marvel Comics series. The general idea is that the major heroes (the Avengers, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four) are assaulted, not just physically, but emotionally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers_Disassembled

Antony’s first line is highly memorable because it follows the rhetorical convention of the one- two- three syllable progression. It flows off the tongue in a pleasing rhythm as a one syllable word is followed by a two syllable word and then a three syllable word.  It also follows the rhetorical device of asyndeton (Lanham), where commas separate the items in a list without the use of conjunctives.  It shows that each term in the list is equal to the others and it speeds up the flow of the sentence.  Combined with the one- two- three syllable progression and you have a very memorable first line.

Brutus’ first line on the other hand, “Romans, countrymen, and lovers, (3.2.13)” falls flat when spoke aloud because Brutus violated the rhetorical convention that made Antony’s first statement so powerful.  He placed a two syllable word after a three syllable word, making the rhythm of the sentence fall flat.  There are other examples in the two speeches that show the differences and ultimately add to how Antony was able to so easily sway the people from loving the conspirators to hating them.  First examine the two men who gave the speeches.

Marcus Junius Brutus (Wikipedia) was a skilled orator from an old Roman family; his speech is no more reasonable and no less rhetorical than Antony’s is.  Brutus is defending himself and the other conspirators as he explains to the people why they took the action that they did. “… As he was valiant, I honour him: but as he was ambitious, I slew him… (3.2.24-25)” is part of his justification why the conspirators raised their hands against Caesar.    Brutus stakes the belief in his words on the plebeians’ belief in his honor.  “Hear me for my cause…believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe…(3.2.13-15)”   He is casting himself and the other conspirators as true Romans dedicated to Rome above all, “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. (3.2.20-21)”

Marc Antony was the grandson of a famed rhetorician (Marcus Antonius Orator) and while he had proven himself greatly in battle and out, he had not the instruction that Brutus had had.  He was in fact a far greater general than he was a statesman or an administrator.  He did in his youth, for a short time, study rhetoric under the philosophers in Greece but his studies were interrupted by the proconsul of Syria who sent him to take part in military campaigns in Judea (Wikipedia).   He even states in his speech that he is “…no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man…(3.2.208-209)”   Yet his keen mind and his brief study in his youth have enabled him to craft a speech that is personal and emotional and uses rhetorical devices among other things to appeal more to the people.

Antony also has the advantage of speaking after Brutus and therefore from a “deconstructive” point of view.  Even with the specific conditions that Brutus laid upon him in order to allow him the freedom to speak (that he may praise Caesar but not blame the conspirators, that he must tell the crowd that he is speaking with their permission, and that he speaks from the same public pulpit that Brutus did) (Shakespeare), Antony manages to shift the mob’s opinion from hating Caesar to going after Brutus and the other conspirators.

Brutus’ speech, while it is a good example of his oratorical skill, comes off as very cold, rational, and aloof speech. It does not inspire the same sort of passion that Antony’s did.  Moreover, Brutus’ trust that the plebeians will believe his speech because they know him to be an honorable man and without giving them any real sort of proof other than his word is a fatal flaw for him. By doing this he has given Antony the room to sway the mob’s opinion by calling his [Brutus'] honor into question (Baines).     Antony accomplishes this by skillfully refuting Brutus’ unsubstantiated claim that Caesar was ambitious.   Through repetition and recontextualizing the words, “ambitious,”  “honor,” and “honorable,” Antony is able to strip them of their meaning in Brutus’ oration.  He does not denounce Brutus; in fact at no point in his oration does Antony come straight out and say that Brutus and the other conspirators were wrong.   He does the opposite, continually claiming that “…Brutus is an honourable man; so are they all, all honourable men (3.2.79-80).”

