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A
popular sport among advanced scholars of English has been to refute the
accomplishments of Mr. William Shakespeare. Hardly a decade passes but
what some worthy pundit announces to the world that somebody other than
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Sometimes ithas been
Raleigh, sometimes Bacon, Beaumont, or Fletcher, but in this century,
Christopher Marlowe has been the most
popular choice. Things went so far a few years back that a group of them
actually dug up what was left of Marlowe’s body in hopes that evidence
that he wrote Hamlet or Macbeth or Julius Caesar might be buried with it. The evidence was not there. Fortunately for them, Mr.
Frankland of Lafter Hall was not there either, so they managed to avoid
prosecution for opening a grave without consent of next of kin.
The reasoning behind
such activities is elementary enough. Above everything else, these
Shakespeare-detractors have an enormous respect for education because
they are themselves educated. Now, if these distinguished intellectuals
do not have thecommand of the English language
exhibited by the author of
Hamlet—and they do not—then how could William Shakespeare, who could not
always spell his own name right, possess such literary powers?
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This line
of thought is irreproachable—so much so that it is imperative that we apply
it wherever else we can. So we must find another English
playwright who was alleged to have written works as elevated as Hamlet and then examine his
educational background for evidence that he might have been just as
ignorant as Shakespeare. The job is not as hard as one might think. We
actually need look no further than Shaw. No, not John Bennett Shaw, and not
the Shah of Iran, and not The Phantom
Rickshaw! The reeeealy big Shaw, himself—George Bernard Shaw! The
greatness of G.B.S. did not merely approach the genius of Shakespeare, it
actually surpassed it; and
we have this on the very best authority—Shaw’s own word, and who should
know better than he?
Next, what of the immortal
Bernard’s educational credentials? Was he a highly eminent scholar,
therefore immune to the impeccable logic which has shown Shakespeare to be
a fraud? Most authorities agree that Shakespeare’s formal education
extended no further than his fourteenth year. Fourteen is precisely the age
at which Shaw dropped out of school, never to return again. And although
Shaw could spell “Shaw,” he spelled “show” s-h-e-w and was no better at
spelling Shakespeare than Shakespeare was. We have him wriggling in our
nets! He could no more have written Shaw than Shakespeare could have
written Shakespeare. When you have eliminated the impossible, the truth
remains, no matter how improbable!
Then
who did write Shaw? To find the answer we merely have to pursue the
Marlowe-Shakespeare scenario to its ultimate conclusion. Marlowe misled the
world into believing that he was dead by disappearing in a fistfight in
1593. Actually, he lived on to write all the plays now attributed to
Shakespeare. The three parts of Henry
VI, which appeared before Marlowe’s apparent death, are considered to
have been written by neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe. The earliest truly
Shakespearean play then is Richard III,which was first produced in 1594, or one year after
Marlowe’s disappearance. Now, the earliest Shavian play, Widowers’ Houses, was first produced
in 1892. It follows that its true writer was someone who misled the world
into believing that he was dead by disappearing in a fistfight in 1891.
Does that description fit anyone? It does. It fits one man and only one
man, and anyone who doesn’t know who that man is has no business reading this
journal.
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