Yeshiva University - Masmid Yearbook (New York, NY)

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M ASM II) cspcarc — To Be Or IN ot To AUKAIIAM S. GuTI- ' .KMAN M In the past lifty years there lias been growing up a considerable movement among literary detec- tives to prove by various means that Shakespeare did not write the works accredited to him. The reader will be justified in asking what difference it makes who really wrote these works. We have them and we enjoy them. They adorn our na- tional literature and are permanent models of power, beauty, and eloquence in the realm of expression. In response to this query, I shall endeavor to justify the seemingly idle Shakespearian research in this direction. With the birth of man, came the birth of curiosity. From the moment that earth ' s first picture unfolded itself before man ' s wondering gaze, he was filled with the mystery of things. The effort to pierce this veil and fathom hidden secrets is the foundation stone of all prog- ress. To it belong the advance and self-improve- ment of mankind through the ages. To it belong the glories of our present civilization and upon it will depend the world that is to be. Men of the past were at times negligent of their duty to posterity. They failed to register their finds, to record the events of their centuries, to explain the ideals which they prized. At times they shouted down the protagonist of a new dis- covery, and at times they dispensed with an ob- noxious representative of progress by recourse to fire and sword. History of every kind, literary, political, social, and economic, has thus suffered tremendously by the shortsightedness of men. Events, movements, migrations, masterpieces of poetry and of art, all these must now be unearthed to tell the story of past civilizations, and many of these archaic dis- coveries must be supplemented by the profuse use of our imaginations. But strive we must and strive we shall to uncover the mystery of Ou so thai we may build more certainly for the ■ future. We thus feel that every effort designed I certain accurately a historic fact is another step in the advance of progress. If, at every step in the development of science, wc had asked whither and what use, all advance would have been stifled. The past holds out a challenge to us. Pragmatical- ly it aids humankind but little to determine exactly when some specific event hidden in antiquity took place. But the sum total of human knowledge is just as much a part of man ' s conquest of the earth as is his desire for present comfort and pleas- ure. It is thus of historical interest to know ex- actly who really is tha author of Shakespeare ' s works. Then, too, there is much that this information could contribute to the psychology of genius. If the Shakespeare who is described in our biographies is the author, then a study of his early environ- ment, the milieu in which his plays were written, his early training, his family life, all these can shed much light on a rapidly growing subject of investigation. If, on the other hand, someone else wrote the plays, the same points in this unknown s life would assist us to understand by what high pathway one genius entered so gloriously into the Arcadian sanctuary of the Muse. We might learn whether entrance to her Arcadian garden is gained by wide and deep scholarship, by sudden inspiration, or whether she bestows her graces upon the votaries who fortuitously receive the designation of her wand. There is still another important reason for as- certaining the actual author of these works. It is a well-known fact that we can never separate an author entirely from the works that he has written.

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Twenty MASMID ind confusedly suggested by Boelime. was devel- oped independently by Bruno, and by Spinoza in whom the material and spiritual, temporal and eternal, find the most eloquent union. The anthropocentric aspects of philosophical speculation, however, received their death-blow at the hands of enlightened propagandists and jour- nalists — the French philosophes of the eigh- teenth century. The most characteristic feature of eighteenth-century French rationalism was the so- cial transvaluation which it gave to all metaphysical speculation. Thus Berkeley ' s arguments in his New Theory of Vision to the effect that the shape and size of objects are not given in immediate sen- sation but are intellectual constructions were used by Diderot to establish the relativity of morals and political institutions. Locke ' s empirical psychology was urged by the philosophes as a basis for universal education. All abstract speculation was given by these enlightened thinkers a social trans- formation. The philosophes were not metaphy- sicians. First and last, they were reformers. The first extension of reason was into the realm of politics and social reform. Voltaire, influenced by Newton ' s mathematical procedure, contended that reason must be adopted as an instrument of reform. Reason had produced law and order in the cosmos; and reason must produce law and order in society. So strong was his faith in reason that he believed that all the profound and innumerable forces which chained man to an irrational past could be dissolved by the single touch of the magic wand of reason. At first glance this notion seems highly superficial, but it contained the kernel of a great truth — the notion of progress. Man was no longer to dream, amid squalor and misery, of a golden past, but was to apply his own efforts for the amelioration of his sufferings. Man, endowed with reason, was to effect the ultimate regenera- tion of the society in which he lived. The natural man was glorified by Voltaire not out of a romantic weakness, but because he served as a convenient symbol, as a physical representation of man free from the institutional evils perpetuated in society by kingly avarice and priestly knavery. Reason then invaded the sphere of morals and found its expression in Helvetius ' L ' Esprit. An inveterate foe of mysticism and asceticism, Hel- vetius brought a new theory cf morals and human character. All human virtue, said Helvetius in effect, was motivated by self-love. Man sought good and shunned evil because it brought him pleasure and spared him pain. To speak of a thing as good in itself was to utter nonsense. How Helvetius deduced social responsibility from the principle of self-interest is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to realize that Helvetius rejected the divine ordinances of the church and the mad ravings of the mystics in preference for experience pure and simple as the basis for moral action. The final extension of reason was made by Holbach in his System of Nature. Few books have made such an impression on mankind as this one. It seemed to many that they stood face to face with the devil, come to claim their souls. The universe, they read in the eloquent pages of Holbach, was nothing but matter in motion; G-d was at best the personification of a force, cold and inanimate; the existence of a soul was chimerical; the belief in man ' s eternity was a vain flattery that must be eradicated if he is to attain happiness in this world. Man, believed to be a fondling of the gods, was but a fleeting symmetry in a world of atomic interaction. The terror that such assertions produced must have been enormous. As Goethe said of the book; it came to us so grey, so Cimmerian, so corpselike, that we could not endure its pressure ; we shuddered before it, as if it had been a spectre. It struck us as the very quintessence of musty age, savourless, repugnant. Caught in the stream of Holbach ' s eloquence, man suddenly discovered himself an inhabitant, as it were, of a huge strange city. He had been awak- ened from a delightful dream only to find himself in the clutches of omnipotent Death. A terror seized him and he fled to romanticism, in which he rediscovered spirit, heaven, purpose, harmony and fantasy. Rousseau clearly indicates to us the psychologic origins of his romanticism in the follow- (Continued on Page 58)

