Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT (A Harvest Test Preparation Book)

by Charles Harrington Elster

  “My dear Professor Martext, let’s say I want to administer an English exam. Aside from essay questions, I need a section of IDs. How would I put it together?”

  “It’s a standard procedure,” Martext replied warily, uncertain about the direction the interrogation was taking. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, one could give the students a list of quotations taken either from books that were assigned in class or from books that were unassigned but by the same authors who wrote the books that were assigned.”

  “Why would you want to test your students on material for which they weren’t strictly responsible?” Bibb queried. “Wouldn’t this latter method be unfair?”

  “Not at all. The idea is to test the students’ sense of an author’s voice and style.”

  A haughty smile spread across Bibb’s face. “So may I take it that you believe different authors have different styles and voices and that these differences can be taught and tested?”

  “Obviously.”

  “And do you think that Shakespeare has a voice different from that of his contemporaries?”

  “Yes—more or less,” Martext waffled, beginning to feel the walls of the corner he had backed himself into.

  “Well then, sir,” Bibb said, moving in for the kill, “don’t you find it difficult to reconcile your own admission that Shakespeare has a distinct, identifiable voice with your thesis that he is some kind of collective entity?”

  “I see your point,” Martext answered. “However, I see no reason to believe that a group cannot have an identity. Look at music, with its orchestrations and arrangements, or politics, with its party platforms bolstering the vision of a single candidate. Or take, for example, the Brooklyn Bridge. It was built by a great many people, yet it has its own architectural personality.”

  This Socratic game of cat and mouse continued for several minutes with Bibb playing the crafty Greek philosopher, asking questions and trying to catch Martext in a contradiction, and Martext unwillingly playing the straight man, answering obliquely and trying to evade each trap Bibb set for him. Phil and Caitlin were relieved when Professor Davies, citing time constraints, finally interrupted this verbal fencing match and introduced Professor Torres.

  “I’m glad to be following Professor Martext today,” Torres began in a poised, sophisticated voice, “because my view on Shakespeare’s identity also assumes that the plays arose from a collaborative and not an individual effort—a collaboration, however, of a singular nature. And unlike Professor Martext’s thesis, my view is not widely entertained or even widely known. In fact, on the rare occasions when it has been promulgated, scholars generally have castigated and vilified its advocates, summarily dismissing them with ridicule and contempt.”

  In the control room, Caitlin nudged Phil. “What do you think she’s going to propose?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Phil said, folding his arms. “Maybe that Shakespeare never existed at all and was just the fabrication of a bunch of pompous professors sitting around a table.”

  Caitlin rolled her eyes.

  “My theory,” Torres was saying, “depends on a document whose existence has always been much disputed. It is referred to only once in the notes for a study of literature by an obscure seventeenth-century monk and scholar, a recluse about whom we know virtually nothing. Apparently much of the dissertation has been lost, and what little is left is abstruse and often ambiguous. At one point, however, the text alludes to a letter, allegedly in Shakespeare’s own hand, addressed to a woman. In it the playwright supposedly chastises her for demanding compensation for a manuscript she had delivered to him.

  “When I came upon this bookish monk’s treatise in a remote abbey in Scotland several years ago, I must confess I was astonished and had no idea what to do. I decided to share my discovery with our late colleague, Professor Edward Anthony Prospero, and was delighted when he encouraged me to pursue the investigation. With his help, I have researched the authenticity of this document for some time, but so far I have come up empty-handed. If in fact it exists and if what the monk purports is true, then without doubt it will alter our perception of Shakespeare radically in the following way:

  “Shakespeare must have been acutely aware of his creative limitations and frustrated by the constant pressure to produce successful plays. He also knew that women were denied access to the Elizabethan stage and therefore could not threaten or usurp his reputation. These circumstances may have led him to exploit a woman of equal or greater talent to further his considerable literary ambitions. In short,” Torres concluded, “I believe it is possible that William Shakespeare may have hired a woman to ghostwrite some or perhaps even all of his plays.”

