REHupa

Sometimes it seems that hardly a day goes by that something doesn’t remind me of a Robert E. Howard comment. There is, of course, the daily news, with its constant drumbeat of violence and treachery which calls to mind Howard’s views on humanity’s true nature. But occasionally something of a somewhat lighter nature also comes to mind. This was the case this past Sunday when I read a couple of articles in The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section.

The Kennedy Center is sponsoring a six-month “Shakespeare in Washington” festival, which is undoubtedly the reason that the Post thought to run articles arguing two sides of the Shakespearean “authorship question.” While the majority of Shakespearean scholars, and the general public, agree with Stanley Wells that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was the author of the plays attributed to him, others argue, for various reasons, that the author must have been someone from a higher social class, thus better educated and more widely travelled, than the middle-class son of a merchant from Stratford. A growing number of these “It wasn’t Shakespeare” scholars side with the argument summarized by Roger Stritmatter suggesting that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the author of Hamlet, Macbeth, et al.

The “authorship question” apparently dates from “around 1785 ,” when a clergyman confided to a friend that he believed Francis Bacon had probably written the plays attributed to Shakespeare, and over the years a variety of candidates were posited. According to Stritmatter, the case for Edward de Vere was originally made in 1920 by the unfortunately (for the Oxfordians) named James Looney, in a book entitled Shakespeare Identified.

As I read these articles, I remembered Bob Howard’s remark on the topic to H.P. Lovecraft, from a 1932 letter:

I notice where a mug named Oliver Herford has decided Shakespeare was Lord Oxford. It must have been a momentus decision, affecting the destiny of the world for Olivero got his map in the magazines. Personally, I never cared whether the Shakespearian plays were written by Shakespeare of Stratford-on -Avon, or Lord Oxford-on-Thames or Lord Bitchbelly of Hogwallow-on-the-Tripe. Its a cinch somebody wrote ‘em, because I’ve read ‘em myself, unless I was suffering from an optical delusion, and if so, I enjoyed the delusion. Although there’s only one character of Shakespeare that I have any real attachment to, and that’s Sir John Falstaff. I have a sincere affection for that old bastard.

Oliver Herford (1863-1935) was perhaps best known as an illustrator, but was also a poet and playwright; the sobriquet “the American Oscar Wilde” was probably earned by his ability to come up with eminently quotable quips (such as “Only the young die good”). I haven’t yet located the magazines in which he got his “map” published, probably in the late summer of 1932 (“September 22, 1932″ is pencilled on the letter to Lovecraft, though not by Howard; internal evidence supports a September 1932 date). I have found a newspaper column by O.O. McIntyre (“New York Day by Day,” one of the more popular syndicated columns of the 20s and 30s; at least one newspaper carried it under the title “McIntyre’s Daily Chat”), datelined November 2, 1933, in which he wrote:

The Washington Square intelligentsia are in hot debate again as to whether Shakespeare wrote his famous works. Leading the cons are Oliver Herford and Joseph Auslander. They are firm in their opinion that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is the real author.

Since this was written a bit more than a year after Howard’s comments, all we are able to surmise is that Herford was making something of a sideline of debating the “authorship question.” I’d be delighted if anyone out there were able to point me toward the magazine Howard refers to.

Howard apparently liked Shakespeare quite a bit. In a 1928 letter to Clyde Smith, he said:

I have carefully gone over, in my mind, the most powerful men – that is, in my opinion – in all of the world’s literature and here is my list:
Jack London, Leonid Androyev, Omar Khayam, Eugene O’Neill, William Shakespeare.
All these men, and especially London and Khayam, to my mind stand out so far above the rest of the world that comparison is futile, a waste of time. Reading these men and appreciating them makes a man feel life not altogether useless.

A quick look at the REH Bookshelf entry for Shakespeare will show that Howard was evidently pretty well versed in the Bard of Avon. (At one point he even argued for Francis Bacon’s authorship of Hamlet, to Novalyne Price. And he quotes in “Graveyard Rats” from Titus Andronicus — man, nobody reads Titus Andronicus!)

But in certain moods Howard could be hard on Shakespeare, as in a 1929 letter to Smith (immediately following the play, “Bastards All!”):

I have a feeling that I’ve unconciously plagiarized a great deal on this drammer but what the Hell. Its very disconnected because my desires wavered between a wish to write straight jovial obscenity and a desire to simply parody Shakespeare and exaggerate and emphasize what I consider show the bastardness of the scut’s nature – the brutal inconsistencies of his characters. I admit that he portrayed human nature that way, but his damnable preachings show his swinishness to my mind. I admit Shakespeare nauseates me quickly. If I might wish for any real power in anything I might write, it would be to write a book proving that he wrote all his dramas but making him out such a bastard that it would influence future literature. I can stand all but the ruling class moral tone he puts in from time to time. That isnt an echo of Upty [Upton Sinclair]. I never even read what Upty said about him. He narrates the doings [of] a bastard, makes you see he is a bastard, then leaves you with the impression that after all, the bastard was morally in the right. Oh, Hell, I cant say what I’m trying to. All I do is wander around in a labyrinth of words which never start and get nowhere. I never in my life presented a clear view of what I wanted to say. I can readily see why primitive people fight instead of arguing. Many a time have I wished to carry my point by the simple process of caving in seven or eight skulls in a row. I consider a swing with a mallet an unanswerable argument. At this time, instead of trying to make my friends understand what I cant understand myself, I’d simply seek out a teacher of Shakespeare and slam him with a mallet, thereby exhibiting my contempt for the subject and my stand on the matter as a whole.