On June 25, 1876, when George Custer and his 209 men were slaughtered by the untutored Sioux and Cheyenne, among the many incongruous and rather stupid reactions that agitated the nation for some time was the theory that the Indians had been led by a graduate of West Point. 

 

This fed many then-current prejudices: West Point had produced a number of traitors of some military competence in the recent Civil War, and it also produced the men who beat them.  This fit in well for a conceptual template that both scolded and enthused the population for the inevitable comeuppance which, of course, would all transpire safely far, far away in the area vaguely known as The West, where Montana could be found on the map as surely as Mongolia by most Americans of the time.  Or, if statistics are correct, today. 

 

The story had specific details which fueled it; there had been a young man nicknamed “Bison” – who apparently looked like one – and this academy cadet of the 1840’s was thrown out for having impregnated a local girl, or ‘ruining’ her, or something.  Years later, he supposedly was living with Indians in the ‘far’ West and once or twice ran across classmates leading patrols chasing his group down.  And after some highly suspicious tales made the rounds, that was the last heard of him. 

 

But according to the written record of West Point, this is all true.  The Cadet was from Missouri and a nephew of Senator McLean.  The young woman’s name was Effie Conklin, and after the ruination and a bar fight just before graduation in Stonewall Jackson’s class, Bison was removed from sullying the other cadets and went west.  The young man would, at the time of Custer’s demise, be the rough age of Sitting Bull, the supposed General, mastermind, and witch doctor who somehow had pulled this off, this inexplicable slaughter of the elite Seventh Cavalry and its fabled commander, part of the greatest army that had ever marched, as the nation was relentlessly informed.  Ergo, Bison must be Sitting Bull.

 

Later, Bison was demonstrated to have been killed long before the Little Bighorn.  But he had a good run as Sitting Bull.

 

Of course, the same sorts of records also show that the Seventh Cavalry was, by any standard, a mediocre or far worse outfit, a substantial percentage of whose troopers could barely ride or shoot even when not in combat, hardly fit to take on battle-hardened plains’ Indians, much less the powerful Sioux and their Cheyenne allies, widely considered the world’s best cavalry and horsemen and idolized by both white and red cultures as people of great honor and courage.  They needed no outside help to polish off Custer.

 

But Sitting Bull, once Bison, struck the public fancy, and was embellished to have studied the tactics of Napoleon while at West Point, and to have corresponded with Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce in Latin, examples thoughtfully provided to the press, part of which, apparently believed it.  By the time it was all done, the unwary might feel it would have been best for the nation if it surrendered post haste and begged for mercy from this Bonaparte from beyond the Mississippi.

 

What in the world was this about, this utter fabrication out of tales and wishful thinking?  It seemed to satisfy some sort of need, much of it rooted in vanity: we were civilized and could not be beaten by Orientals in loin cloths.  But there was something else, even deeper.  Not only must the commander of the warriors not be an Indian, but he must, somehow, have had benefit of the very schooling that made us – and not them - civilized and superior.  Upper class, part of the aristocracy, not only of our race but also of its upper classes; a fallen angel, if you will.  Not just an enemy to be respected for his strategy, and schooling, but one comfortably doomed.  Because that’s just the way things are meant to be, is why.

 

For those of you undergoing a certain amount of cognitive dissonance trying to correlate the title to the content thus far, sorry.   We now arrive at Shakespeare.  Or rather the argument over who Shakespeare was.

 

Ever since Ben Johnson put aside any and all vanity or jealousy regarding the talent of his friend and assembled most all of Shakespeare’s works that he could find and published them in the Folios, people have been both uneasy and in some awe of the good old boy lying in Avon and not in The Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abby. 

The growing realization that Shakespeare was far more than one of the greatest writers in the language, far more than just someone among our best poets, necessitated that he be examined and provided with proper background for his achievements, underpinnings that reflect well on his civilization, as if Homer were a contemporary of grandfather, and could be placed in locus and society and time.  He had to be more than a middle class scribe doing a mere job as best he could.  We’ll return to this, but the very fact of his popularity, however achieved, had importance beyond his literary product.  