  A ripple of what could only be called intellectual shock passed over the table. The other members of the panel cleared their throats and squirmed in their chairs. Phil saw that Caitlin had stopped writing and was sitting up straight, her pen poised in the air, nibbling nervously on her lower lip.

  Torres waited until everyone had settled down and then went on. “The notion that Shakespeare hired a woman to write for him is not as outlandish as one might think. Throughout history, because of their secondary status, women writers have resorted to pseudonyms and masks. Mary Ann Evans took the pen name George Eliot, Hilda Doolittle preferred the anonymity of initials, and Emily Dickinson led a secluded life to veil her literary activities. The Bronte sisters also concealed their identities, even from their publishers, for most of their careers.

  “Furthermore, had this alleged ghostwriter been male, then the chroniclers, predominantly male, would have had little or nothing to lose in reporting the true author. The issue of gender would not have been a hindrance. Pseudonyms and ghostwriting were common in the Elizabethan period, and it would have been simply a case of moving the mantle of genius from one male to another. The traditional assumption that intellectual ability and creative power are male and not female attributes would have remained unchallenged.

  “On the other hand, it is easy to imagine how the discovery of a female ghostwriter would be considered an affront to certain orthodox beliefs about creativity and might have been censored. Certain historians might have tried to suppress whatever evidence existed in the interest of preserving the patriarchy. For as we all know,” Torres said with a sly look at Professor Bibb, “historians are not always objective. They are neither immune to intolerance nor impervious to prejudice, and some might even be called dogmatic.

  “However, because of this enigmatic monk’s peripheral life and relative insignificance as a scholar, his contemporaries were not aware of him and therefore could not sabotage his work. Had he been less obscure, it is likely that the evidence I have presented today would have been unavailable.”

  “Thank you, Professor Torres,” said Enid Davies. “Despite your dearth of evidence, you ingeniously transform your argument’s weaknesses into strengths. Yet I wonder if that alchemical process is possible in real, sociological terms.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Though I sympathize with your sentiments, I’m afraid I do not find your analysis plausible. You portray Elizabethan society as so thoroughly patriarchal, so repressive toward women, that the only way a woman could seek artistic expression was in the guise of a man. Yet, isn’t this repression more profound than the clothes one wears or the name one adopts?”

  “Of course,” Torres responded. “If it weren’t, women would never have had so much difficulty circumventing it.”

  “Precisely,” Davies concurred. “Now, I presume you remember that Virginia Woolf, not exactly a male apologist, argues in A Room of One’s Own that a woman in Shakespeare’s day, because of the harsh and onerous yoke she had to bear, could never have achieved what Shakespeare did. She would never have had enough education, privacy, freedom, confidence, and, above all, money to attempt the creative enterprise on such a grand scale.”

  “The kind of woman you describe would probably f
ail in her efforts to write,” Torres replied. “Yet there must have been at least a few women, perhaps among the aristocracy or nouveau riche—the merchants and landowners—who lived in more favorable circumstances. An affluent widow, an heiress who remained unmarried, or a gifted child who was taken under a scholar’s wing—all are possible. Remember, the English monarch herself, Queen Elizabeth I, was a woman and a first-rate scholar.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Davies. “Shakespeare as Queen Elizabeth. Hmmm. I believe we have now officially crossed the boundary that separates the plausible from the absurd.”

  Professor Torres laughed.

  “Before we venture any further into this uncharted territory,” Davies continued, “I believe we should pause, admit that our peregrinations have led us astray, and ask for help. Professor Bibb, would you like to point our discussion in a new direction?”

  “I most certainly would, Professor Davies,” Bibb said, rubbing his palms together with barely contained glee. He was savoring his approaching moment in the limelight the way a fervent preacher, convinced of the efficacy his sermon will have on his wayward congregation, might approach the pulpit.

