On Hamlet and reasonable doubt: a question for Alex Jack, pt. 2

Part two of our interview with Alex Jack, whose 2005 two-volume edition of Hamlet celebrates William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe as co-authors of the world's most famous play. Howard Zinn, author of the bestselling A People's History of the United States, hails Alex Jack's Hamlet as "remarkable" and "enormously impressive as a detective work in literature." Professor Jack has authored or edited more than 35 books on food and health, history, science, and the arts, including The Cancer-Prevention Diet (with Michio Kushi), The Mozart Effect (with Don Campbell), and Vegetarian Bride of Frankenstein. He is a macrobiotic teacher and counselor and divides his time between his home in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts and teaching in Europe. We're honored that he's taking the time with us.

Q: Alex, tell us a little about your amazing edition of Hamlet.

Alex: I’d long wanted to publish one of the Shakespearean plays under Marlowe’s name with annotations and complete commentary. I felt it was long overdo. Why wait another four centuries for the Shakespeare complex to come around or for more evidence to turn up? I’d literally grown up amid Marlovians, so I was pretty steeped in all the evidence from childhood. My grandfather, Rev. David Rhys Williams, was a pioneer American Marlovian, lecturer on Marlowe’s probable authorship of the Shakespearean works since the 1920s (when he met Thomas Mendenhall, whose pioneer stylometric study showed that the Marlovian and Shakespearean canons were written by the same hand), and close friend of Calvin Hoffman, whose book The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare made the popular case for Kit and caused a worldwide sensation. (When I was a kid in the early 1960s, I met Hoffman at a family gathering.) My grandfather’s main interest, as a Unitarian minister, was the freedom of religion dimension to the subject, so I was almost destined to carry on the quest. However, unlike my grandfather, who was not very much interested in the actual plays or poems, I broadened it and was as consumed as much by the literary side of the subject as by the theological and political.

Yet I recognized maybe we were wrong. Perhaps de Vere, Mary Sidney, or Elizabeth herself was the real author. I’d read some Oxfordian literature over the years, and it too was highly convincing. I knew love is blind. Whatever we feel passionate about has another side that remains invisible to us. So in my meditations and prayers I asked for a sign that I was on the right path. One day, while still just toying with the idea of going ahead with a Marlovian edition of Hamlet, a project I knew would consume my life if I took it up, at least for a few years, I was scrolling through a 19th-century version of Hamlet on the Internet when a passage in the play literally jumped off the computer monitor. It was part of the famous scene in the opening act when the Ghost appears to Prince Hamlet and tells him that Claudius seduced his mother, Gertrude, and murdered him (Elder Hamlet) in the orchard to seize the throne:

GHOST. Ay that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts,
O wicked wit, and gifts that have the power
So to seduce; won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous Queen.
(1.5.47–51)

I intuitively recognized the passage as a punning reference to Archbishop Whitgift, Marlowe’s nemesis, the one who occasioned his arrest, and the one who set in motion the events of May 30. It was clear as day. Not only did the passage contain one pun, but it contained two, in case you didn’t get it the first time! The appearance of the ghostly passage sent shivers down my spine very much like the Ghost’s appearance to Prince Hamlet! Though in plain sight of every high school student and Shakespearean scholar, the witty puns had gone unnoticed until now - almost as if Hecate, the queen of Night invoked in Hamlet’s play-within-the-play, had scattered fairy dust over four centuries of viewers and readers. In the same passage in which the Ghost reveals the identity of his murderer to his son, the playwright discloses the identify of his tormentor to his witty reader/viewer. What could be cooler - or more Shakespearean - than that? I never looked back.

Over the next three years, I was totally consumed with researching and writing my edition of Hamlet. I developed an elegant literary interpretation that Hamlet’s overall theme of an incestuous marriage and usurpation of power had affinities with a poisonous union between the Church of England and the Crown. Throughout the text, at one level, in the characters of Claudius and Gertrude, the play satirizes wicked Whitgift, who lusted for temporal power and acquired absolute moral and spiritual sovereignty over Queen Elizabeth.

I found that the First Quarto of Hamlet contains a version of the revelatory passage, but the wordplay regarding Whitgift’s name did not appear until after the Archbishop’s death in 1603 and the publication of the Second Quarto in 1604. By this time, Queen Elizabeth - who referred to Whitgift as her “little black husband,” or spiritual spouse - had also passed away. The First Folio’s capitalization makes the pun even bolder: “Oh wicked Wit and Gifts.” Further, there are multiple hilarious references to Marlowe’s “death” and the events in Deptford of May 30 in Hamlet in the play-within-the-play and in the Gravediggers’ scene. One reference, for example, suggests that Prince Hamlet (who personifies Kit) was exactly the same age in years (29) and months (3) as Marlowe was at the time of the Deptford affair and his supposed murder! The autobiographical jests and allusions go on and on.