 

His popularity acted as an efficient compiler of the rhythms and cadence of the language itself; the musical ticks that affect not only our poetry but even how jokes are told, restaurant orders taken, and which lock English into the music it sings to this day: the English world is primarily Iambic, tetrameter and pentameter.

 

Modern English prose, it seems to me, is written and delivered in iambic tetrameter.   “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and tide.  And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by….”   Just about all prose and declamatory writing has that sense of ‘regress to mean’ about it when it hits the boards in a beat compatible with iambic tetrameter.   Our everyday, spoken language is as tied to the heart beat of iambic tetrameter as is our music.

 

Note and word have their own music, united in song, but most often pursuing different if convivial paths.  It is the music of a language that attracts or repels those that do not speak it.  In English, where the grammatical subject, verb and object tend to be separate words, and follow that order, the rhythms lend themselves to those variants of iambic tetrameter.  Much literature and conversation can be attenuated to that rhythm, and we find it soothing, especially when delivered by secure adults.  Duh-DUH, duh-duh, duh…duh, with the lowest note the last word.  

 

Children, in their various excitements, deliver sentences that go up in volume and scale.  “And THEN, Mommy, we wanted to GO BACK to the STORE?  You KNOW?”  Everything is a question, or sounds like it.  It grates and confuses, as the young are programmed to do so we pay attention.  But what happens if that delivery is replicated in Spanish or Chinese because the verbs come at the end of the sentence or elsewhere than in English and have quite adult connotation if we’re trained to recognize it.  We don’t know what they’re saying, but it sounds like a bunch of children talking gibberish except that they’re adults.  And how do we treat adults talking like children?  As children we don’t know, often with annoyance at perpetual presence.  When English was still unformed, with spelling and grammar ‘as what thay wrotes’, local dialects must have seemed like different languages to towns forty miles distant.  Listening to people from different parts of the realm talk must have proved annoying in long contact.  People got the standardized language from the traveling theater troupes, which tended to confirm pronunciations and meanings around the realm.  Shakespeare, as the most popular playwright, played a large role in that, unintended but sure.

 

Not always, but there were variants of pronunciations and style that could easily have conquered, a more sing-song approach and delivery of, say, Chaucer, or actual French or Gaelic.  But the thing about Shakespeare, and the few writers that remotely compare, is that you cannot read him – certainly not aloud – and not be affected by the strange beauty and rhythmic music of his wording, even as he channels emotions recognized by everyone to this day.

 

E. L. Doctorow, on NPR discussing his new collection of short stories, chatted amiably about the music in words, their very order and choice gives a melody to bank up their meaning, and how the connection was made early in his Depression era Bronx apartment where his mother played piano and his father ran a music store, and the place was full of books.  Reading to yourself can be enhanced and subject to chaos when playing music depending on how well or poorly the music blends with the cadence of words.

 

These are accolades not granted easily or without due thought and consideration, and there are few examples in other languages where one person so thoroughly dominated that he was both the bench mark of normalcy and the ideal at once.  Not even Voltaire – who many consider the greatest writer of all time in any language - dominates French as Shakespeare bestrides English.  And given that English is the main international language of science and pop culture, diplomacy and emergency channels, his influence is greater each year.  And less appreciated, but that’s to be expected.

 

This might be because Samuel Johnson, who put together the first English dictionary, came about a century and one half after Shakespeare died, not long enough for his influence – direct, in some cases – to have faded from institutional memory of the British theater and its audience, which was everyone.  The language Johnson wrote down had been codified and solidified by the popularity of Shakespeare, and his word use and mastery of informal and popular expression was a final judgment.  Besides which, Johnson knew genius.

 

On top of that, on a less literary level, Shakespeare was both the medium and the man who recalled the days and ways of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth, the two greatest monarchs in England’s history, and whose historical alliances and inclinations bothered monarchs and people for a century after their, and Shakespeare’s passing.  Every war in France – and gee, there sure were a lot of them – found rich, inspirational quotes from the Bard of Avon.  You couldn’t forget Shakespeare because every event inspired the need for great language.  And Shakespeare wrote a lot in inspired language.  The shades of John of Gaunt and most of the Henrys, even the Richards, are most glad that Shakespeare’s fabrications and not their own oily, perfidious utterances – and in French! - are what the public recalls about them.  What would today’s tongue bathers of recent veterans do without the easy quotes about a ‘band of brothers?’  What would Lord Nelson?