Antony cites three specific examples as part of his refutation of Caesar being ambitious, only one of which is truly relevant.   First that “he hath brought many captives home to Rome whose ransoms did the general coffers fill. (3.2.85-86)” Caesar conquered many peoples for Rome, bringing back captives and slaves that were sold or ransomed at great cost; all of that profit was added to Rome’s treasury coffers instead of Caesar’s own pocket.  Antony asks the mob, “Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? (3.2.87)” In fact, this would almost suggest that Caesar deserved a crown, having brought so much wealth to the republic.

Antony’s  second example, that Caesar cried with the poor in their misfortune, and that in his will, left them all his private parks and gardens as well as seventy-five drachmas for every man (Shakespeare). This shows great compassion and generosity in Caesar, but does not refute Brutus’ charge that Caesar was ambitious.  Still Antony states that, “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. (3.2.89)”

Finally, that “…on the Lupercal, I thrice presented him with a kingly crown, (3.2.92-93)” Antony reminds the mob that they all saw him offer such a thing to Caesar and that “…which thrice he did refuse. (3.2.94)”    This is the only truly relevant piece of information and still it is a bit suspect, if you take into account Casca’s report of the offer and refusal, as though it was a theatrical performance staged to delight and win over the plebeian audience (Shakespeare).  It serves Antony’s purpose well; the mob is starting to shift its opinions.  “Methinks there is much reason in his sayings,(3.2.105)” One citizen states. “…Caesar has had great wrong, (3.2.107)” Another is heard to say.

Antony is fashioning his own words as truth just as he is denying his intention (and ability) to strip Brutus’ words from their meaning. “I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. (3.2.97-98)”   He implies that Brutus only spoke “words” and that they had no real meaning behind them.   He also makes it so that his words, his “truth” seem to echo what the plebeians themselves already know.  “I tell you that which you yourselves already know.  Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor dumb mouths, and bid them speak for me. (3.2.215-217)”   The “truth” is not merely in what he is telling them, but in what he is also about to show them.  A visual sort of proof that will fire up the imaginations and stir up the emotions even more than they have already been stirred up (Baines).

Antony’s greatest strength, his most effective strategy is his sense of theatricality.  His ability to stir up the hearts and minds and emotions of the mob, replaying the assassination in the way that he would want his audience to interpret it. The ultimate irony and triumph of Antony’s accomplishment is when he deconstructs the vision that Brutus and Cassius had created of Caesar’s death, turning their metaphorical vision of Caesar’s death from a ritual sacrifice that had liberated the people to a savage spectacle, killing a benevolent leader.   He then adds to the emotional swell when he breaks off his oration in order to weep for Caesar (Baines).

The combination of the rhetorical devices and Antony’s own charismatic sense of the dramatic all contributed to his being able to sway the mob’s opinion. Manipulating them, and their emotions, so provoking their rage against the assassins and their grief for the lost Caesar, in doing this, he turns the tide of public opinion against Brutus, Cassius, and the other conspirators, and thereby paves the way for the conspirators’ defeat at the close of the play.

Bibliography

Baines, Barbara J. “That every like is not the same, The Vissictudes of Language in Julius Caesar.” Zander, Horst. Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 2004. 139-155.

Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.

Shakespeare, William. “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.” Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Shakespeare. London : W.M. Norton & Company Ltd. , 1997. 1525-1589.

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Marcus Junius Brutus. 28 Nov 2008. 2 Dec 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marcus_Junius_Brutus&oldid=253343629>.

-. Mark Antony. 2 Dec 2008. 3 Dec 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Antony&oldid=255341838>.

Doubters of the man from Stratford’s authorship believe that there is a lack of concrete evidence that the actor/businessman known as Shaksper was responsible for creating the vast body of literary works that bear his name. The man himself is a very enigmatical figure and there is precious little biographical information on him. Much has been inferred from his writing, but the dearth of information that is solid is one of the major reasons for the questions about his identity. Mainstream scholars (also referred to as Stratfordians) do not see this as the critical issue that the non-Stratfordian proponents do (Shakespeare Authorship Coalition ). The Elizabethan and Jacobian periods of England were some of the most well documented periods of history but the majority of it was centered on the gentry and nobility. The lives of the commoners were not as well documented and the documents that did exist would have been unlikely to survive to present day.

