portentous perhaps of all these colossal works, Mr. J. Thomas Looney’s “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
III
The desire to see the face behind the mask is not only legitimate, but necessary; and, happily, it has not recently been exclusively confined to the Bacon-Ralegh-Oxford-Derby-Rutland-Southampton exponents of critical solitaire. The most priceless hour of the irrecoverable past, says William Archer,[1] would be that in which one might meet the real Shakespeare face to face; and Professor Bradley says: ‘For my own part I confess that, though I should care nothing about the man if he had not written the works, yet, since we possess them, I would rather see and hear him for five minutes in his proper person than discover a new one.’
The author of the Shakespearean plays, we can say with perfect confidence, was not the advanced political thinker that Bacon was, or Ralegh, or Spenser, or even Marlowe. He was distinctly a traditionalist in politics and social theory. His attitude toward the state and sovereign was not Tudor, but Plantagenet; not renaissance, but feudal. It represents the feeling of Stratford much better than that of London.
The King in Shakespeare is nearly always the man
- ↑ ‘If some enchanter should offer to recover for me a single hour of the irrecoverable past, I think I should choose to be placed among the audience at the Globe Theatre, in or about the year 1600, with liberty to run round between the acts and interview the author—actor-manager, Master Shakespeare, in his tiring room. For this I would give—one can afford to be lavish in bidding for the inconceivable—say a year of my life. There is nothing more difficult than to form a vivid and satisfactory picture of the material conditions under which Shakespeare worked; and there is nothing more fascinating than the attempt to do so.’