 

As Shakespeare’s fame and presence became greater and more calcified with each succeeding generation, resentment began.  Let’s face it; Shakespeare sucked the oxygen not only out of the candle-lit garret but out of the royal stage as well for many years after his passing.  This looming ogre intimidated and discouraged all but the most confident and talented, which probably played a role in England’s production of generation after generation of influential, skillful, and daunting authors and poets way out of proportion to the population.  And that’s just in literature.

 

To this day, visiting theater types are intimidated and impressed by not only the quality of British actors, but the quantity.  ‘It sometimes seems,’ they say, ‘that everyone in England can act.’  For better or worse, you can lay this at Shakespeare’s feet.  If you’re young and in the Royal Vic, there are certain things about your talent that can be assumed beyond all doubt because of the vast competition, things that graduates of various prestigious acting academies in the United States do not necessarily have.  Going to local theater in England is a quite different experience than in most of the United States.

 

George Bernard Shaw thought Shakespeare over-rated, which is both true and not.  Praised and damned for all the wrong reasons, Shakespeare in our canon has choked off the oxygen for newer writers and playwrights, some of them incredibly gifted.  That can lead to resentment as personal as if Shakespeare himself chose plays for performance to this day other than by product quality.

 

To this day he channels acting, elevates and demands it, in the Sceptered Isle, guaranteeing it the preponderance of the world’s finest stage actors and a disproportionate number of the best movie actors.  That’s because - more than Samuel Johnson, Chaucer, or Noah Webster - Shakespeare defined and codified the English language, set the structure for its growth, gave gravitas to the verb ‘to be’ (the star of our language) and gave it literature both easy to memorize and worth memorizing. 

 

He didn’t invent any of it, he simply mastered it and gave it – or made apparent, or assured its distribution – of the rhythms and cadences, the richness and beauty of its ability to be the most accurate language and one of the loveliest; to express best everything from formula to anguish.  This has made it both the sluttiest language on earth - absorbing any handy word or phrase without shame or much notice - and one of the most beautiful and certainly the most popular.

 

One guy can be said to have done all this, made it possible and likely and more or less provided us with the evidence to defend the contention.  A working Joe, a scribe for cold hard ones, a sell out of sell outs who rose above it effortlessly.  Assign Shakespeare a task of writing a poem to assuage someone dying horribly of cancer, he might come close.  He might do it.  His empathetic abilities, his talent, his genius for insight and spirit were that good.  And let’s be honest: Pay him enough, he might do it really, really well.  Money, or the fear of no money, spoke to him loudly. 

 

Such influence and importance has rankled the class conscious British for centuries, and like UFO academics and Custer historians in America, the search for Shakespeare has its own clique and standards of expertise.  The one thing they have in common is that if Shakespeare actually existed, he was little more than a literate janitor type, perhaps good enough for small parts on stage, but the person who wrote the plays and the poems was obviously a person of great schooling, of great experience, of great aristocratic virtue and not to be mistaken for the Upstart Crow, the earliest known reference to Shakespeare the playwright.  All people to be substituted for Shakespeare are upper class and wealthy, you will notice.

 

One chronic applicant to the title is Edward de Vere, the 17^th Earl of Oxford, an Elizabethan nobleman whose death date just passed the four hundred year mark.  Supposedly, when Shakespeare arrived broke in London, de Vere used him as a front for his plays and acting.  This presumes that acting and writing what was acted was considered a degrading profession, and an aristocrat would have to fake it to do it.   The de Vere Society is quite adamant about all this….despite the fact de Vere died twelve years before Shakespeare did, before the last plays.