  Bibb proceeded to spend several minutes rebutting Martext’s and Torres’s theses in painstaking detail. “And so,” he said when he had completed his dissection, “although the opinions of my colleagues at first appear to be merely amusing novelties, it is precisely this facade of playful innocence, this charade of naive speculation, that makes them so insidious. Why? Because if they cannot be substantiated, then they cannot be refuted, and therein lies the rub. Unfortunately, the impressionable young student, who should be struggling to comprehend the subtle art of documentation, is fatally seduced by this perniciously cavalier style of analysis and, once bit, seldom recovers. A teacher can only shake his head.”

  Bibb shook his own head ruefully and took a sip of water.

  “Now,” he went on, “when propounding theories on the identity of Shakespeare, we must not stray from the realm of fact and common sense. Whoever penned the plays clearly was an individual; however, that individual was probably not the man known as William Shakespeare. It is inconceivable that the son of a humble provincial could have procured for himself the erudition—the knowledge of history, law, languages, and the classics—the breadth of culture, sophistication, and nobility of spirit that his greatest plays manifest. In his youth, Shakespeare was an obscure, struggling actor and playwright, and despite his later success he was never more than an aspiring middle-class landholder. There is no evidence that he ever left England, nor is there any proof that he ever attended university.

  “That the records of so great a writer’s life are sparse, that so little was written about him by his contemporaries, and that none of his manuscripts have survived—these facts strongly suggest a surreptitiousness on Shakespeare’s part that is dubious, to say the least. In short, he was probably a front for a member of the aristocracy, a class that shunned association with the theater, which was considered a vulgar pastime. In my opinion, he could have been working for one of several noblemen, most likely the famous rationalist, Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans.

  “To begin with, as a man of breeding, Bacon traveled widely and had a comprehensive education. He knew foreign and classical languages, and his writings show a familiarity with nearly all of the more specialized subjects alluded to in Shakespeare’s plays. Furthermore, a number of cryptic messages indicating Bacon’s authorship can be found embedded in several Shakespearean texts. For instance, there is the famous ‘long word’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost: honorificabilitudinitatibus. This hapax legomenon—a Greek term meaning ‘something said or used only once, a single citation of a verbal form’—has been shown to be an anagram for the Latin hi ludi F Baconis nati tuiti orbi, meaning ‘these plays, born of Francis Bacon, are preserved for the world.’”

  At the sound of Professor Bibb’s reverent pronunciation of honorificabilitudinitatibus, Caitlin and Phil looked at each other in amazement.

  “Honorifi-what?” Phil gasped.

  Caitlin laughed. “Beats me. I’ll have to ask him to spell that one for me.”

  “It is also possible,” Bibb continued, “that Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, may have been the creator of the oeuvre attributed to Shakespeare. His early poems display a remarkable affinity to Shakespeare’s immature lyric work. Some of these are said to be in his own hand, yet are signed ‘W. S.’ Moreover, de Vere is supposed to have given up writing only half a year before the first record of Shakespeare as a playwright emerges. It is also believed that the earl chose the pseudonym Shakespeare because his coat of arms was a lion shaking a spear. Are all these circumstances merely coincidental? I think not.

  “Now, these are the two most likely candidates; however, not a few respected scholars have also proposed Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland, and William Stanley, Earl of Derby, as possible foils for the slippery, elusive Shakespeare. But the evidence to support these claims is at best tenuous and circumstantial. Hamlet, for example, is said to mirror Lord Rutland’s childhood—and I shudder to think what a traumatic childhood that must have been. As for William Stanley—” Bibb paused and grinned at his colleagues. “Well, his initials are W. S., and if that bit of cryptographic coincidence doesn’t persuade you that he was Shakespeare, I suppose nothing will.”

  The panelists all laughed, after which Bibb resumed.

  “One last possibility, which I find intriguing although hardly credible, is that Christopher Marlowe, the playwright to whom Shakespeare has been shown to be so much in debt, did not die in a tavern brawl in 1593, as is commonly thought, but, because of pressing financial adversity, feigned his death and fled to Italy. From there, he continued to write plays, using Shakespeare as his contact in England.

