The Man Who Was Shakespeare
what* heroic doggedness Mr. Martin Seymour-Smith (August 20) clings to hi S belief that a few mis-spelt words in a book should be equated with, and crucified as, factual errors. It is not fanci- ful to believe that he would verily damn an author and a book because the letter i in the word sit was not properly dotted. How pedantry is ennobled by his values!
But it is one thing to judge a book on the basis
of proof-reading. It is another (and more frighten- ing) to read the fulminations of a critic reviling, in foaming tirade, an author who is at variance with his point of view. To resort to name-calling billings- gate, as Mr. Seymour-Smith has resorted, to wit: 'idiot,' ignorant,"daft' and (August 6) 'exhibition- ist' hardly bespeaks the critical temperament. His insistence that a tenet or a theme not in harmony with his convictions is merely a 'waste of time' and 'time-wasting' exempts him from the chair of criticism.
Amidst the chaos and welter of. his letter one lone
thought may be salvaged. He asks: '. . . has one Shakespearian scholar come forward to back him [i.e. me] up?' (in my belief that Christopher Marlowe was the author of the Shakespeare Canon). Yes, Mr. Seymour-Smith, an infinitely great number of them. Again, he invokes the equation: a Shakespeare scholar must ipso facto be one who adheres to canons and dogmas of orthodoxy, that is. one who must accept Shakespeare as author of the attributed works; or perhaps one who, in the cloistered confines of a university, amid the deadly routine of classroom duties, finds it a bit difficult to be exposed to fresh concepts, new thoughts or original ideas? May I remind Mr. Seymour-Smith that Shakespeare scholarship is not, nor cannot be, equated with orthodoxy per se? There\ are brilliant scholars who are not university-attached or con- vinced of Shakespeare'S authorship.
Mr. Seymour-Smith's wild additions to the
illustrious names I quoted in my August 13 letter, which he alleges I mentioned ('whose names he mentions), is a chilling manifestation of the in- stability of the human -condition. It is all consistent, I'm afraid, with his hallucinatory invitation for me to visit him at his Sussex home at ,a time when he will not be present though [his] 'proofreader' will 'show' [me] around. A literary critic?
7 Abingdon Court, W8
CALVIN HOFFMAN
Previous page
