NO GREAT SHAKES
A prize for proving that
PROFESSOR Peter Levi would have the literary world believe that a handful of poems hitherto attributed to John Marston are in fact the work of William Shakespeare.
But Professor Levi's heresy is as nothing compared to that of Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman. You have not heard of Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman? Probably not, unless you read the small advertisements in the Times Literary Supplement, or are anything to do with the administration of the King's School, Canterbury. Calvin Hoffman is the author of The Man Who Was Shakespeare, one of the 100,000 or so entries in the file-index in the library at the Shakespeare Birthday Trust, at Stratford- upon-Avon. I'm not sure what the burden of the book is, though I feel sure that it is a ponderous one, but I can make an in- formed guess as a result of reading the advertisement.
This announces the terms of the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize of £5,000 for a distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe. This is a tempting carrot to those of us who hope to earn the odd penny in return for the occasional endeavour of a literary nature, but a close reading of the stipulations of the Trust Deed show that there are difficulties. It will be awarded annually, to the person who 'most convin- cingly, authoritatively and informatively examines and discusses in depth the life and works of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakes- peare with particular regard to the possibi- lity that Christopher Marlowe wrote some or all of the plays and poems . . . .' The clause hedges a little, concluding less de- mandingly, 'or made some inspirational creative or compositional contribution to- wards the authorship of them'.
Now we get a glimmer of Calvin Hoff- man's cunning and how he, too, is going to be able to perpetuate his own name, and that of his wife Rose G., alongside that of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. There will be no end to it because, as Clause 6 stipulates:
If in any year the person adjudged to have won the PRIZE has in the opinion of the King's School furnished irrefutable and in- controvertible proof and evidence required to satisfy the world of Shakespearian scho- larship that all the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shake- speare were in fact written by Christopher Marlowe then the amount of the PRIZE for that year shall be increased by assigning to the winner absolutely one half of the capital or corpus of the entire Trust Fund and thenceforth the remaining one half of the capital of the Fund and the income thereof shall be held by The King's School in perpetuity upon the trusts set out and de- clared in clause 8 below.
Do you see the cunning? If you can irrefutably prove that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, the remaining half of the Fund, along with the name of Hoffman, will stay with The King's School, 'in perpetuity', which is the same time-scale as Ben Jonson predicted for the reputation of his friend Master Will.
But just imagine what consternation that extraordinary discovery would have on the world. First of all, all the works hitherto attributed to William Shakespeare in the bookshops would have to be withdrawn, to enable the newly discovered authorship to be correctly attributed. Then all the entries in all the libraries in the world would have to put in notes saying, 'Shakespeare, Wil- liam; see Marlowe, Christopher', and notes would have to be stuck on title-pages of existing copies of the works saying that they had been wrongly attributed. And then what about Stratford-upon-Avon it- self, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Stratford would lose its attraction as a tourist centre, and would become just a dull provincial town. The theatre and the library would have to pack up and remove themselves to Canterbury, and would there have to set up as the Royal Marlowe Company and the Marlowe Birthplace Trust. The effect on the economy of Warwickshire would be devastating. And then, of course, you would upset the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare faction, and all those other ones that champion other candidates. And then, worst of all, you would find another Hoffman who had an obsession about Shakespeare, who would write a book called The Man Who Wrote Marlowe and he too, in turn, would endow Shakespeare's old grammar school at Strat- ford with a Trust Fund and Prize for the first man to come along and prove that Shakespeare wrote Marlowe.
A glance at the respective lives of both contenders to the Work is worth taking at this point, before rewriting the history of English literature. Though both Shake- speare and Marlowe were born in the same year, 1564, history records that Marlowe died in 1593, in that supposed tavern-brawl in Deptford that is increasingly looking as if it were a secret-service execution job to get rid of an embarrassing former agent, and an atheist homosexual to boot. History also records, though doubtless these re- cords are fabrication in the eyes of such as Hoffman, that Shakespeare didn't die until 1616 and that all of his supposed plays after • the fifth one, A Midsummer Night's Dream, were written after 1593, that is, after the death of Christopher Marlowe.
Are we then to believe that it wasn't Christopher Marlowe's body over which a coroner's court sat in Deptford, nor his body that was interred in St Nicholas's Church there? If not, whose body was it, and how did the real Christopher Marlowe get by busily scribbling another 31 plays, and how did he fool his fellow actors and business associates into believing he was other than he was? And who, then, is buried in Shakespeare's tomb under the epitaph (and surely this itself has now a deeper meaning):
GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FOREBEARE TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE: BLEST BE THE MAN THAT SPARES TEES STONES, AND CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES?
If you can answer these and other questions, you deserve every penny of the £5,000 Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize. But you'd also deserve to be hung, drawn and quartered for ruining the reputations of hundreds of scholars and authors, as well as that of Ben Jonson and John Hemminge and Henry Condell, who would have perpetuated in the First Folio one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time.
Sleep on, Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman. Your names will be secure as long as footnotes to Shakespeare and Marlowe are recorded in the archives; and the King's School, Canterbury is assured of the in- terest of the capital of your Trust Fund, for ever.
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