  “A host of other historical personages,” Bibb concluded, smoothing the rumpled lapel of his jacket with a plump hand, “have been nominated for the job of being the true Shakespeare, but, as in politics, the wide field of candidates at the outset of a campaign quickly narrows itself down to an elite few from which one man of integrity must be chosen. That man, I propose, is most probably Francis Bacon.”

  “Thank you, Professor Bibb,” said Enid Davies, “for your, as always, provocative views. Questions?”

  Martext and Torres, who had had great difficulty keeping quiet through Bibb’s presentation, wincing at the implication behind such words as elite, nobility, and breeding, did not spare Bibb now that he had finished.

  “Professor Bibb,” Torres said, “your argument was quite lucid and sagacious. It showed a perspicacious grasp of the facts. You are certainly a very learned man.”

  “Why thank you, Professor Torres.”

  “Don’t mention it. Were you always that way?”

  “What do you mean, that way?”

  “Were you always so erudite?”

  “Of course not. No one’s born a scholar. It takes a great deal of dedication and diligent labor.”

  “Well,” Martext said, cutting in and picking up the thread, “if knowledge is not innate, but something one must cultivate, then any person, regardless of the class into which he was born, as long as his physical and mental faculties were intact, could have acquired the learning needed to write these plays. Theoretically, Shakespeare could have been from the lowest stratum of society.”

  “Theoretically, of course, Professor Martext, all men are created equal,” Bibb replied. “And that theory is especially applicable to today’s society. But one must remember that in Elizabethan times the lot of the lower classes was unfortunate in the extreme. Had Shakespeare been from the lowest stratum, living in penury, he would have been so preoccupied with the struggle to survive, his day-to-day life would have been such an unremitting ordeal, that he wouldn’t have had the leisure to pursue formal education, let alone artistic creation.”

  Martext and Torres rigorously cross-examined Bibb until the corpulent don finally began to break down. He granted it was true t
hat many of the foremost writers of the Elizabethan period were commoners, lacking in university education, who used their pens and their wits to make a living and about whose lives and affairs little information had survived. Pressed even further, Bibb admitted that, although it was highly improbable, it was nevertheless possible that someone from the lower classes could have been a zealous autodidact, borrowing or scrimping or starving to obtain the books and experience that would broaden his sphere of knowledge and nurture his talent.

  “Yet,” Bibb asserted obstinately, “it would be rash to suppose such a metamorphosis in a man of such singular achievement. What Shakespeare—or perhaps I should say Francis Bacon—did was unprecedented, and no one since has matched his accomplishment. It is ludicrous to entertain the notion that someone so lacking in refinement could have transformed himself into the greatest writer of English who ever lived.”

  “However,” Torres countered, “isn’t it also rash to assume that a person is incapable of transforming himself simply because one has never heard of its happening before? Besides, Shakespeare is commonly regarded as a genius, am I right?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “And if we look at geniuses of Shakespeare’s stature in the world of music, for example,” Torres continued, ignoring the interruption, “we see that Bach and Mozart and Beethoven—arguably Shakespeare’s equals in their own field—were also of the common people. Surely, Professor Bibb, you will agree that genius is not a birthright, but a random and perhaps divine gift. Surely you wouldn’t argue that one’s class, one’s standing in the hierarchy of money and power, is the sole, immutable determinant of one’s level of achievement, would you?”

  “Certainly not!” Bibb fumed. “But I must protest that your misleading analogies and convoluted logic have entirely perverted my point, which is that—”

  “Thank you very much, professors,” said Enid Davies, deciding it was time to mediate before the debate digressed any further and flew out of control. “Our discussion thus far has been enlightening. Following the path of ‘the possible,’ as you say, Professor Martext, can lead one to the most astonishing places. These last few minutes of the program will be devoted to my own more traditional and, alas, less glamorous and exotic view of the matter.”