As is hopefully clear in my (admittedly TL;DR-prone) posts, I agree with pretty much everything you just said.

On the classics thing - The classics are not among the specialized knowledge that anyone (reasonable) has said William Shakespeare might not have known.

To say that Shakespeare's writing was a complete anomaly might be overstating the case, but so is saying that "no one" has believed any of the above since the 19th Century, or that everyone who does believe it is nothing more than a snob. There genuinely are compelling arguments on both sides of the "technical…

I'm not denying the existence of lone geniuses, by any stretch. I'm just saying that it's a narrative our culture favors over messier ideas of collaboration and cooperation. Which is of course why people immediately jump to the Oxfordian thing as the only possible alternative to the traditional, Stratfordian position.

Throwing the word postmodernism into the argument was a mistake, since it refers to so many different things. Hell, Stephen Mitchell has made the argument that you could even call The Epic of Gigamesh postmodern.

Again, what you guys are saying is all completely possible, and indeed plausible, and maybe that's exactly what happened. I can't stress enough that I'm not claiming to have special, secret, conspiratorial knowledge here.

I apparently can't make the reply chain go any deeper, so I'll just respond to some stuff here. As for the David Crystal book, I will most certainly check that out!

I'll check it out. Thanks!

Like I said above, Milton (a wordy guy by any measure) used about 13,000 fewer words than Shakespeare did.

Breaking the fourth wall is not postmodernism. Arguing two opposite points of view at once kind of is.

I've never heard the argument about variants, nor have I ever heard that modern English speakers generally know at least 50,000 words. But that doesn't necessarily change the heart of the vocabulary size argument.

My argument isn't "no one could write that well," and so "he was a very good writer" doesn't address, much less disprove, my argument. What Shakespeare knew (as distinct from how well he wrote) is not tangential elitism or idle snobbery. It's at the very heart of the authorship question, however much we decide that…

Most of the serious "anti-Stratfordian" theories suggest that Shakespeare The Dude wrote SOME of the Shakespeare canon. And the "illiterate hick" business doesn't come merely from his family's social status, but also from the few writing samples we have of his, and the weird poem on his gravestone, yadda yadda yadda.

That's always really bothered me: Harry and Hermione use the Time Turner AFTER Harry has already saved himself. So how did Harry survive to use the Time Turner in the first place? Like, how can Five O'Clock Harry save Two O'Clock Harry if Harry gets killed by Dementors at Three O'Clock?

More! More! More!
Did anyone record this panel? I'm a little tired of hearing people describe GDC content, rather than hearing or seeing that content myself. It's not that the recaps aren't good. It's just… come on.