Miss Judy Woodruff
Frontline
c/o WGBH
125 Western Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02134
Dear Miss Woodruff:
As a long time admirer of you and of Frontline I write in sorrow
and regret to register my strong disapproval of the treatment accorded the
question of Shakespearean authorship in your recent program, The Shakespeare
Mystery. A matter easily susceptible of common-sense investigation and
conclusion was treated instead with all the earnest irrationality of a medieval
discussion of angels on the head of a pin. I am afraid that Frontline
may have seriously damaged its reputation for sound and solid analytical
reporting.
Let me explain my own claim to having some knowledge of the subject. I
taught English Literature for almost fifty years before my retirement in 1983.
More than forty years ago I undertook a thorough study of the
anti-Stratfordians. I had no preconceived notions of where my investigation
might lead and no emotional investment in the person called William Shakespeare
(1564-1616) of Stratford-on-Avon. I did not then, and do not now, have the
slightest interest on personal grounds in arguing the claims of one proposed
author rather than another. Indeed, I thought at first that with all the smoke
pouring from the chimneys of the doubters there must be a fire somewhere. I
read a vast body of material on the subject (nobody could read it all) from
William Henry Smith to Delia Bacon to Ignatius Donnelly to Nathaniel Holmes to
the Ogburns (Charlton, Sr. and his wife Dorothy, and their son Charlton, Jr.,
the Charlton Ogburn who appeared on your program).
In determining authorship of any work, whether of a Greek classic, an
Elizabethan play, a Romantic poem, or a modern novel, the techniques are pretty
much the same. One looks for identifications on title pages of books or
manuscripts, for comments by contemporaries, for what appears in the historical
record (such as, for sixteenth and seventeenth century books, The Register
of the Stationers Company). I don't want to expand on what can be a
complex subject. Let me say only that, like every other disinterested
investigator who has looked into the matter, I concluded that William
Shakespeare was indeed the author of the works generally attributed to him.
The evidence for his authorship is as complete and sound as the evidence that
John Milton wrote Paradise Lost or that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry
Finn. If, on the evidence, we deny Shakespeare the authorship of his works
then we must, to be fair and consistent, deny Milton's and Mark Twain's claims
also. The conclusion that Shakespeare is The Author is not one that is made
tentatively, as a mere likelihood or probability, as the best that one can do
in the face of insufficient evidence. Rather it is one that is made with
absolute certainty. All the evidence relating to authorship points to
the Stratford Shakespeare and him alone. There is no evidence of any kind
pointing to anyone else, as your program clearly demonstrated.
I respectfully suggest, Miss Woodruff, that if you take another look at a
tape of your program you will discover that the Oxfordian stars of the show do
not present any evidence of any kind for Oxford's authorship. When the smoke
and mirrors are removed you will find that they have nothing but emotional
rhetoric on their side. Oxford cannot be shown to be The Author merely because
one wishes he were. If you will apply the simple conventional rules of proof
by which to determine the authorship of literary works (anybody's, not just
Shakespeare's) I think you will find that in your program not a single piece
of evidence is adduced that connects Oxford in any way with Shakespeare's
works. We are not faced with a question of choice, of how to decide
between two equal but conflicting claims. No person trained in the evaluation
of evidence could find any justification for the pretensions of the Oxfordians
(or for that matter of the Baconians or the Dyerians or any other of the many
claimants).
You may ask why, if this is so, the anti-Stratfordian movement has
persisted for so long. I addressed the question twenty-five years ago in an
essay I wrote for the Union College Symposium on the 400th anniversary
of Shakespeare's birth. I enclose a copy for your amusement and, I hope,
edification. Mr. Charlton Ogburn, Jr. (he has since dropped the Jr.) was so
infuriated by the article that he threatened to sue me and Union College but
decided not to. The President of Union's Board of Trustees, a distinguished
lawyer, was eager to have the case tried in court. In his most recent book,
The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality (New York:
Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984), Ogburn takes some pot shots at me and my
article, but it is significant that he does not meet any of the objections I
raised there, and that his book, a long one like This Star of England
(written by his parents), is as free of evidence as theirs was. In the years
since that article was published I have found no reason to change my view about
the source of anti-Stratfordianism; indeed events since have strengthened
it.
One of the qualities I found in the anti-Stratfordians (see my article) is
their "preternatural persuasiveness." They can make people believe almost
anything by the sheer power of their rhetoric and emotion. They would make
wonderful second-hand car salesman, and indeed what they sold the producers of
your show was little more than the intellectual equivalent of a second-hand
car. The main speaker on your program slanted everything in favor of the
Oxfordians. To cover his rear he suggested the evidence for Shakespearean
authorship, but buried it in the middle of the program in about seventy
seconds, then simply moved back to the Oxfordian rhetoric and never made the
simple point that he failed to present any evidence of Oxford's connection with
the plays, that in terms of evidence the Stratford Shakespeare holds all the
cards and Oxford none. Even in the choice of advocates the program was
slanted, perhaps unintentionally but effectively. Professor Rowse may be a
distinguished Oxford Don, but he is also a petulant and abrasive man, not
likable even when he speaks the truth. He spent most of his time calling his
opponents names rather than demolishing their arguments. Professor Schoenbaum
is the most distinguished of Shakespearean biographers whose own works
demonstrate Stratfordian authorship quite convincingly, but I think even he
will acknowledge that television is not his most effective medium. The average
viewer, the "man in the street," probably came away from that show with the
feeling that there really was a question about who wrote Hamlet when in
fact there is none.
