The Man Who Was Shakespeare
SIR,—in Martin Seymour-Smith's review of the latest-published book on Marlowe (Spectator, August 6), he calumniously refers to my book The Murder of the Man Who, Was 'Shakespeare' as 'This lurid volume whose . . . factual errors did not escape detection . . to myself as 'infected . . . with crankiness . . .,' and claims that 'this absurd idea of Marlowe's authorship of the Shakespeare Canon is the province of 'idiots and exhibitionists,' imply- ing that I (the first espouser of Marlowe's sole authorship of the so-called 'Shakespeare's Works') am the prime `idiot and exhibitionist' of all.
If Mr. Seymour-Smith is a votary of selfless ob- jectivity as he cockily implies in his review when referring to my book's alleged 'factual errors' (about which he probably read in The Times Literary Sup- plement in an article by the anonymous John Crow), his self-vaunting objectivity might have directed your readers to refer also to my rebuttal and rejoinder which soon followed Mr. Crow's TLS article and which actually revealed that the so-called 'factual errors' were, in fact,•nothing of the kind; that they were for the most part typographical and/or proof- readers, errors, as, for example, Hamner for kanmer, knave for nave, etc.
Had Mr, Seymour-Stnith been so scholarly ob- jective as he desired his readers to believe he is, Why did not his chaste, objective purity direct Spec- tator readers to my reply and rejoinder?
Here, Mr. Seymour-Smith, are some of those who arc, or haVe *been, 'infected . . . with crankiness,' mad enough' to 'believe that (a) Shakespeare does not reflect the true ascription of his authorship of the Plays and poems or (b) that Marlowe had a hand in writing some, or had written all, of 'Shakespeare's' Works: Whitman, Hawthorne, Dickens, Emerson, Byron, Palmerston, Hardwicke, Twain, Bakeless, Roberts, Brooke, Freud, Heard, Casson. Hoover, Robertson, Tynan, Watts, Chaplin, Flesch, Trevor- Roper and hundreds—no, thousands upon thousands —of interminable others.
What a disreputable array of cranks with whom I find myself in tune!
7 Abingdon Court, W8
CALVIN HOFFMAN
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