The prevailing mainstream view is that the author known as Shakespeare is the same man who was born in Stratford-Upon–Avon in 1564, then traveled to London to be become an actor and part owner of the acting company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford and eventually retired to Stratford somewhere around 1613 before his eventual death in 1616.

Other possible identifying evidence lies in the fact that Shakespeare left gifts to actors from his London company in his will and that the man from Stratford and the author of the plays share a common name. In the 1623 First Folio, there are several commendatory poems that refer to the “Swan of Avon” (a term coined by Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare). The poems also refer to a Stratford monument which scholars believe to be the monument set up to Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford (Schoenbaum).

There is further evidence in a 1592 pamphlet by the playwright Robert Greene where he chastises a playwright whom he calls “Shake-scene”, calling him “an upstart crow” and a “Johannes factotum” (a jack of all trades or someone able to feign skills). This indicated that people were aware of a writer named Shakespeare (Anderson). Poet John Davies once referred to Shakespeare as “our English Terence,” (Terence being a famous Roman playwright who was first a slave/commoner). In addition to that, Shakespeare’s grave monument in Stratford, currently features him with a pen in hand, suggesting that he was known as a writer. The monument was built within a decade of his death and compares him to Vergil and his works as being a type of “living art.” The earliest descriptions of this monument go back to the 1630’s (Anderson).

Critics and opponents of the mainstream theory have disputed all of these, claiming that there is absolutely no direct evidence which clearly states that Shakespeare of Stratford was a playwright. They note that the only theatrical references in his will (the gifts to his fellow actors) were inserted between previously written lines almost as an afterthought and therefore subject to a certain amount of doubt. The term “Swan of Avon” can be interpreted in numerous ways, so they claim. The pamphlet could have implied that Shakespeare was in fact, being given credit for the work of other writers. Davies’ mention of “our English Terence” could have been a mixed reference as many contemporary Elizabethan scholars knew Terence to be a front man for one or more Roman aristocratic playwrights. They also state that Shakespeare’s grave monument was altered after its original creation, the original monument merely showing a man holding a grain sack, instead of with the pen in his hand (Anderson).

Another contested point between the Stratfordians and the anti-Stratfordians is about Shakespeare’s education. To have written the plays, one would have required a certain level of higher education, including knowledge of contemporary science and several languages. There are 29,000 different words and word variations in all of the plays (Kernan). That number is five times the number of the different words in the King James Bible (6,000). Henry Stratford Caldecott in one of his lectures had this to say about Shakespeare.

The plays of Shakespeare are so stupendous a monument of learning and genius that, as time passes and they are probed and searched and analyzed by successive generations of scholars and critics of all nations, they seem to loom higher and grander, and their hidden beauties and treasured wisdom to be more and more inexhaustible; and so people have come to ask themselves not only, ‘Is it humanly possible for William Shakespeare, the country lad from Stratford-on-Avon, to have written them?’, but whether it was possible for any one man, whoever he may have been, to have done so (Caldecott).

The Stratfordian position is that Shakespeare was entitled to attend the King’s School where he would have studied the Latin poets and playwrights until the age of fourteen (Whitaker). This cannot be proven since the records of the school’s pupils cannot be found (Greer). Any other schools that he might have attended are all purely speculation since there are no records of a Shakespeare having studied at a university, college, or even a grammar school. Attending university was not a prerequisite however, and traditionally scholars have postulated that Shakespeare was largely self-educated. This was not unusual; a common parallel used by Stratfordians is Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson.

Anti-Stratfordians use the claim that Jonson’s self-education is more easily proved than Shakespeare’s. He had an enormous library to partake of as evidenced by the hundreds of books that have been found annotated and signed by Jonson (Ridell and Stewart). There is no such evidence for Shakespeare, no books have ever been found that could be proved to have been owned or borrowed by Shakespeare of Stratford.

