The Mysterious William Shakespeare:
The Myth & the Reality
by Charlton Ogburn Jr.
(892 pages, hb, $37.50)
EPM Publications, 2nd Edition, 1992
ISBN 0-939-00967-6
An irrefutable argument! And one that ignites the plays and poems in ways
undreamt of. If you want to follow one of the greatest literary mystery
stories in history, read this book! (Past-life confirmed! <g>)
Chapter Titles
Book One "The Cause and Question Now in Hand"
1 "A Mystery? Ay, Sir, a Mystery"
2 "Cry Out Thus upon No Trail"
3 "Such a Deadly Life"
4 "A Case of Lives"
5 "The Baseless Fabric"
6 "How Much Art Thou Shrunk"
7 "And Thereupon These Errors Are Arose
8 "Are They Not Lamely Writ
9 "Look Here, upon This Picture, and on This"
10 "To Defend the City from the Rebels"
11 "I Will Hereupon Confess
12 "My Name Be Buried Where My Body Is
13 "A Very Ancient and Fish-Like Smell"
14 "Most Like a Noble Lord"
15 Myriad-Minded Man of the Renaissance - 1
16 Myriad-Minded Man of the Renaissance - 2
17 "As the Very True Sonnet Is. . . ."
18 "Have Writ Your Annals True"
19 "See, Where Oxford Comes!"
Book Two "Is Not Oxford Here Another Anchor?"
20 "What's Past@ is Prologue"
21 "Learning and Ingenious Studies"
22 "Amongst the fnfinite Doings of the World"
23 "And Summon Him to Marriage
24 "Of Courts, of Princes, of the Tricks...."
25 "Entertainment to My Princely Queen"
26 "To Me It Is a Prison"
27 "Why, Then, the World's Mine Oyster"
28 "Look So Strange upon Your Wife?"
29 "Phoebus Gins Arise"
30 "Shall's Have a Play of This?"
31 "As the Style Shall Give Us Cause"
32 "They Come Not Single Spies
33 "A Spirit Raised from Depth of Underground"
34 "For Fair England's Sake!"
35 "For That Have I Laid by My Majesty
36 ". . . and Plodded Like a Man for Working Days"
37 "For It fs Parting from Us"
Chronology of the Principals in the Case of William Shakespeare
Appendix. Adventures in the Quest for the Shakespeare Manuscripts
Selected Quotes
pp. 4-6
And so with the first known mention of Shakespeare as a playwright, he has
already produced at least fourteen plays - other evidence would raise the
number to sixteen - and is being labeled as the best of his nation in both
categories of drama. That their author had never previously been named,
so far as we know, is the more surprising in that the name "William
Shakespeare" was already well known. It had been signed to the dedication
to the Earl of Southampton of two long, extremely popular narrative poems
published respectively in 1593 and 1594, the only works by "Shakespeare"
ever published by himself. Francis Meres paid a tribute to these, too, declaring
that "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued
Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets
among his private friends, &c." A publisher got hold of two of
the sonnets and brought them out in an anthology of poetry in the next year
(1599). Thereafter nothing was heard of them until Shake-speare's Sonnets
to the number of 154 - a deeply emotional and disturbing account of the
poet's love for a beautiful young man and an unworthy woman - were published
in 1609 with a dedication by the printer indicating that the author was
dead. After 1598, when Meres published his Palladis Tamia, in which the
dramatist for the first time we know of was called "Shakespeare,"
it was the rule for plays of Shakespeare to appear under his name until
thirty-seven or more had been given to the world.
And what plays came from that hand! In words matchless in their magic, the
dramatist scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of human experience
and could, without too great exaggeration, be said to have first given shape
to the human race as we know it in his throng of characters. He shows us
people who are gay and debonair, playful and elfin, sharp-tongued and witty;
he shows us irresistible - or murderous - womanhood, eloquent as none of
our race has been before or since; he shows us people transfigured and transported
by love or by jealousy, debilitated by doubt or suiting action to the word
with passion that Sears the page, consumed by greed and steeped in incomparable
villainy. In short, he shows us men and women uncontainably human, who,
after nearly four
centuries, people the cosmos of educated persons throughout the English-speaking
world and beyond. Such was the genius behind these poems and dramas that
Thomas De Quincey could assess Shakespeare's "station in literature"
as "now irrevocably settled ... by those who everywhere seek for his
works among the primal necessities of life," Thomas Carlyle own to
feeling "that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact of
such a man being sent to this Earth," Heinrich Heine be moved to declare,
"Look you, the good God Himself naturally has right to the first place,
but the second certainly belongs to Shakespeare," and Algernon Charles
Swinburne exclaim of him that:
'There is one book in the world of which it might be affirmed and argued,
without fear of derision from any but the Supreme and crowning fools among
the foolishest of mankind, that it would be better for the world to lose
all others and keep this one than to lose this and keep all other treasures
bequeathed by human genius to all that we can conceive of eternity - to
all that we can imagine of immortality. That book is best known, and best
described for all of us, simply by the simple English name of its author.