 

Another claimant seems to be an unwilling Francis Bacon, apparently because he was an acknowledged genius and scientist and a terrific writer of, well, non-fiction.  Yes, we know he was writing a novel, The New Atlantis, at his death, but that was barely more than a wet dream for the scientific laboratory of Saloman, a name and occupation that Tolkien probably was aware of.   Anybody good at science is just naturally a great writer, aren’t they?  Who among us hasn’t choked up at the love poems of Edward Teller and the short stories of Albert Einstein?  There is little in Bacon to indicate that he’d have been particularly interested in the title of The Bard although much to suggest he’d have enjoyed reading Shakespeare.  Everyone did, after all.

 

Christopher Marlowe, the literary and literal gay blade who was exactly Shakespeare’s contemporary, died at twenty-nine under mysterious circumstances – he was murdered – and in the years after Shakespeare constructed his greatest works.  Ergo, obviously and without any question, Marlowe faked his own death and put out plays under Shakespeare’s name while living on the continent while Will simply remained as an actor.  Or not.  Or whatever.  But Shakespeare didn’t write the plays, of that we can be sure.  Marlowe did, because Marlowe went to Cambridge – on a scholarship!! – and therefore moved in the correct circles and must have done it.  Yet, it is not just noblemen or natural gay aristocrats like Marlowe who people the ranks of unknowing and perhaps unwilling pretenders. 

 

Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, also has her supporters.  A literary lioness, Lady Pembroke also is the recipient, indirectly, of thanks and dedications in Shakespeare’s portfolio. The first Shakespearean plays, her backers remark, were published anonymously by Pembroke’s Men, the theater troupe she and her husband founded.  Her symbol was the swan, and Shakespeare was the Swan of Avon. 

 

She was also a poet, like her famous brother Phillip de Vere, and probably as well educated as Queen Elizabeth, and had a huge and varied library.  She was dedicated to the elevation of English literature, which sounds rather fussy and snobby today, but English was only then being spoken in correct circles by ‘nice’ people, with French the tongue of the aristocracy and the diplomatic world.  English was the bastard child of French and the various Germanic dialects built upon the numerous Britannic place names throughout the island, so picking up the cudgel for the native, evolving language bespeaks of a farsighted woman aiding in the creation of a culture and a country....   And, she was born before Shakespeare and died after.

 

She had been conceived of as a collaborator on some of Shakespeare’s plays previous to the recent insistence that, in fact, she was the Man herself.  Her emergence has to do with book learning, which she certainly had and which Shakespeare, the oaf, is considered not to have had.

 

But there is nothing in her known poetry that speaks of genius.

 

For an English major, Shakespeare is both the devil and the god.  In this country, relentlessly bad exposure to and instruction in Shakespeare’s plays and poems generally manage to kill off any love of language as surely and as totally as mandated piano instruction kills love of music in the young when they just want to play guitar.  Any love of music in word or note is stifled utterly by innovative choice of awful teachers, preferably ones who favor memorization with no point and no clue.  Any flickering flame will then be drowned by endurance of piano recitals and local theater productions of Hamlet, where the unleashed tones of Oklahoma meet the clipped enunciation of the Bronx to produce a cacophony in many different volumes and styles guaranteed to drive anyone actually paying attention to slit their wrists with the program edge.  Ironic that the great homogenizer of language is subject to such strains. 

 

Later, one of the greatest Victorians, winding down and honest as ever, wondered through the history of his mind to, well, formulate a reason for his tastes and his dislikes and how these have made him a better or lesser man.  He put some effort into it.

 

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

 

I don’t think that implications of these tossed-away sentences of mild regret are given the examination they deserve.  Charles Darwin today would need only own a radio to have his fear of music and poetry deprivation abated, postulating a cultural adaptation.  With computers, his self-concluded strong points are nearly and practically irrelevant.  But even with more music and poetry than ever, gifts they once provided those fortunate enough to have received them now seem mean and small.  Youth has abandoned rock and roll for computer worlds.   And after a century and a half of seduction, the Love Brat of Capitalist and Pedagogue rules school boards across the nation, and traditional humanities suffer even more with general unappreciation than the various sciences.  And that’s pretty bad.  But it isn’t the comment on our world that glows from Darwin’s autobiographical passage; it’s the hell that was his world, and the world that preceded him, by modern standards.  