The issue of Shakespeare’s class has also been hotly debated. Anti-Stratfordians doubt that a glove maker’s son who didn’t leave Stratford until his early adulthood could have written so convincingly about the activities and lives of the nobility. That the plays show too detailed an understanding of politics, not to mention the law and foreign languages that would have been almost impossible to attain without having an aristocratic or university background (Shakespeare-Oxford Society).

Stratfordians disagree, stating that the glamorous life of the aristocracy was a very popular setting for plays at the time. They cite other Renaissance playwright from humble origins who also used the aristocracy in their plays. Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker are among the playwrights they use. They also assert that Shakespeare’s life was upwardly mobile and that he had several chances to observe courtly life with the several performances his company made at court. His theatrical success made him wealthy to the point that eventually he earned the title of gentleman and acquired his own personal coat of arms (Kathman).

Other candidates for the position of the “real” Shakespeare have been Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. According to anti-Stratfordians the first indirect murmurs regarding suspicions about Shakespeare’s identity happened in Elizabethan times. As early as 1595 there were allusions to Shakespeare having aristocratic ties though nothing concrete and direct until the eighteenth century. The first published doubts were published in a series of three allegorical stories. They were quickly forgotten (Michell).

Francis Bacon was the popular choice in the nineteenth century when the “authorship question” was popularized. In 1856, William Henry Bryan made the claim that Sir Francis Bacon had to have been the one to write Shakespeare’s plays (Smith). He was supported by several others, Delia Bacon also wrote on this subject. She hypothesized that Shakespeare was actually the pseudonym for a group of writers, a group that included Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. The group’s agenda, according to her, was to transmit an anti-monarchial system of philosophy by concealing it in the text of the plays (Friedman). Constance Mary Fearon Pott was another supporter of this theory and in 1885; she founded the Francis Bacon society. Stratfordians dispute this strongly, holding up Bacon’s own work as an example. The poems that have been attributed to him are stilted and very abrupt compared to the lyrical flow of Shakespeare’s poetry and prose (Cockburn).

Christopher Marlowe, a poet and playwright and a contemporary of Shakespeare of Stratford was a popular candidate in the twentieth century. Supporters of this theory cite similarities between the styles and vocabularies of both Marlowe and Shakespeare. They also believe that he faked his death and then wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare with the help of friends in higher places (Baker). However, Stratfordian scholars find the argument for faked death unconvincing, citing any similarities as the product of Shakespeare’s having been influenced by some of Marlowe’s work. Apart from that, they find the works of Marlowe and of Shakespeare to be very different.

Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford is the most popular later day candidate (Bryson). Theories about his possible authorship of Shakespeare’s plays arose in 1920, started by J. Thomas Looney. Looney’s theories persuaded several early 20th century intellectuals, Orson Wells and Sigmund Freud among them (Shakespeare-Oxford Society). It became the preferred alternative to the Stratfordian view after the 1984 publication of The Mysterious William Shakespeare written by Charlton Ogburn. The basis for this theory rests in what Oxfordians (the popular names for supporters of this theory) cite to be multiple and striking similarities between events in Shakespeare’s plays and the biography of Oxford himself (Ogburn).

Oxford was an acclaimed poet and playwright; he was also very close to Queen Elizabeth and court life. He had an extensive education and intelligence. Stratfordians dispute these contentions, citing Oxford’s death in 1604 as one of their major examples. They believe a number of Shakespeare’s plays to have been written after 1604, though Oxfordians and other anti-Stratfordians have long claimed that the Stratfordians have dated the plays in order to favor their own candidate. Another point of contention is Oxford’s published poems which bear little stylistic resemblance to the works of Shakespeare. Oxfordians dispute this, citing parallels between the poems and Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s early play, claiming that the poems only show that they were written by a young man (Ross).

