Virtual Grub Street: Mr. Prechter’s Provenance.

Robert Prechter is a man with credentials. He graduated with a bachelors in psychology from Yale University. He joined Merrill Lynch in 1975, as a market technician, back when investment firms were eagerly hiring psychologists instead of quants, and left in 1979, in which year he began a popular newsletter called “The Elliott Wave Theorist”. It was then that he predicted the bullish direction of 1980s markets ostensibly driven by “social mood”. His predictions of market moves were for a time correct in their direction but substantially off in magnitude. Where they involved specific values, they proved to be wrong — a not uncommon trait among market analysts.

With the crash of 1987, firms began letting go psychologists and hiring quants. Mr. Prechter’s predictions were less sought. What he had coined as “socionomics” received less attention in favor of mathematical analysis. Nevertheless, socionomic studies continue to be consulted in some investment circles. His name remains at the top of that field.

As for the field itself of Socionomics, it’s observations are generally considered to be of limited value. Often they are attributed to a version of apophenia rather than rational analysis.

Back when I knew no more of Robert Prechter than his reputation for having predicted financial outcomes and his analysis of the authorship of George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573), I was surprised to find that his confident pronouncements on the book were mistaken in key ways. Still, his presentation was intricate enough that it would take some doing to unwind the flaws in his reasoning and claims.

When the time eventually came available, I answered his essay on the Flowers in my Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal.[1] Having only so much time, I assumed the essay was an anomaly and that Prechter’s other authorship work, if I’d had time to read it, would have proven to be up to the level of a professional analyst of his magnitude.

Prechter has since announced over one hundred Tudor works that he has determined were written by Edward de Vere under pen-names and allonyms. The sweeping pronouncements are stunningly in line with Oxfordian mood. The presentation modest. He invites the readers of the series of books in which he makes his case to join him as so many editors in the process of assembling a final text.

I’ve rebutted his claim regarding Ben Jonson’s The Case is Altered in the “Look inside” free introduction to my Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589.[2] Until his recent presentation on George Peele for the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable[3] I lacked further specifics to ponder.

More immediately striking to me than the many instances of the version of apophenia called “agenticity” was Prechter’s stated provenance of Peele’s Anglorum Feriae. The listener is informed at 12:45 in the video that the manuscript was discovered “in 1909 among the papers in the lodgings of the President of St. John’s, Oxford…. This poem was never published.”

“George Peele, His Only Surviving Letter, and its Connection

to the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable.

As it turns out, I have recently traced its history as part of an in-progress study which I have undertaken that has been paused pending a key piece of information. The history I find is one in which the manuscript was privately printed by William Stevenson Fitch, an infamous thief of manuscript antiquities, in 1830. According to a Mr. Denney of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology:[4] not yet infamous, circa 1830, Fitch gifted the manuscript to the rigorous scholar of 16^th century British literature and Shakespeare, Joseph Hunter, without raising red flags. The manuscript is next found listed as item 296 in the May 23, 1856, Sotheby’s catalogue for the auction of a large part of the collections of the also rigorous scholar J. O. Halliwell, where it was purchased by the British Library. It is now indexed as British Library, Add. MS 21432.

Alexander Dyce having published his collected works of Peele in 1829, the work does not appear in its pages. It does, however, appear in his 1861 Works of Robert Greene and George Peele and in A. H. Bullen’s 1888 Collected Works of George Peele.

Part of the reason Mr. Prechter did not stumble over these facts about Peele’s “Anglorum Feriae” might be a lack of search engine knowledge more than Tudor knowledge. One might think from the celebration at 41:15 in the video that research is now as easy as looking up the phrase Anglorum Feriae on a major search engine. But for all search engines are a feature of our life to celebrate they wouldn’t lead you to the title in the 1861 volume. It shows up in the T.o.C. as “ANGLORUM FERI^,” and on the title page of the poem as “ANGLORUM FERIJ:.”. In the Bullen of 1888 the digital scanner recorded them respectively as “ANGLORUM FERLE” and “ANGLORUM FERINE”.

Long experience with search engines teaches a wide range of special knowledge is called for in order to find obscure and/or specialized information. First of all, it is a myth that even the best search engines return every result throughout the Internet. The Internet is simply too large even for a powerful computer bank to index instantaneously. If one wants an exhaustive list, a carefully designed series of searches is necessary. One must further know the special characteristics of the search engine being used and interpret the results accordingly.

Assuming that all of the instances matching one’s query do fall within range, dipthongs such as “æ” only download successfully with a very few higher quality text scanners. They are almost always corrupted in the process of scanning. Irregular spellings force that searcher to run their query a number of times over which all combinations of spelling are searched. Marks and blotches on scanned pages can show up as random letters corrupting the words or phrases nearby. I am not aware of any scanner that consistently returns correct results from Gothic type. This before one even gets to the matters of searching on foreign languages, specialized symbols, etc.

All of this said, I can find no reference anywhere on the Internet to the 1909 papers “in the lodgings of the President of St. John’s, Oxford” mentioned by Robert Prechter. I can only wonder to what he refers.

[1] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021). https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B096GSQV14/

[2] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (2022). xvi.d. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WC94FGW

[3] Prechter, Robert. “George Peele, His Only Surviving Letter, and its Connection to the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5oOp2GXVJw

[4] Denney, A. H. “William Stevenson Fitch, 1792-1859.” Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, Volume XXVIII, Part 2 (1960). 123.