For my own work, it is alive and kicking, where most of the professors are dead from the neck upwards
subject, of course. But he called in aid old Professor Wilson Knight, who repeated all the nonsense about Mr W.H., still not having grasped the elementary point that he was Thorpe's man, not Shakespeare's. He couldn't see that the characteristics of the young Lord in the Sonnets were absolutely those of the obvious person, the patron Southampton, personality, circumstances, refusing to marry, dating and all. He thought the likeliest candidate to be that of Hotson's ' important' book, William Hatcliffe, Prince of Purpoole, quite unaware that the book is not regarded by ',anybody as ' important ' but is cracked from top to bottom.
This leads me to an important strategic point. As the result of the needless confusion created by these people, creating ' problems ' where they don't exist, leaving open questions which can be settled, thousands of people in Britain and America don't know whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays or whether he ever existed. All this is crackpot nonsense, we know. But the Shakespeare Establishment are largely responsible for it, by confusing the issues, and leaving the gates wide open for all the crackpots to gallop through all over the field.
blame the Establishment — and they , never have been able to deal with the crackpots they have let in (Baconians, Marlovians. Oxfordians — sheer lunacy of course). If I have accomplished one thing I am not at all proud of — I have certainly dealt these lunatics a more effective blow than the Shakespeare professors ever could. They have not been a bit grateful for it: too purblind to see that in the leading Elizabethan historian they have their most effective ally, bringing the background to Shakespeare, both life and work, into the light of common sense knowledge of the age as no one else can.
Why do they dislike it so much? That is the real problem. (I like being told what I don't know about, am anxious to learn.) So far from proper recognition of the re
markable amount of work accomplished, the great deal of new light thrown on Shakespeare, the new material brought out, the new impulse given when Shakespeare scholarship was at a dead end, become a dead scholasticism repeating all the old abracadabra—" the problems of Shakespeare's Sonnets are insoluble" -when I solved them for them, anyone would think I had committed a crime.
The Oxford University Press published a fat book by an American professor Schonbadme on Shakespeare Biographies. It described my work as merely " a triumph of promotion," dragging in a reference to my poetry as that of "a poetaster." Irrelevant as that was, it reminds me that a more distinguished writer, J. I. M. Stewart, had seen that my Shakespeare work had the advantage of being written by someone who was both historian and poet.
When I protested at this disgraceful treatment by my own university press of serious and original work by (at least) one of the university's leading historians, I could get no redress. After a lengthy correspondence — which one day I shall publish — all they would do was to withdraw the insulting word 'poetaster.' (It is of no consequence to me, merely ironical, that the poetaster appears in their own Oxford Book of Twentieth Century
Verse.) • ' Envy and spite are such familiar phenomena in contemporary literary life as to be boring, rather than hurtful. So used to them, I can smell them from a mile away. They should try something else for a change — let them try learning from someone who has got fascinating things to tell them about a far more rewarding age than this. As for the beautiful SchonbaUme and Levines, they will be forgotten five minutes after they are dead or have ceased to go through their hoops in the newspapers. The historian takes longer views and can afford to wait.
. To sum up: I think something more hopeful may be indicated for the future. It is perfectly true that the old Shakespeare Establishment, at a dead end, has nothing more to offer than Its wearisome academicism, infinitely boring, incapable of taking in — let alone absorbing — a new idea, a new approach.
Some of the old men did good work — Chambers erected a marvellously massive structure on which to build. Even Dover Wilson did good work, though notoriously erratic. The work that I find most illuminating is that which sees Shakespeare first and foremost in terms of the theatre — Granville Barker, Nevill Coghill, G. E. Bentley. The theatre is the best place in which to study Shakespeare, not the lecture-room. For my own work, it is alive and kicking, where most of the professors are dead from the neck upwards. As for its reception — it is quite simple and whit you would expect: a first-rate response from the first-rate, secondrate reactions from the second-rate, and . third-rate from the third-rate. You can always tell what people are from the reviews they write.
Why am I then angry and contemptuous? I think it is partly, as a woman writer of distinction saw, that I love Shakespeare so much that I cannot endure to see him made such nonsense of by the imperceptive and the obtuse. But I see a gleam of light. At the very least I shall have given this Elizabethan subject a new impulse. And this will work in two ways. Younger scholars will follow up the trails I have started and they will yield us new and solid information about the people Shakespeare knew and lived and worked with — the real thing as against the conjectures of the third-rate.
Even more interesting, now that we have a third dimension to the biography of our greatest writer the field is now open, as never before, for creative work — plays, novels, films, TV, all the things that are not my province nor within my competence. Moreover, my time is running short.
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