How now! what means this passion at his name? 4/5/2008 10:46:20 AM
Many Elizabethan scholars have decided that the life of
Shakespeare is well documented. Yet it is the lack, or
misrepresentation of, such documentation that is
responsible for the bitter controversy over the actual
authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems. It is a
controversy rich in forgeries, crackpot imaginings, and academic arrogance dating back to the few references to William Shakespeare restricted to his works. His life,
as Charles Dickens wrote, was a "fine mystery." Walt Whitman said the prevailing Shakespeare dogma had
"no substance whatever." And Henry James was haunted by
the conviction that the self-serving academic portrait
of "divine William [was] the biggest and most successful
fraud ever practised on a patient world." Once a man is
canonized by history, the hearsay evidence perpetuated by
later generations makes it impossible to remove the halo.
The question to be answered is "Who was Shakespeare?" Who
was the mysterious man who revealed himself in his works?
For, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is his plays and
poems that document his life. Emerson believed that
Shakespeare "clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived under his roof." So who was the author who--in the role of
Hamlet--urged that his cousin Horatio put the record
straight?
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in that heart,
Absent thee from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draw the breath in pain
To tell my story.