 

First, given that we are inundated with music all day and night, and have it at our command - not just our favorite songs and performers but a precise performance that we can listen to over and over - the idea of listening to some music only once a week, and being able – absent a crown – to only hear what was offered and by who was offering it, strikes me, anyway, as about as deprived as one can be.  We are spoiled rotten by the technology of our age, and the longing for music that consumed those in centuries past is absent from our consciousness. 

 

In fact, any entertainment in centuries past generally required you live in a city.  Rural life may or may not have had its charms, but it had its deprivations as well, and likely any music or entertainment that did not require your own work or effort was greatly admired and appreciated to a degree.  If you paid to see such, and it was badly done, the anger would be immense.

 

I was thinking of all this while watching a program on PBS called In Search of Shakespeare.  It was by Michael Wood, a documentary film maker, although he inserts himself heavily into the proceedings.  Twenty odd years ago he did the same sort of thing on Troy, and it was absolutely fascinating as much for its history of archaeology as for the contrast of possible truth to the poems said to have been written by Homer.  It is now generally conceded that Homer was a composite name of all those who contributed to the Iliad and Odyssey through the centuries previous, but we cannot know, of course.  Homer, in whatever form he graced us, lived centuries after the hypothetical war on which he wrote, and it is to be wondered that anything whatever is accurate.   But some of it might be.

 

To be precise, some of it is.  There was a Troy where Homer said it was.

 

I cannot recall all that Wood concluded about the Troy of Homer, except that it is the 6^th city on the site, there was burning and other things consistent with war and siege, and that Priam ruled at the same time as Ramses II in Egypt (the Pharaoh of the Exodus with Moses) and that the years around 1700 BCE must have been an interesting time.

 

I think an effort needs to be made to imagine how absent was music and entertainment in the olden days by our standards.  Sure, in the cities and in the courts, there would be minstrels and jesters and all sorts of performers, but for most people?  I wonder.  I wonder how much there could have been despite the romantic images handed down.  If Charles Darwin would have to make a point to listen to music once a week, apparently requiring some effort even for a man of means, makes you wonder how much music there actually was.

 

In the four part series of Shakespeare, Wood pretty much blows the lid off various other theories that have been percolating around for centuries, foremost amongst which was that Shakespeare probably didn’t exist, and if he did exist it was as a nobody because there was hardly any mention of such a person, and in any case Christopher Marlowe wrote his plays, or at least the ones not written by the Earl of Essex, Elvis, or the Illuminati.  Horsefeathers.

 

Wood convincingly shows that Shakespeare did exist, and he does so by finding the Bard’s life noted and kept by the local bureaucrats of the age, one that Wood enjoys calling Queen Elizabeth’s police state.  Marriage licenses, law suits, property deeds, all there, and there is his signature, and there are these manuscripts in the same hand which suggest that, if Ben Johnson’s word wasn’t enough, Shakespeare wrote what we think he did.  Yet, I just watched within the last year a documentary devoted to the opposite: that Marlowe was clearly Shakespeare because his ‘death’ occurred at just the moment when the Bard became famous and started writing all these plays that were really good.

 

While you could say that Marlowe’s best play was at a par with the lower end of Shakespeare’s output, there is nothing in Marlowe – or anyone – that compares with Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet, one of the early plays.  It is the phrasing, the internal poetry, the layered language of suggested intimacy, of gossamer threat, that elevates Shakespeare over all before and concurrent.  Compared to the work of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe’s suffers.  But then, Marlowe died at twenty-nine.  Had Shakespeare, we’d be bereft of the plays with which the world is still intimidated.

 

I like this.  Proof positive the man who, like it or not, gave us our language and provided a concordance of expression for the years up to him that make Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of a century later so much less impressive.  Because Shakespeare either created or recorded a dizzying number of expressions that are clichés to us.  One guy.