My reference above to Hecate, by the way, is not just an idle remark. Not only does she appear in more than half of the Marlovian and Shakespearean works (most notably Faustus, Dido, Hero and Leander, 1 Henry IV, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and many others), but May 30, the fateful day when Marlowe met his destiny, was the annual festival day of Hecate since ancient Greek and Roman times! The mythological correspondences are astonishing, but that’s another story and one I go into in depth in my commentary.

Q: How has your book been received?

Alex: Overall, my book was well received by Marlovians and a few independent and open-minded observers. For example, the poet Robert Bly wrote me several times how entranced he was with my thesis, and Howard Zinn, the historian and champion of a “people’s” approach to history, was enthralled. But generally it met the proverbial wall of silence by the scholarly world and book reviewers.

The one exception was the Times Literary Supplement in London, which included my book in a review of several others on the authorship. The reviewer, Brian Vickers, a prominent Shakespearean scholar, panned it completely saying anyone who seriously doubted the Shakespeare authorship was akin to a holocaust denier! Stephen Greenblatt, the doyen of American Shakespearean scholars and a professor at Harvard, has used the same metaphor in his comments on the subject. I take exception to remarks by him, Vickers, and other Stratfordians comparing those of us who question the received version of history to holocaust deniers! That’s pretty low-hitting, beneath the belt, in my view, and if anything it trivializes the Jewish holocaust. But more than anything else it shows how desperate the Shakespeare establishment is. Is it so afraid that a small, essentially self-published book like mine will rock its foundations that they have to engage in that kind of character assassination? Of course, what it reveals is that inside they know full well that the whole Shakespearean edifice (and I’m not referring to Shakespeare’s house in Stratford) is a house of cards. Their whole careers, reputations, and honors and awards are at stake. So naturally, like Grand Inquisitors, they silence all who express the slightest doubt, voice suspicion, and dare to speak out or question authority. Totally absurd and childish! The irony is that Vickers himself recently wrote a pioneering book, Shakespeare Co-Author, showing that many of the plays in the Canon had junior co-authors in the persons of Peele, Middleton, Wilkins, and Fletcher - an enormously valuable contribution to the riddle of the authorship question.

Fortunately, the climate for free inquiry is rapidly changing. Nearly 1500 people - including several hundred current or former college and university faculty, actors and other theater arts people, and other professionals, as well as just plain extraordinary readers and theatergoers - have signed a declaration circulated during the last year by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition asking that the authorship be treated as a legitimate subject in academia. Already a few schools of higher learning are including Shakespearean authorship studies in their curricula. The edifice is cracking, and the Shakespearean scholars don’t have enough fingers to plug the leaks in this dike.

Another sign of the times is the hoopla over the recently identified Shakespeare portrait. It was unveiled at a news conference by Stanley Wells, the leading Stratfordian scholar (who referred contemptuously to my grandfather in one of his books!), as a done deal and swallowed wholesale by almost the entire global media. Only later did doubts surface. (The likeness may well be of Shakespeare, but we need more than just the assurances of Wells and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Like everything they pontificate on, it was presented as fact rather than a hypothesis!) Eventually, the New York Times, which had uncritically accepted Wells's preposterous claims in its original front page news story, ran a whimsical commentary a few weeks later on its editorial page by one of its top editorial commentators who observed there wasn’t a shred of evidence for the portrait’s attribution to Will. With evident amusement, he said the claim was conjecture piled on conjecture, like everything else in Shakespeare’s historical biography!

The whole effort by the Shakespeare literary-industrial complex to prop up a dying cause and defend the indefensible has many parallels with doomed scientific theories, ideological crusades, and contemporary wars. I suspect that if Marlowe were alive today, he would satirize it in a new comedy reminiscent of Errors or Twelfth Night. The distinguished scholars would be undone by their own folly and past pronouncements as new evidence turned up conclusively documenting Marlowe’s survival and literary afterlife.

While such evidence would be the proverbial holy grail to clinch the matter, I don’t think it’s necessary. There’s already enough historical, literary, political, theological, linguistic, and other compelling evidence to convince a jury of our peers - the 21st-century reading and viewing public - and commonsense gravediggers everywhere that Marlowe was the primary author and guiding spirit of the Shakespearean canon. I predict that by 2023, the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, if not before, there will be a literary tectonic plate shift, and Marlowe’s leading role will be universally recognized. And just as a Shakespearean comedy has a happy ending, I can foresee the collected plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare all being performed in 2023, beginning in Stratford, under both Marlowe and Shakespeare’s names. If they are still with us, I suspect by then the leading Stratfordians will have been reborn and morphed into Marlovians and take full credit for solving the greatest historical literary mystery of all time. Well, let them. As said in another place, all’s well that ends well!

Q: Professor, we’d love to have you come back again. Thanks for taking the time with us.

Alex: My pleasure.

© The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, June 2009  hamlet.com

Copies of the 400th anniversary edition of Hamlet by Marlowe and Shakespeare, with annotation and commentary by Alex Jack, are available for $35 postpaid from Amberwaves, PO Box 487, Becket MA 01223.  to be or not to be james shapiro emmerich

Alex’s web site is shakespeareandmarlowe.com, and he could be reached at shenwa@bcn.net.

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