“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “what’s Shakespeare to you, or you to Shakespeare?”
“For one thing, he’s an old friend. For another, he’s a whole universe in himself—”
“Surely a respectable opinion!”
“I’m sorry to be respectable, but I want to be just. It is easy to name great and important qualities that Shakespeare lacked, and damn him for that lack. On the other hand, one can think of hideous qualities he lacked—and honor him for their absence. Most important of all, he wasn’t a medieval bigot. If he doesn’t ascend to the heights of moral idealism, at least he avoids wallowing in what Sterling calls ‘the liquid manure of superstition.’ He is a modern man, who looks at life with clear eyes, and judges it on its own merits. Coming from Catholic Europe to Elizabethan England is like coming out of a morgue, and standing on a headland where the wind blows from the sea. Shakespeare knew that, and all the men of his time knew it; they were defending themselves from the Inquisition, they were saving the race-mind.
“The future world poet was twenty-four years old when the Spanish Armada was harried down the English channel by the little ships of Drake and Frobisher. He had already come up to London, and perhaps he heard the guns. Anyhow, all England knew that the pope had by formal decree turned over their country to be a vassal of Spain; they knew that King Philip was preparing against them the most powerful fleet in history. They waited, in just such an agony of suspense as we knew during the long struggle in France. And just as Æschylus was inspired by the battle of Marathon to write Greek patriotic propaganda, so Shakespeare was inspired by the defeat of the Armada to write English patriotic propaganda. Now, in weighing the value of that propaganda, we have to judge the society in which Shakespeare lived, the balance of democratic and aristocratic forces, of progress and reaction it contained. We can’t do that without a theory of political evolution—”
“I’ll tell you what you do,” says Mrs. Ogi. “You start in and tell us some facts about Shakespeare’s plays, and what’s in them, and work in your theory of political evolution as you go along. Then, as I go along, I’ll take a pencil and mark most of it out!”
CHAPTER XXXIV
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.