The word Shakespeare connotes more than any other man's name that ever was
written or spoken upon earth."
These are extreme-sounding words. Yet it is true that the vitality of Shakespeare's
art and the meaning he has for us, matchless among literary works of the
past, seem never to diminish. If anything, his appeal grows; certainly our
interest in him never flags. The Shakespeare Annotated World Bibliography
for 1979 printed in the Folger Library's Shakespeare Quarterly lists 2,859
published items - articles and books - reported by a Committee of Correspondents
from 25 nations. "Nor," Louis Marder observed in 1963, "should
we forget that the plays have now been translated into 68 languages, whose
new readers have become as idolatrous as those of the English-speaking world."
Other statistics that Professor Marder reports are that the Shakespeare
Memorial Library of Birmingham had by 1959 come to include 37,000 volumes,
and among the tens of thousands in the Folger Shakespeare Library of Washington,
D.C., are 1,300 different complete editions of Shakespeare, 800 editions
of Hamlet, and 500 of Macbeth,
In collections of quotations, Shakespeare has no competitor. The 1980 edition
of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations contains 85 pages of Shakespeare as against
47 1/2 of the Bible (the work of a congeries of writers), 9 of Milton, 7
1/2 of Tennyson, 7 of Emerson, and between 6 and 6 3/4 each of Byron, Coleridge,
and Wordsworth. In the 1955 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations,
with smaller type, there are 66 pages of Shakespeare to 18 of the Bible,
13 1/2 of Tennyson, 13 of Milton, and 11 of Kipling.
In Paperback Parnassus, Roger H. Smith reports that only one category of
books in this mass market outsells books by or about Shakespeare - manuals
to help applicants pass civil service tests. Far from supplanting him, the
motion pictures and television have merely given Shakespeare more worlds
to conquer. The production by the B.B.C. of all thirty-seven plays in the
canon for television beginning in I979 is probably the greatest Shakespearean
event since the first collected edition of the plays was put out in 1623
and of course far surpasses any tribute of the kind so far paid to any other
writer. Moreover, it is perhaps especially illustrative of Shakespeare's
reach into our souls that he has inspired more music than anyone else who
has ever lived, at least in the West. In addition to innumerable musical
settings given [its works, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Tschaikovsky, and
Prokofiev have been among those who have turned his dramas into major musical
compositions.
Given the towering place of Shakespeare in our culture, it would be utterly
incredible, if we did not know it to be so, that the most fundamental question
should arise about him:
Who was he?
The record of the years when he must have been alive has been combed without
turning up one reference to him that connects the name with any flesh-and-blood
human being. Of course, a number of mentions of William Shakespeare the
poet-dramatist appear on the record of those years, but beyond commenting
briefly and favorably on his writing, they tell us almost nothing about
him and identify him with no recognizable person. Here the reader will,
of course, think of the man born and buried in Stratford-on-Avon. There
is no suggestion in the record of these years, however, that he was the
author. Quite the contrary - as we shall see. Indeed, I know of none before
1623, the year when for the first time the world learned explicitly that
he was dead, which tells us anything at all - with one small exception.
In 1610 a few lines of verse by John Davies told us that had "Shake-speare...not
played some kingly parts in sport" he "would have been a companion
for a King." A disclosure as important as this seems to be makes us
regret all the more that it is unique.
But if there are no other references during those years - the years when
he must have been alive - to tell us anything whatever about him as a man,
surely the references to William Shakespeare, the disembodied poet-dramatist,
must show that his contemporaries were aware that a great genius was among
them. Oddly enough, no. This circumstance is particularly puzzling since
we have it later from Ben Jonson, his fellow playwright, that he had delighted
the two monarchs reigning during his lifetime - neither of whom is known
ever to have spoken the name Shakespeare.
