Whodunit?

THE MURDER OF THE MAN WHO WAS "SHAKESPEARE" (232 pp.)--Calvin Hoffman--Julian Messner ($3.95).

Did William Shakespeare write the works of William Shakespeare? Charles Dickens was positively jumpy about the problem: "The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery," he wrote, "and I tremble every day lest something should turn up." Among those who have gone further and insisted that William Shakespeare was a mere pen name are men as different as Mark Twain (a whole-hog Baconian), Sigmund Freud (he rooted for the Earl of Oxford), Bismarck, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1931, Britain's Gilbert Slater caused a flutter by declaring that Shakespeare was a seven-man syndicate consisting of Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lady Pembroke, Christopher Marlowe and the Earls of Oxford, Derby, Rutland.

Most plausible pretender to the throne of Shakespeare, on grounds of genius and style, is Marlowe. His claims have not been pressed, except in regard to Shakespeare's earliest work, for the reason that he died before most of Shakespeare's plays were written. Anti-Shakespearean students are prepared to believe almost anything, but none of them has ever suggested that Marlowe went on writing after he was dead. Heaven only knows why. Calvin Hoffman, a reporter, drama critic, Shakespearean scholar, is the first man to try to grasp this nettle firmly.

Could He Read? Author Hoffman, who spent 19 years digging up "evidence," believes that Christopher Marlowe fired every single shot in what is called "The Shakespeare Canon." The dedicated tenor of his writing indicates that he would far rather be burned at the stake than give up his stake in Marlowe.

Like all anti-Shakespeareans, Author Hoffman begins by arguing that William Shakespeare was too much of a booby to have written as well as he did. There was a flourishing grammar school at Stratford in Shakespeare's youth, but there is no record of Shakespeare's having attended it. Nor is there positive evidence that he went to Oxford or Cambridge (England's only two universities at that time). But could Shakespeare not have educated himself? Author Hoffman scoffs at the idea. "There were no public libraries ... no dictionaries ... no grammars."

Even if there were, Shakespeare was too "poverty-stricken" to chase around after them. What is more, church records show that by the age of 21, William Shakespeare was a married man with three children. His life, says Author Hoffman (who often writes as if Shakespeare had had many an off-the-record chat with him) was too "full of responsibility" to permit "the hours of solitude necessary for 'self-education.' "

Could Shakespeare read? The ability to read, after all, is about the only equipment, apart from being able to write, an author needs. Author Hoffman skips over this question, but he agrees that the records show that Shakespeare, in 1594, was listed "as an actor in the Lord Chamberlain's Company of Players." This suggests : (though not to Author Hoffman) that Shakespeare had at least learned to read well enough to master his parts.

Fake Murder? Shakespeare is first listed as an author in 1593, when the poem Venus and Adonis ("The first heir of my invention,") was registered at the Stationers Company. Plays bearing his name began to appear some years later. In 1598, a Rutlandshire clergyman-schoolteacher, Francis Meres, "specifically names twelve of his plays," compares them to the works of Horace, Homer, Sophocles.

Teacher Meres, says Teacher Hoffman, was fooled. Shakespeare's name was merely "tagged'' to these poems and plays in order to hide the identity of the "real" author, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare (1564). He was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but records show that he was a brilliant student. He won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Young Marlowe, as everyone agrees, translated Ovid, wrote poems and plays (Hero and Leander, Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, Edward II, The Jew of Malta). Records indicate that he was a homosexual and an outspoken atheist, also suggest that he was a secret agent of Queen Elizabeth's government. In 1593, a long charge of atheistic crimes was drawn up against Marlowe, but before he could be brought to trial (if such was intended) he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl. He was buried on June 1, 1593, in Deptford churchyard.

Or was he? Sleuth Hoffman says no. He believes that Marlowe was the "secret lover" of Courtier Sir Thomas Walsingham (WalsingHam, suggests Hoffman, is the "Mr. W. H." to whom Shakespeare's sonnets are dedicated). Fearing that his boy friend would be burned at the stake for heresy, Walsingham faked up a murder. Only a stooge was buried at Deptford. Marlowe lived on secretly for many years, wrote all the plays of "Shakespeare." In fact, he began to write under Shakespeare's name almost immediately. Venus and Adonis, registered anonymously six weeks before Marlowe's murder, was published four months after his "death." Calling it "the first heir of my invention" was just Marlowe's cute way of saying that V. & A. was his first crack at being W. S.

Just Snobbery? Author Hoffman has spent years compiling a list of Marlowe-Shakespeare "parallelisms," i.e., extracts from Marlowe's acknowledged works which are repeated or rephrased in the works of Shakespeare. He is not the first to find, for instance, that four whole lines from Marlowe's poem The Passionate Shepherd to His Love turn up again with hardly a word changed in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, or that after Marlowe wrote of Helen of Troy, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships?" Shakespeare echoed him (in Troilus and Cressida) with "She is a pearl,/ Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships." But Hoffman also lays down scores of absurdities which parallel nothing but his own wishful thinking, e.g., "Here is my dagger" (Marlowe); "There is my dagger" (Shakespeare). Nor does it ever occur to him that certain elemental ideas have struck almost every poet who ever lived, e.g., that rain may be described as Heaven's weeping, that fast-beating hearts are like hammer blows, that lovers long before the Elizabethan Age had decided that even the sunniest day was a pain in the neck compared with a long, dark night.

No orthodox Shakespearean will be moved by Author Hoffman to abandon his established belief--that Christopher Marlowe was the great pioneer who explored the unknown continent of Elizabethan drama, and that William Shakespeare, following after, bulldozed and occupied that realm with a power and majesty far beyond the strength of his doughty predecessor. Some of Author Hoffman's parallelisms are interesting contributions to Shakespearean scholarship. For the rest. The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare" confirms but one thing--that profound snobbery is the main weakness of all anti-Shakespeareans. Deep-rooted in all Baconians, Oxonians, Marlovians, of every type, decade and nationality, is a chagrined refusal to have any truck with a man who never went through college.

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