SHAKESPEARE WAS A SHADOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 12

SHAKESPEARE WAS A SHADOW

THE MAN WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE, by Calvin Hoffman; Max Parrish, English price 15/-. POOR Shakespeare! His works have been ascribed to every contemporary Elizabethan, with Bacon a hot favourite. I don’t know what happened to the German claims, mainly based, I feel, on the fact that he was too good to be an Englishman. (In the last sentence I am not hinting that my own favourite is Selwyn.) Shaw demolished him as a playwright, and wrote one story in Elizabethan blank verse because it was so much easier than prose. But some stand steadfast in the faith. Poor Shakespeare! It’s all his own fault. We know nothing of the man, beyond a few official parish and property transfer entries. It was long after his death that the familiar legends grew, and it may well be, as Brahms and Simon frivolously suggest, that he spent a lot of time scribbling variant spellings of his narmhe to see which looked the best. Scholars have doubted the attribution of nearly every play, at one time and another, and it is odd that only nine of the First Quarto plays were signed. Two good points Mr. Hoffman makes-in a detailed will, down to second-best beds, Shakespeare leaves no books, no manuscripts, no interests in any plays. And the occasion of his death evoked not a single elegy from the teeming poets of the time-an honour not to be escaped by any alderman or prosperous fishmonger. Shakespeare remains a mystery. But Mr. Hoffman has a positive case to make. His target is that unsavoury young wit Christopher Marlowe. He makes thrilling detective fiction of a tenuous story, "proved" quite as ingeniously as Morgann proved Falstaff no cowardly buffoon but a very knight of chivalry. Mr. Hoffman attaches great importance to parallelisms-he gives us 31 pages of them-but falls flat on the rich carpet of absurdity when he seriously compares. "Holla, ye pampered Jades of Asia./What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day. . ." with Pistol’s "And hollow pamper’d jades of Asia,/Which cannot go but thirty miles a day." Of course, Shakespeare lifted in a hurry from every plot, every extant play. There are more than a thousand lines he should have blotted, and more than a thousand that he obviously borrowed.

A pity that Mr. Hoffman found nothing but a mound of hard-packed yellow sand in Sir Thomas Walsingham’s tomb. But there’s another coffin below that, just as there’s always another last chamber in the Great Pyramid. "These oracles are hardly attain’d, and hardly

understood."

Denis

Glover