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7 D ' cn V-7 li ' i MASM1D If it can be proven conclusively that someone other than Shakespeare created the works, we may, by studying this unknown ' s life and thought, under- stand more thoroughly many of the plays, see some of them perhaps as autobiographical, trace perhaps in their development some genius of multiple per- sonality who can combine the pensiveness of a Hamlet, the jealousy of an Othello, and the ruth- less ambition of a Macbeth. The works may then have, for us, a new interest and, if it were possible, a greater. The first point that strikes us in the pursuit of this study is the mystery that shrouds Shakespeare ' s life. Few of the facts of his career have been adequately substantiated. And if we accept the descriptions presented to us, we are thereby stirred to questi on whether the man whom the biographies depict could have written on so high a literary plane. Thus, the arguments against the Shakespearian authorship presented by the so-called Anti-Strat- fordians resolve themselves into two divisions — the mysteries and the improbabilities. The first mystery, besides the uncertainty concerning the facts of Shakespeare ' s life in general, is the facJ that his death was passed by completely unnoticed by his contemporaries. When Spenser and Beau- mont died, a chorus of lamentations, of poetic ap- preciations swept through England. When Ben Jonson died in 1637, forty poets wrote expressions of their grief, and their verse occupied 64 pages of a complete edition of his work. When Shakes- peare died in 1616, strangely enough no poet was stirred to record his passing in verse, and even Ben Jonson remained silent. Is there not a tone of strangeness in Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy ' s Child, who for years had been producing poetry of matchless beauty, being thus unnoticedly lowered into his grave? Mystery the first! Then, in 1623, when the immortal bard ' s work was for the first time issued in a complete edition, the same Ben Jonson designated him as not of an age but of all time. A rather belated tribute! What cause could Jonson have had for with- holding his adulatory verses for so many years? Mystery the second ! Again, the folio of 1623 contains a portrait of Shakespeare engraved by Martin Droeshut. A careful study of the head of this figure, of its rigidity and strange stiffness, shows it to be a mask. An examination of the sleeves of the coat show that the front half and back half of a left arm are also superimposed on the picture. Why these peculiar additions? Can they be mere co- incidences? Or were they meant to represent the fact that under the mask of Shakespeare some other author has been writing with his left hand; for one attributes to the left hand symbolically those acts which the right hand cannot acknowledge. Mystery, the third! In 1 790, the diary of Philip Henslowe, the great Elizabethan producer, was discovered. It contained the authors and actors of his time, the plays he bought, and the amount he paid for each. Shakespeare is not even mentioned in this docu- ment, and it is hardly possible that Henslowe would have been unacquainted with the greatest play- wright of the time. This leads to the question, was the Shakespeare we know the greatest play- wright of his time? Mystery the fourth! We now turn to the realm of the improbabilities. It is here that the anti-Stratfordians direct their most powerful broadsides. Picture a man born of illiterate parents, whose schooling was of the most meagre. He deserts his wife, and becomes an actor in London. He writes purely for money and breaks off suddenly, returning to provincial life as if dissociating entirely his art from himself. He dies without being in the possession of a single book. Now consider a monument of works that proclaim their author to be a classical scholar, a diplomat, soldier, lawyer, sportsman, musician, doctor, botanist, naturalist, falconer, sailor, astron- omer, even an archer and an angler. Conceive a vocabulary employed that surpasses the most ex- tensive vocabularies in all languages. Thackeray ' s vocabulary was about 5000; Milton ' s, next to Shakespeare ' s the greatest among English writers, was about 7000. Victor Hugo, with the most extensive vocabulary in the French language, had but 9000 words. The estimates of Shakespeare ' s vocabulary go from 15,000 to 24,000 words.