At this point, the Stratfordian view is the only “accepted” theory taught in universities today. Scholars scoff at most of the alternate candidates and there is a firm refusal to consider even the smallest hint of reasonable doubt. There is presently a group lobbying for a question of reasonable doubt to be recognized so that the alternative theories may also be freely taught in universities and colleges (Shakespeare Authorship Coalition ). Whether they succeed or not, the fact remains that what little evidence we have for any of the candidates is at best circumstantial. We may never know who Shakespeare really was. My personal opinion holds with that of the Stratfordians, that the man Shakespeare from Stratford was the poet and playwright who authored some of the greatest works in the English language.

Bibliography

Anderson, Mark. “Shakespeare” by Another Name. New York: Gotham Books, 2005.

Baker, John. “The Case for Christopher Marlowe’s Authorship of the Works attributed to William Shakespeare.” John Baker’s New and Improved Marlowe/Shakespeare Thought Emporium (2002).

Bryson, Bill. Shakespeare. . London : Harper-Collins , 2008.

Caldecott, Harry Stratford. Our English Homer; or, the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Times, 1896.

Cockburn, Nigel. The Bacon-Shakespeare Question. Bacon Book, Inc, 1998.

Friedman, William and Elizabeth. The Shakespearian ciphers examined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957.

Greer, Germaine. Past Masters: Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press , 1986.

Kathman, David. Were Shakespeare’s Plays Written by an Aristocrat? . 28 June 2008. 18 November 2008 <http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/aristocrat.html>.

Kernan, Alvin B. Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613. Yale University Press, 1995.

McMichael, George and Edgar M. Glenn. Shakespeare and His Rivals, A Casebook on the Authorship Controversy. New York: Odyssey Press, 1962.

Michell, John. Who Wrote Shakespeare. New York: Thames and Hudson , 1996.

Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare. New York: Dodd, 1984.

Ridell, James and Stanley Stewart. The Ben Jonson Journal, Vol. 1 (1994): 183.

Ross, Terry. The Verse Forms of Shakespeare and Oxford . 28 June 2008. 18 November 2008 <http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com/verform.html>.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life . Oxford University Press, 1987.

Shakespeare Authorship Coalition . The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition. 14 April 2007. 18 November 2008 <http://www.doubtaboutwill.org/>.

Shakespeare-Oxford Society. Shakespeare-Oxford Society. 1995. 18 November 2008 <http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/>.

Smith, William Henry. Bacon and Shakespeare. London: John Russell Smith, 1894.

Whitaker, Virgil. Shakespeare’s Use of Learning. San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1953.

]]> http://bkesler.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/will-the-real-shakespeare-please-stand-up/feed/ 1 Bethany http://bkesler.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/character-sketch-charlie-snap-reed/ http://bkesler.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/character-sketch-charlie-snap-reed/#comments Sat, 27 Sep 2008 02:43:15 +0000 Bethany Kesler http://bkesler.wordpress.com/?p=68 ]]> Snap,
aka Charlie Reed.

An average height reed-thin guy with oval-shaped wire-rimmed glasses sitting at a computer desk in a small room crammed full with bookshelves and bits of stray paper and computer paraphenalia haphazardly strewn all over the room. A set of headphones on his head, he rapidly types something into the PC at the desk and then whirls around in his computer wheel-y chair and just as quickly clicks and types into the laptop on the other side of the U-shaped desk. He reaches up with one hand to grab the last printout from his printer on the shelf above the desk before it falls and he scans it before whirling back to the PC and working there again.

This man is a Master of the Binary Kung-fu. General little details about him include how he likes to dress (mostly casual – ties make him twitchy), his favorite foods while working (Pizza Hot Pockets, Toaster Strudels, and Chinese Takeout from the Restaurant two doors down along with some nice herbal teas and caffeine drinks), his favorite outdoor hobbies (photography and rock climbing), and even the names of his two cats (Rorschach and Jake) and how he got to be called Snap in the first place (a nickname given to him by a friend who’d say that, “Charlie can do it for you in a snap” in reference to his phenomenal coding skills. Eventually he just became known as ‘Snap’).