The Bard for Today

WILL SHAKSPERE AND THE DYER'S HAND --Alden Brooks--Scribner's ($5).

SHAKESPEARE AND THE NATURE OF MAN -- Theodore Spencer -- Macmillan ($2.75).

Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays? Was it Francis Bacon? Or a couple of other fellows? Or was it, by some stretch of the imagination, after all, Shakespeare himself? This never-quite-laid ghost has haunted the battlements of English literature for 100 years. In many corners of the world, scholarly and unscholarly fanatics have spent the best part of their lives trying to prove that the son of a simple Stratford-on-Avon townsman was literature's greatest bluff.

Most recent hunter of the Shakespeare snark is Alden Brooks, born in Cleveland, Ohio. His 700-page Will Shakspere and the Dyer's Hand is his second try at unmasking Shakespeare, and the result of 20 years' sniffing among Shakespearean data. Stern, relentless Alden Brooks takes a poor view of the accused. He depicts Shakespeare as a butcher's son in Stratford, "a country youth who has to leave school early in order to assist his father in the killing of cattle . . . one who sows his wild oats so liberally that he must, first, marry against his will a woman eight years his senior, and, secondly, run away to London, apparently to escape legal prosecution."

Author Brooks accepts the legend that young Will did his butchering with dramatic flourishes, that in London he got a job holding theatergoers' horses. Soon he earned enough money to rent out theatrical costumes and furnishings. Something of a wit in his coarse way, he began editing plays for production, soon became a play agent, buying and renting the works of others. On the side he kept a brothel: "In his tavern in Deadman's Lane, sub-leased to Widow Lee, Will Shakspere . . . created . . . a roistering hubbub." His "broken, almost falsetto voice" became a feature of London life. His "fat body" was soon "taxed by excesses." Many suffered from "his scheming tricks ... his dirty dealing and underhand passing of coin, all the shabby pretense in the double-faced glutton and roisterer."

Meanwhile a grey-haired courtier with "wrinkled visage, deep-set eyes . . . walked nervously in the gardens" a stone's throw from Will's brothel. The courtier's name was Sir Edward Dyer, known to literati mainly as the author of a rather smug poem called My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is. No one guessed his secret, but for years, says Author Brooks, Dyer had been getting Shakespeare to buy bad plays for him and had rewritten them into the classics we read today. As a gentleman, Dyer had naturally not wanted his name connected with the disreputable world of the theater, so he had Agent Shakespeare's name tacked to the plays. To get a bit of his own back, he satirized obese Will Shakespeare in certain plays, making him Bottom, Falstaff, William the Clown, and once even "a forlorn maid."

Author Brooks's evidence for his case is far from conclusive. Readers will be grateful to Author Brooks for his delving into the vast mass of Elizabethan research, but they will not agree that his muckraking has uncovered a skeleton, will find still circumstantial and uncontroverted the evidence of The Bard's friend Ben Jonson: "I loved the man, & do honour his memory--on this side idolatry--as much as any."

Confusion's Masterpieces. Theodore Spencer, youthful Harvard instructor and poet (The Paradox in the Circle), is after bigger game than snarks. In Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, written with high intelligence and clarity, Spencer shows Shakespeare as the archetype of his age, in Elizabethan literature what Drake was to the Elizabethan navy--a symbol of England's emergence into the status of a world power. The Elizabethans, says Spencer, found themselves in a social and moral dilemma. For hundreds of years men had lived and died in a world in which "order [was] behind everything." Man, animals, the heavens were set in fixed categories, hardly ever questioned. In this "order" man was seen as below the angels but above the beasts. Kings were divinely appointed; they might be assassinated, but no one suggested that kingship itself should be abolished. Man was made to worship God, but all else was made to serve man, and would do so as long as man did not give way to his passions and, by becoming a beast, disrupt the universal scheme:

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

But in Shakespeare's day, says Author Spencer, men were beginning to question the whole framework of this pillared firmament. Copernicus proclaimed that the sun, not the earth, was the center around which the planets were set. Montaigne described man as a "miserable and puny creature" for whom the universe cared nothing and who was "only another animal." Niccolo Machiavelli not only saw man as a cunning beast but insisted that the royal ruler of men must be a super-beast, without moral scruples in his control of the state and in his relations with other nations. As a final blow, England had broken away from the religious sovereignty of the Pope and established a national religion.

It was Shakespeare, says Author Spencer, who best reflected in his plays the terrible split in men's minds between the old order and the new skepticism. In Richard II, Shakespeare showed the tragedy of a monarch who believed that the trappings of kingship were what made a king. In Henry V, he showed a king who knew "the hollowness of . . . ceremony" and became great by rejecting his youthful dissipation and embracing the just and divine ideals of the perfect monarch. Hamlet's world was shattered when his mother, the Queen, married her late husband's brother before the deceased husband was cold in his grave. And when Macbeth murders his saintly relative, King Duncan, the outrage is unparalleled :

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope

The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence

The life o' the building!

The old order is given over to rapacious individualists like Ajax, Iago and Lady Macbeth, and Shakespeare's world becomes a miserable home for oafs and savages.

But in his last plays, Spencer thinks, Shakespeare's faith in the nature of man was regained. A change of heart, as the poet grew older, led him to reverse his earlier decision and to conclude that "only the appearance is evil; the reality is good." Humanity can be purged of its evil, and man may say:

How beauteous mankind, is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!

In his concluding chapter Author Spencer reaches a moral that is thoughtful even though considerably oversimplified. We, too, have been going through a universal breakdown. "We have lost any real belief in the capacity of intellect to dictate our actions" and believe ourselves to be at the mercy of our unconscious impulses, the state, environment, economics, science. "Galileo's confirmation of Copernicus has become the cosmology of Einstein, Montaigne's comparison of man to animals has become psychoanalysis and behaviorism, Machiavelli has become Hitler." The difference may be that at bottom the new forces may prove themselves "not disruptive but collective," and order may be restored to us "in a new and vital shape." But this restoration of order will depend on the awakening of a new faith "which will make the higher impulses of the mind seem the right ones to obey."

What this faith will be, Author Spencer does not try to guess. But if it is to be expressed in great art, the artist must inevitably, Spencer says, dig down into "the elementary facts of ... birth, struggle, death, and that which is beyond death." Like Shakespeare, the artist must illustrate "that rhythm, that sequence, that vision, which all human beings must recognize and accept as fundamental to the nature of man."

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