"Shall I Die? Shall I Fly . . ."

By Otto Friedrich

The players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that . . . he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand!" --Ben Jonson

And now, something new from the man who brought you Hamlet?

"Every relic counts," said Harvard Professor Emeritus Harry Levin. "Shakespeare's work has ceased to be a literary consideration. It has become part of our culture, almost part of our ideology and religion."

"This is a second-rate, hack work," countered Columbia's Edward W. Tayler. "It's clumsy, inept. It's a clunker. It's quite clear to anyone who doesn't have a zinc ear that this is not a poem written by Shakespeare."

Thus were the bristly experts in the world of literary scholarship arguing last week the merits of a young Kansan's claim that he had discovered in Oxford a long-buried poem by William Shakespeare. If authentic, the work would be the first notable addition to the canon in more than three centuries. Gary Lynn Taylor, 32, joint general editor of the Oxford University Press's forthcoming New Complete Shakespeare, reported that he first glimpsed the find while checking through the Bodleian Library's listing of first lines in the catalog of its vast manuscript collection. He came across an entry reading, "Shall I die? Shall I fly . . ." The line, attributed to Shakespeare in the catalog, was unknown to Taylor. So one day last month he asked the Bodleian to show him its "Rawlinson Poetry Manuscript 160," a leather-bound collection of copied manuscripts that had been donated to the library in 1755 by Bishop Richard Rawlinson. There on leaf 108, all adorned with red curlicues, was the poem:

Shall I die? Shall I fly Lovers' baits and deceits, sorrow breeding? Shall I fend? Shall I send? Shall I shew, and not rue my proceeding? In all duty her beauty Binds me her servant for ever. If she scorn, I mourn, I retire to despair, joying never . . .

At the end of the nine stanzas, the anonymous copyist had written the name of the author: William Shakespeare. Other scholars had seen this signature, but somehow nobody before Taylor had pursued the obvious question: What if. . .? "I tried not to think about it," Taylor recalls. "The chances of actually finding something like this are so grotesquely small that you don't want to get excited." Unexcited, Taylor began probing.

Says Taylor, who studied at Kansas and Cambridge but never got his doctorate: "I'm a literary technician, like someone in a police morgue who is presented with a body and told to figure out how it died." The first step, which proved to be fairly easy, was to demonstrate that the manuscript had been in the Bodleian for centuries, that there was no possibility of its being a modern fake. No less important was the evidence that other works in the collection had been attributed without error to such poets as Robert Herrick and Ben Jonson. Then came the search for what Taylor calls "forensic evidence of a literary kind . . . stylistic fingerprints."

Computerized concordances have by now recorded every use of every word in Shakespeare, and Taylor soon found interesting similarities between his discovery and Romeo and Juliet, written when Shakespeare was around 30. The poet writes that his lady's "star-like eyes win love's prize/ When they twinkle." Romeo says of Juliet's eyes that they are "two of the fairest stars in all the heaven" and that they "twinkle in their spheres." Oddly enough, though, Taylor was also pleased to find some words that Shakespeare used nowhere else. Scanty, for example, does not appear anywhere else in the language before 1660, nearly a half-century after Shakespeare's death, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. "Shakespeare was always trying to create a new language, a new way of speaking," Taylor explains. "It's only mediocre writers like you or me who use the language that other people have invented for us."

Several scholars joined in praising Taylor. Says Samuel Schoenbaum, professor of Renaissance literature at the University of Maryland: "This discovery is no wild surmise. All scholars will have to take it seriously." And how has it lain so unnoticed for so long? "In modern times we explore outer space," says Schoenbaum. "But there is an inner space to be explored. An inner space of libraries, where there are wonders like this poem to be found."

Perhaps, but many experts were bothered by a basic question: Could Shakespeare really have written a poem that is so, well, mediocre? "This is a really bad poem, a piece of doggerel," says David M. Bevington, professor of English at the University of Chicago. "The poem itself does not sound much like Shakespeare to me," says Princeton's Alvin B. Kernan. Frank Kermode of Columbia is even harsher. "This is a very silly affair," he says. "True, Shakespeare wrote some bad poems, but the way this one is bad is not similar in any fashion to the way Shakespeare was bad. The whole thing is a mess."

Taylor himself does not claim to have discovered a masterpiece. "It's not Hamlet," he says. "It's a kind of virtuoso piece, a kind of early Mozart piece." Early Salieri would be more like it, but Taylor, who wears an earring rather like the one in Shakespeare's portrait, is learning quickly that all the scholarly world's a stage and all the scholars merely players. "I've always regarded this hoo-ha as slightly absurd," he says, "and once it is over, I shall go back to being as ordinary as dirt." --By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Steven Holmes/London

With reporting by Reported by Steven Holmes/London