 

He wrote thirty odd plays and numerous poems and we don’t even know if we are aware of half of his output, which can be politely considered prodigious.  Some consider it highly unlikely that one man could turn out three or four plays a year of the quality or durability of those under the name William Shakespeare.  Apparently he could, anyway, although it seems to have been the norm for playwrights and theater troupes of that remarkable literary period.

 

Shakespeare was born a Catholic during the Tudor confusion of what religion would consist of in their island kingdom, and his benefactors were often Catholic – secretly Catholic - nobles, and although religion did not seem a major factor in his life, given that he cheerfully performed for the Anglican Elizabeth and her successor, he did honor his father and his family and early benefactors and is rumored to have been buried with the rites of the old religion.  In any case, Shakespeare – so often offered as an example of Protestant Tudor England and the flowering of culture it inspired – was pretty clearly, at heart at least, a Roman Catholic.  As a member of an oppressed faith, his compassion for others under the gun wended its way into his plays and his life.

 

Acknowledged as a brilliant wit and writer in his time, apparently neither he nor his good friends fully appreciated his genius, his lasting gift to us all till after his death.  It was then that they put his collected works – or most of them, or some – together in the folios.  His poetry was never collected as his plays were, and lord knows what we’ve lost of his.  Compositions attributed to Shakespeare still turn up, found hidden away, identified by his handwriting.  Together, these plays seemed to exert a powerful force upon any and all who read them, who could view such beauty, insight, passion, and pain as the work of one man.  It’s true in translation as well.  From Russia, from India, from China the genius of the work was appreciated by the local literati almost immediately even when stumbled upon and not taught in imperial schools.

 

As Darwin’s remark suggests, music was not as frequently available to the public even at that late date in our history in the manner movies and rumor have traditionally suggested.  It was a rare delight, and probably an ethereal and elevating experience to those fortunate enough to absorb a symphony.

 

I suspect that the continued popularity of Shakespeare was due to a similar effect his phrasing – his cadence and music - had on his listeners, be they doomed monarchs like Edward VI or the town millers in Outer Crapwad-on-Sinkhole during a tour of the hinterlands by his theatre troupes.  Phrasing.  It was not the plots, for the most part.  Shakespeare lifted plots from others as surely as they did from him, and theater was really a form of catharsis by accepted and known template in linear development and characters.  Much like religious service.  Much like religion.

 

Even if you don’t buy into Robert Graves’ theories of the White Goddess and the earlier aspects of religion, there are things that can be said with some surety about how the tendrils of long ago faiths are with us yet.  There are three major and current institutions that are descendents of the early temples and the public worship of whatever/whoever therein.  First, of course, is church, with its ritual dance (even if just stand and sit) and music, its call and response. 

 

Second is the secular manifestations of those types of performance, reduced or elevated (depending upon your prejudices) into pop music and rap, rock, and reggae, and musical theater, opera, ballet, and drama…..perhaps all performance, based upon the early shock and awe of theatrical presentations to those inexperienced in it, and told to consider it a form of or maybe the very definition of divine revelation. 

 

And third, the corner bar and all the social exchanges and rituals that attend it, drunken and sexual.  Because at one time, all three of these very separate institutions today were united in the major temples which served as performing arts centers, places of worship, and drug distribution centers augmented by prostitutes and pornographers.

 

Shakespeare’s most devoted hagiographers would suggest that The Bard of Avon was as divine in talent and insight as humans get, lived in the world of popular performance for cash and elevated it despite its limited demands, and was utterly at home in the third world of camaraderie, drink, dissolution, and friendship.  Few men of such talent left such few enemies, so many friends, and a record of devoted husband and father, devastated by the loss of his son (probably the source of the poems that have been construed as gay because of all that lip kissing….), and all things considered, to the annoyance of elites and artistic snobs who wanted him to have suffered, a very middle class, hard working schlub who just wrote a tad better than anyone else.  Ever.

 

Tom Lehrer, in the introduction to a song on a live performance album, mentioned that certain people’s deaths suggest how little one had accomplished.  For example, when Mozart was Lehrer’s age, he’d been dead six years. 

 

When William Shakespeare, poet and playwright of London and Stratford on Avon, had my years, he’d been dead four of them.