PHOSPHORESCENCE AND DECAY
A few months ago I had the pleasure of spending twenty-four hours with a
Chicago millionaire who specializes in knowing all there is to know on
the subject of ciphers. During the war he gave our army practically all
its information on this subject; so precious was his knowledge that, for
fear the enemy might get him, he was kept for a year and a half locked
up in the fire-proof, bomb-proof, burglar-proof and bullet-proof vault
where his books and manuscripts are preserved.
Sitting in this vault, the owner showed me the greatest collection of
Bacon and Shakespeare first editions in America. For several hours he
pointed out the ciphers in these editions, and coming home on the train
I read the narrative which is hidden in these ciphers, the secret life
of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, wherein he claims to have been a natural
son of Queen Elizabeth, and the author of most of the plays attributed
to William Shakespeare. It seems strange that one has to learn about
these things in French; but so it stands, in a series of articles by
General Cartier, published in the “Mercure de France,” September, 1922.
If I were going to have an opinion on this subject, I should want at
least two years to devote, without interruption, to a study of this
cipher literature, and to the lives of Bacon and Shakespeare, and a
comparison of their literary styles. Lacking this leisure in the present
crisis of man’s fate, I content myself with saying that here is one of
the most fascinating mysteries in the world, and that I am not one of
those comfortable people who know a thing to be impossible, merely
because it is new and strange. Having said this much, I proceed upon the
orthodox assumption that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare
were written by the actor of that name.
He was born in 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, his father being a merchant
who early fell into misfortune. There are legends that the son was wild,
and ran away to London to escape prosecution for deer-stealing. He
became a hanger-on of theatrical companies, held horses at the doors of
theaters, became connected with the Duke of Leicester’s company, acted
in various plays, was called upon to revise and patch up manuscripts,
and finally wrote plays of his own which were popular successes. He made
money, bought several pieces of property at Stratford, won the
friendship of some of the powerful and great, and finally returned to
his home town, to die at the age of fifty-two.
That is all we know about the greatest poet of all time. How he managed
to escape attention, how above all he failed to see to it that the world
got authentic copies of his plays, is a mystery only partly explained by
the fact that playwriting and acting were disreputable occupations.
Actors had been strolling vagabonds, liable to be thrown into jail by
any constable, like a workingman out of a job in the United States. Only
by getting the protection of some noble earl could they be safe from
persecution; and if you had become a friend of noble earls, and a
gentleman of property in your home-town, you did not boast of plays you
had written, any more than if you lived on Fifth Avenue today you would
boast of a saloon you had once kept.
Shakespeare’s first plays are romantic comedies in the style of the
time. It was the tradition of the pastoral, fostered by elegant ladies
and gentlemen who know nature as a place for picnics. It is a world of
beauty, wit and “charm”; everybody is young, everybody’s occupation is
falling in love with some other pretty body, and problems exist only to
be solved in the last act.
When I was young I saw Julia Marlowe in “As You Like It,” and was
ravished with delight. Now I look back on it, in the broad daylight of
my present knowledge about life; I recall the thousand traps into which
I fell because of ignorance of sex, ignorance of money, ignorance of
almost everything about my fellow human beings. I recall the people I
have known who fell into these same traps, and were not able to
extricate themselves, but paid for their romantic illusions with
poverty, drunkenness, disease, divorce, insanity, suicide. So I am
compelled to declare that these “charming” comedies are as false to life
as the average moving picture of our time, in which the problems of
labor and capital are solved by the honest labor leader marrying the
daughter of the great captain of industry.
I have to go further and maintain that this betrayal of life was
deliberate; the writer himself knew more than he told us. Shakespeare is
fond of jeering at the “groundlings,” and those who stoop to tickle
their unwashed ears. In the Shakespearean theater the cheap seats were
in the pit, or what we call the orchestra; the aristocrats sat on the
sides of the stage, and frequently got drunk, and amused themselves by
sprawling in their seats and tripping up the actors and guying the show.
These elegant ones were not “groundlings,” and it was no disgrace to a
romantic poet to rise in the world by giving them what they wanted.
Shakespeare was even cynical enough to laugh at them for their silly
taste; he called one of his comedy successes “As You Like It,” and
another “Twelfth Night, or What you Will.”
This man was gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared
on earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a
moment’s notice all his life; he covered everything he wrote with the
glamour of poetry. This gift was his fortune; but also it was a trap,
because it saved him the need of thinking. It is a trap for us, because
it tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking. But force
yourself to think, ask yourself what is the actual value of the ideas
the mighty poet is expressing, and you discover that many of them are
commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices
of his time and class.
In these early days Shakespeare wrote a long narrative poem, which helps
us to know him. It is dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, his
patron, and is called “Venus and Adonis”; a typical example of the
pseudo-classical romantic rubbish which the cultured world of that time
called “art.” Nature has provided for the mixing and distributing of the
qualities of living creatures by a system of sex exchanges. Throughout
the higher forms of life, and with men and women in their primitive,
natural condition, the act of sex fertilization occupies less than the
entire time of the creature. But now a leisure-class arises, parasitic
upon its fellows; and the members of this class seek to divert their
idle time by the endless elaboration of the sex function.
“Venus and Adonis” tells the story of an effort of the goddess of love
to secure the sexual attentions of a reluctant youth. The striking
thing about the poem is the extent to which the Greek ideal of the
goddess of fecundity has been debased--I will not say to the animal
level, because the animals are decent and sensible in their sex affairs;
I say to the level of the high-priced brothel, where the jaded rich are
beguiled. Venus in this poem has no idea of making herself spiritually
or intellectually attractive to the youth; she does not know how to be
sublime and goddess-like, she does not know how to be wise, or even to
be witty and gay. She only knows how to force her unwanted flesh more
and more persistently upon the youth, to wallow upon his body,
disgusting both the youth and the reader.
The fact that “Venus and Adonis” is full of verbal splendor, like
everything else that Shakespeare wrote, makes it more and not less
offensive to an intelligent person. By means of our intelligence we have
invented the microscope, and thereby we know that decay is not less
decay because it happens to be phosphorescent. We can surely say that
there was decay in the fashionable world of Shakespeare’s time, when
twelve editions of “Venus and Adonis” were called for, while for a
mighty tragedy like “Othello” there was not demand enough to secure its
printing until six years after its author was dead!