One of the other devices involved in the smoke and mirrors was the use of
the professional actor solemnly intoning Hamlet's dying plea to Horatio, given
at the beginning of the program, and repeated ad nauseam. By its
propinquity to emotional utterances by Ogburn, the viewer is led to believe
that the passage refers to Oxford's desire to have his authorship known. But
--if we want to assign secret meanings to ordinary passages in drama-- it could
just as easily be Sir Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth who is asking for
recognition. Nothing connects Oxford with the passage, nor does the program
demonstrate that it does; it merely suggests darkly. Actually, of course,
Hamlet spoke the lines in a play to another dramatic character, lines necessary
to the drama, as they explain how the inside story of Hamlet's family life came
to be known so it could be written about. It makes sense just as it is; it
requires no extraneous interpretation --and no interpretation can be shown to
have any connection with Oxford.
What the Oxfordians lack and desperately seek is something, anything, that
can give respectability and credibility to their cause. If on the title page
of some Shakespearean work, a play or a poem or the Sonnets, there
appeared the words "By Oxford," or "By the Seventeeenth Earl"; if in the
Stationers Register Oxford's name was connected, however indirectly, to
any of Shakespeare's works; if in a manuscript in the Library of the British
Museum, which has scores of thousands of Elizabethan and Jacobean manuscripts,
there was even one that named Oxford in connection with a Shakespearean work,
we would all have to sit up and take notice. No such book or manuscript or
record has ever been found, not one. The respectability which the
Oxfordians could not win on the merits of their argument they have now been
handed free by the producers of Frontline.
The absence of logical consistency on this program is another of its
defects, though again not easily noticed by the Man in the Street. The
Oxfordians, who detest the country bumpkin from the shabby little town of
Stratford, make much of the fact that this mean little money-grubber didn't
even mention the manuscripts of the plays in his will. (He didn't own the
manuscripts, but that's another subject and is neither here nor there). But if
Oxford was the Author, why didn't he, with his vast wealth and
influence, preserve the manuscripts among his possessions and mention
them in his will? Why find fault with a poor little country boy for not
doing what a powerful earl failed to do?
One could go on and on, which is precisely what the anti-Stratfordians
want one to do, throwing dust in people's eyes and blinding them to the fact
that they have not been able to dispose of Shakespeare's formidable and
convincing claims of authorship of his own works. If you reexamine the program
you will discover that their only argument against Stratfordian authorship is
that a simple boy from a country town couldn't have written such magnificent
works -- just as Mark Twain (in his upbringing the American equivalent of
Shakespeare), with little education (he didn't go to Harvard as Mr. Ogburn did)
could not possibly have written so sophisticated a work as The Mysterious
Stranger and as John Keats, who never went to Oxford or any other
respectable school and who never lived in medieval times, could not possibly
have written The Eve of St. Agnes.
And, finally, I deeply regret your own closing remarks, which I am sure
were provided for you by the fellow who wrote the show. After an hour of a
program demonstrating that the anti-Stratfordians have nothing on their side,
you then appear on camera to make the remarkable statement that we still don't
know who really wrote the plays and the poems, that no "smoking gun" has yet
appeared. Yet the clear and documented evidence for the Stratford Shakespeare
is the equivalent of a 16-inch cannon; the Oxfordians have not even a cork
popgun. I think you will discover on reflection that there is no justification
for the unfortunate words with which you ended the program. And the words you
were given to speak at the beginning were equally misleading. You said that
"since Shakespeare's death in 1616 more than 4,000 books" had been written
questioning his authorship; you neglected to say (and perhaps you didn't know)
that the first of these was not written until a hundred and fifty years after
his death. During his lifetime and for a century and a half afterward no one
questioned that Shakespeare was the author.
My worry is that Frontline may have done itself irreparable damage.
Shakespeare is secure. He has never been in real danger and is in none now,
but Frontline has always been regarded as a program that discusses
matters of broad intellectual interest from a scientific, rational, and
common-sense point of view. The subject of anti-Stratfordianism is certainly
an important one since it interests so many people, but Frontline
treated it as if it were a serious intellectual position rather than what it
is. One might expect such treatment on 20/20 or the Geraldo Rivera Show, but
not on Frontline. There are many Flat Earthers too, but would
Frontline devote an hour to discussing their arguments so seriously and
leave the reader with dark suspicions that there really is something to their
claims, that there is no "smoking gun" to prove the earth round?
With admiration for your work, and with regret for having felt compelled
to write this letter, I am,
Sincerely yours,
William M. Murphy
