WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 1006, 28 November 1958, Page 11

WHO WAS SHAKESPEARE?

Sir-yYour readers are greatly indebted to you for publishing a specimen of Mr Guy Powell’s lively and picturesque prose in your issue of August 22 in which he holds up to ridicule poor Mr Foot’s armoury of damp squibs and an India-rubber pointed rapier. I have not seen Mr Foot’s contribution, so cannot comment on it. It is, of course, obvious to the meanest intelligence, though I fear that even in this lowly category we cannot include Mr Foot and those who, like him, believe in the Stratford Oaf, that this creature could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be held to be the author of the various poems and the some three dozen plays so long and so absurdly attributed to him. What could be easier, simpler, or more natural than for the Oaf (a mere country bumpkin and half-wit at best) to have deceived all the members of the company of actors with which he was associated for so many years? It might be argued that the Oaf would not dare to attempt to deceive such an important and powerful nobleman as the Earl of Southampton, to whom the Oaf dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, but of course the Earl was in the secret and must have enjoyed the mystification; indeed, the joke must have been a well-kept secret known to quite a number of people. As to Ben Jonson’s testimony in the First Folio, this can be brushed aside without more ado, as it is notorious that Jonson, a fifth-rate playwright, pitifully obscure in his own day, was a cowardly, veniai nobody whose "evidence" is utterly worthless. Then as to Queen Elizabeth and King James, both dangerous persons to offend, we can safely’ assume that either they did not care when an impostor was foisted on them, or that they too were in the carefully guarded secret. There are, however, two small points in Mr Guy Powell’s brisk letter to which I should like to draw attention, First, there are only six undoubted specimens of Shakespeare’s script, all, with one small exception, limited to signatures. These appear on legal documents. They are:"Willm Shaksp" (11th May 1612); "William Shakspé" (10th March 1613),

the stroke over the "e" indicates the omission of one or more letters; "Wm Shakspe," 11th March 1613, and the three signatures on his Will of 25 March 1616. The first of these last is "William Shakspere," the second is "Willm Shakspere,"’ here a curly line over the "m" denotes an abbreviation; and the final and legally the most important signature on the third sheet of the Will, which reads "By me William Shakspeare." It will therefore be seen that some of: the "signatures" referred to by Mr Powell are creations of fancy. It is a pity he did not verify his facts before composing his entertaining epistle. Secondly, as to Mr Powell’s other weapon in his anti-Stratfordian armoury, the infra-red photographs taken by the happily named American Mr (or should it be "Dr’?) Barrell, he should know that only two portraits of the Stratford Oaf possess any substantial claims to authenticity. These are the Droeshout portrait (a remarkably poor work of art) in the First Folio, and the bust in the Church at Stratford-on-Avon (which is little better). As to the rest of the portraits, and there are dozens of them, they mav well be of the Lord Nozoo.

CHARLES

FOX

( Swansea, U.K.).