Yeshiva University - Masmid Yearbook (New York, NY)

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MASMII) Is there any wonder thai doubl should entei a iliniiiilitful mind thai thi versatile geniu of so wide ,i range ol human knowledge, linuld be this ordinary man? Moreover, .nunc the mi orthodox, this same almost omnisi ienl individual could barely scrawl an illegible, illiterate igna lure, besides nnl knowing I lie spelling I In ■ n name. This formidable array of evidence nm I cause us to pause and give ear. Can grapes grow on thorns? We have presented up to this point the general outline of the Anli-Stratfordian attack. Lei u now consider the validity of some of its conten- tions. The almost complete silence about Shakes peare by his contemporaries should not cause us any undue concern. We are dealing with the 1 6th and not with the 20th century. I daresay thai theatregoers of to-day rarely take the trouble to find out who the author of the play presented is, with the exception, of course, of certain popularly known dramatists. We know but a few dates of birth, death, entrance at school, college, and Inns of the Court, of many of Shakespeare ' s illustrious contemporaries. In this period, the characters and personalities of mere playwrights were not closely followed. Only such men were generally known as gained popularity by occupying public position, like Spenser, or by being active in court society, like Sydney ; or those who gained notoriety by writing about feuds and friendships, like Greene and Nash, by writing reminiscences and satires, like Ben Jonson, by killing anyone, like Ben Jon- son, by being killed, like Marlowe, or by being imprisoned with the danger of having nose and ears split, like Marston. The age was not very enthusiastic about mere dramatists. Thus silence obscures the life and personality of Kyd, Beau- mont, Fletcher, Dekker and others. Nor need we concede that the author of Shakespeare must have been a scholar of the first order. We find many instances in the works which point to a rather cursory acquaintance in the field of scholarship. In Troilus and Cressida the Greeks and Tro- jans cite Aristotle — a rather unscholarly anachron- ism. In The Winter ' s Tale he calls Delphi I )elpho . i onfu ing Delphi I ihui plat ing the I )elphii , ■■ Ic on an i land In thi play he make the arti • ' i mo ' 1 4 ' )I I »46) contemporary with the oracle ol (he Pyth- ian Apollo. I il likely thai i cholat would guns in Scotland three hundred yeai before the invention I artillery, i repre enl leopatra , liw; inn in thi comparatively modern game oi billiard ' How, ask the anti-Stratfordian . could tl n| uili ilhli-iritr p.ircnl With ' • little I r . • 1 1 1 1 r ■ . ■ written these plays? History furnishes us with countless example ( men ol lowly birth ri the highest pinnacles of genius. Thu . . .i shepherd boy; Leonardo da Vinci, the illegiti- mate son of a common notary; Wolsey ' s fath ' a butcher; Marlov . ' lemaker and Ben Jonson as a bricklayer; Burns was the son of a small farmer, and Keats was an apothecary ' s apprentice. A man who could hardly spell his own name, they insist, could not have indited such immortal verse. It is true that the signatures left to us of Shakespeare are spelt in different ways, but the spelling of surnames at the time was even more inconsistent than the spelling of ordinary words. For example, Sir Walter Raleigh is known .o have spelt his name in five different ways, viz., Rawley, Raleghe. Ralegh. Rawleigh, and Raw- leghe. Thus, the variation in spelling has no special significance. And as to the illegibility of the handwriting, it is a fault to which many of us may with perfect candor plead guilty. But. even if we grant that Shakespeare is not the author of the works that bear his name, who is? The Anti-Stratfordians are divided into many camps. For one. Bacon is Shakespeare. For an- other, Rutland is Shakespeare. For yet another Derby is Shakespeare, and for still another Oxford is Shakespeare. One group modifies the Baconian theory by designating Bacon, not as the individual author of the works, but as the editor and super- visor of a group of the eminent young dramatists of the time, who in collaboration wrote the plays. And another group designates the author as the

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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.

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Tfrentv-Four M A S M I D ' Great Lnknown who is yet to be discovered. Let us turn then to examine the evidence and weigh the arguments presented by some of these groups. We shall start with the Baconians, for they have gone farthest in the development of their thesis. Many distinguished men have taken up this theory, including Emerson, Gervinus, Disraeli, Hawthorne, Lowell, O. W. Holmes and Dickens. No other figure of the Elizabethan period com- bined so egregiously the various fields of learning manifested in the ' Shakespeare ' Works . He was all that the works required their writer to be. He was both philosopher and poet. Thus claim the Baconians. They base their contentions on three essential points. In the first place, a careful study of both authors shows that their minds coincide, that their geographical knowledge, political ideas and reli- gious sentiments were similar. Secondly, the many parallelisms between their works, the employment of similar expressions, quotations and errors indi- cates the same mind operating in both cases. Third- ly, there appear to be hidden in the Shakespeare works all sort of anagrams, cryptograms, and other concealed forms of expression which point to Fran- cis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, Lcrd Chancellor of England as the writer of the works. As to the similarity in ideas and expression be- tween Bacon and Shakespeare, we may remain un- convinced of their identity. Two men of high and noble mind, living in the same generation, im- bibing the spirit and knowledge of their time, would inevitably show a certain similarity in their ideas and even, when discussing the same subject, a great similarity in the expression of those ideas. The hundreds of parallelisms which scholars have drawn up to prove this theory would have little validity if we remember that treatment of any given subject by two gifted men, trained in the concepts of the age, would have a certain likeness in approach, in choice of examples, and often in choice of language. The phase of proof that deals with the concealed testimony of Bacon ' s authorship, written into the works, is the most startling, the most interesting and the most precarious. From earliest times, hid- den forms of expression, known only to initiates who had gained in seme way the esoteric keys, were both a favorite pastime and a necessary vehicle for conveying information. Mystics from time immemorial have delighted in searching the Scriptures for hidden information of this sort. Sects have been founded whose secrets were recorded in well-ordered codes. The source of many of these codes has been the Cabala with its Gematria, or simple clock count, where A=l, B=2, C=3, etc., or the reverse count, where Z=1, Y=2, X=3, or the Kay count, where K= 1 0, L=11, etc. All these various methods were a part of the mystical literature for centuries before the Elizabethan Era. By a study of the records and writings of the Rosicrucian society, or the society of the Rose Cross, — Rose representing secrecy, and Cross rep- resenting salvation of humankind, — which flowered during the Elizabethan period, we find that Bacon was one of its prominent members, that it aimed at the advancement of human knowledge, that it employed the above-mentioned methods of con- cealed expression to keep its secrets sacred for the Sons of Sapience. Thus, we may be reasonably sure that Bacon was acquainted with the inweav- ing of special messages into the warp and woof of literary productions. Moreover, Bacon had declared, in the works we do credit to him, that advancement of humankind could be best effected by romance and poetry. This would explain the great moral lessons of the Shakespearian dramas. Let us pause to regard some instances of this hidden type of expression. Though there have been brought forward all sorts of cryptograms, ana- grams, and cabalistic arrangements proving Bacon to be the author, we shall glance at but a few. In Love ' s Labour ' s Lost Act V, Sc. I, we encounter the peculiar word, Hononficabilitudini- tatibus. This word seems to cry for some ex- planation. The Baconians come to the rescue and declare it to be an anagram which, when rearranged, contains the Latin sentence ... Hi