Numbers in bold brackets [] indicate original page numbers.
The Stratfordian View
VI
We do not say that the alternative belief, the belief that is to say in a hidden author, is without difficulties. We may justly wonder why the author of such works should prefer to remain unknown, just as we may wonder why "Ignoto," "Shepherd Tony" and "A. W.", the writers of some of the best Elizabethan poetry, have elected to remain unknown. The facts are, however, incontestable realities of literary history. Moreover, the motives for mysterious and secret courses are, no doubt, frequently as mysterious and secret as the courses themselves, so that inability to fathom motives cannot be put in as an argument against the evidence of a fact: though knowledge of a motive may be accepted as corroborative of other evidence. Difficult as it is to penetrate and appreciate the private motives even of people circumstanced like ourselves, the difficulty is immeasurably increased when the entire social circumstances are different, as in the case before us. The man who thinks that any one living in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I would be as proud [47] to acknowledge himself the author of "Shakespeare's" plays as any one living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be, has not understood the Shakespeare problem in its relationship to the age to which it belongs. He is, moreover, judging the question largely from the point of view of the professional litterateur as author, and overlooking the numerous considerations which may arise when an author of a vastly different type is supposed.
"It is difficult to realize," says Halliwell-Phillipps, "a period when . . . the great poet, notwithstanding the immense popularity of some of his works, was held in no general reverence. It must be borne in mind that actors then occupied an inferior position in society, and that even the vocation of a dramatic writer was considered scarcely respectable. The intelligent appreciation of genius by individuals was not sufficient to neutralize in these matters, the effect of public opinion and the animosity of the religious world; all circumstances thus uniting to banish general interest in the history of persons connected in any way with the stage."
To have laid claim to the authorship of even "Shakespeare's" plays, would therefore have been of no assistance to any man seeking to obtain, preserve, or recover the social dignity and eminence of himself and his family.
We may wonder that the secret should have been so well kept, and be quite unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of the complete success of the "blind," just as we may stand puzzled before the other mysteries of history. This again is a difficulty which is greatly magnified by giving it a modern setting. In "Shakespeare's" day, however, according to Halliwell-Phillipps, "no interest was taken in the events of the lives of authors . . . non-political correspondence was rarely preserved, (and) elaborate diaries were not the fashion."
The lack of interest in the personality of authors is borne out by some contemporary records of the [48] performance of "Shakespeare's" plays without any suggestion of an author's name. The educated readers of the printed works, interested mainly in these works as literature, might well be content to know an author merely by name, especially when that author was supposed to be living in what would then be a remote village. The contemporary records of the "Shakespeare" literature are moreover just such as belong to an author whose name is known but whose personality is not; and Shakspere would escape personal attention by taking up permanent residence in Stratford just at the time when this literature began to appear.
Mystery and concerted secrecy were moreover characteristic not only of the literary life of the times, but even more so of the general social and political life. Plots, and counterplots, extreme caution and reservation in writing letters - men habitually writing to friends as if suspicious that their letters would be shown to their enemies - every here and there some cryptic remark which only the addressee would be able to understand, such are the things that stand out from the mass of contemporary documents preserved in the State Papers and the various private collections. We can be quite sure that in those times no important secret would be imparted to any one without first of all receiving the moist solemn assurances that no risk of disclosure should be run. Certainly the writer of "Hamlet" was not the man to neglect any precaution. The carefully framed oaths by which Hamlet binds Horatio and Marcellus to secrecy, and the final caution he administers, is clearly the work of a man who knew how to ensure secrecy so far as it was humanly possible to do so. And we do know, as a matter of actual human experience, that when a superior intelligence is combined with what may be called a faculty for secrecy and a sound instinct in judging and choosing agents, secret purposes are carried through successfully in a way that is amazing and mystifying to simpler minds.
These, then, are certain difficulties of the [49] anti-Stratfordian position which it would be folly to ignore. Most truths, however, have had to win their way in spite of difficulties. Whilst, then, difficulties do not kill truth, incredibilities are fatal to error; and it is the incredible that Stratfordianism has to face. The same general human experience that compels us to accept facts for which we cannot adequately account, compels us also to reject, on pain of irrationality, what is inherently self-contradictory, or at complete variance with the otherwise invariable course of events. It is thus that the commonsense of mankind instinctively repudiates a moral contradiction as incredible. Such we hold is the belief in the Stratford man: the belief that the author of the finest literature lets others do just as they please during his own lifetime in the matter of publishing his works but does nothing himself. "It is questionable," says Sir Sidney Lee, "whether any were published under his supervision." He is thus represented as creating and casting forth his immortal works with all the indifference of a mere spawning process, and turning his attention to houses, land, malt and money at the very moment when the printed issue of these great triumphs of his own creative spirit begins. This is the fundamental incredibility which along with the incredible reversion represented by Shakespere's second Stratford period, and a succession of other incredibilities ought to dissolve completely the Stratfordian hypothesis, once it has become possible to put a more reasonable hypothesis in its place.