THE EDITOR: An article, “Murder he Wrote” in the Sunday Newsday of June 15 gained my attention as I glimpsed the name Christopher Marlowe, one of the Elizabethan constellation of poets and dramatists who hold the polar vantage in the firmament of English Literature. The details pertaining to Marlowe’s death, or supposed death, as is speculated by some, were interesting, but what stirred my mind was the assertion by Calvin Hoffman that Marlowe had authored some of Shakespeare’s plays; it also amused me, and I decided to comment on it.
Hoffman, whoever he is, represents another digit in a lineage of doubters as to the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays that is centuries old. The mathematician Georg Cantor, originator of transfinite set theory, which demonstrates there is a hierarchy of infinities, the theory of which is a basic part of the foundation of mathematics, finding that, after a nervous breakdown in 1884, he could not handle the exacting thinking required by his subject, turned to the study of English Literature, and became wholly occupied with what many people took very seriously at that time, that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s plays. There are, and have been, many theories about those plays, and many authors proposed. As to Shakespeare’s poetry, I do not know of any disputation of authorship. One of the most recent attempts, using a computer, was to digitally compare features of Shakespeare’s portrait that appears in the first Folio edition of his plays with portraits of other notables of that time, and finding no match, the expert in computer art and graphics, Lillian Schwartz, was baffled. Persevering, she returned to the national portrait gallery, and discovered that the eyes of Queen Elizabeth I were exactly those she had been looking at for weeks in Shakespeare’s portrait. Conclusion? The face, with the bulbous forehead, seems to be based on a cartoon of the Queen’s face. (Check, Scientific American, April 1995. Schwartz also discovered that the Mona Lisa is really a self-portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci).
So now, another bit is added to the mystery: no one knows what Shakespeare really looked like, and scant descriptions were left by those who saw him. One such was Ben Jonson (1573-1637), a writer and dramatist (Shakespeare acted in one of his plays called Every Man in His Humour). Jonson never attended university, but both Cambridge and Oxford conferred honorary degrees on him. He is buried in Westminster Abbey; on the slab over his grave is the line, “O rare Ben Jonson.” In his Timber, he writes of Shakespeare “I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side of idolatry as much as any”. Thomas Fuller, in his History of the Worthies of England describes the friendly disputations that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson would engage in at the “Mermaid Tavern”. “Many were the wit combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Galleon and an English man-of-war; master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war. Lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.”
Ben Jonson wrote the poem “To the Memory of my Beloved the Author” which stands at the beginning of the First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Following is an excerpt from the poem:
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room
Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praises to give —
And tell, how far didst our Lyly out-shine
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line —
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe
He was not for an age, but for all time!
The last line above stands truest of all that has been written on Shakespeare. My personal belief is that Shakespeare wrote what he wrote, and no one else; that people should doubt it is more a result of human nature than anything else. There is one other point in the article that I can comment on; and that is where it says that Elizabeth the first “had the first of the British Secret Services”. This is not so. Under King Henry the Seventh, a spy system was organised in England, and extended through the whole of Europe; the King received letters from Italy every day, on certain matters. Queen Elizabeth, as all successful rulers, was a shrewd picker of the people who served her. On ascension to power, she called William Cecil to her service, and spoke thus to him: “This judgement I have of you,” she charged him, “that you will be not corrupted by any manner of gifts, that you will be faithful to the state, and that, without respect to any private will, you will give me that counsel you think best.” Cecil was the greatest of the sixteenth-century English statesmen, says Winston Churchill, and Elizabeth’s England was the foundation of the greatest Empire ever known.
SURENDRA SAKAL
La Romaine
