Notes on & Excerpts from Dowden's Shakspere A Critical Study and on Chapman's Wm. Shaksp. and Robt. Greene The Evidence

A thread for comments on and excerpts from Edward Dowden's William Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1875) and William Hall Chapman's William Shakspere and Robert Greene: The Evidence (1912).

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You can find and read these books on-line by clicking on the hyper-links in the titles, above, to open full-text .pdf pages for each of the books.

Page numbers referenced in the (i.e. my) succeeding comments and excerpts refer to the pages in the books as found at the links to http://www.archive.org .

“If the plays of Shakspere could be read with the simple purpose of leading students to understand the language of Shakspere and firing the imagination to visualize the varied personages of his interesting world, the number of readers would be multiplied a hundredfold.”

—Will David Howe, (1918, Indiana University) writing in the Introduction to the 1918 edition of Edward Dowden’s Shakspere : A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (p. vii). Howe (1873-1946) was a professor of English at Indiana University and an early business partner and editor with the publishers, Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace, forming Harcourt, Brace and Howe publishers in 1919.

... "a school of discipline"...

—Edward Dowden

... “When our English and other literature departments shrink to the dimensions of our current Classics departments, ceding their grosser functions to the legions of Cultural Studies, we will perhaps be able to return to the study of the inescapable, to Shakespeare and his few peers, who after all, invented all of us.”

—Harold Bloom, "An Elegy for the Canon," p. 17 from The Western Canon: The books and school of the ages, (1994) Harcourt Brace & Co.

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It has taken me a while to arrive at it—something around six years ;^) — but I have a different and, I hope, a better answer to a question which recurs so frequently in this realm of the 'Shakespeare Authorship Question' (SAQ) that it's worth setting it out here specifically—and that question is the famous or infamous,

"What difference does it make (Why ought we to care about...) who wrote the "Shakespeare" opus, whether it was William Shaksper of Stratford-upon-Avon or some other fellow?"

I would now reply to that very-often-sincerely-posed question by saying,

Well, it matters only if one thinks that this author had and may still have something both interesting and important to say to us. If one is of the view, grievously mistaken in my opinion, that this author, whoever he may have been, the writer behind "William Shakespeare," had and has and shall have really nothing very important to say to us, then in that case, it's true merely in a sort of matter-of-fact way that it doesn't matter who it was.

But wherever one turns to those present and past who have written about the author or his work, it happens invariably that these treatments, however well or poorly executed, should have been much improved if their authors had started or at least finished with a correct understanding of their subject-author's identity. Two examples are Edward Dowden's Shakspere; a critical study of his mind and art. (1875*) (With an introd. and a brief bibliography by Will David Howe) and William Hall Chapman's William Shakspere and Robert Greene: the evidence (1912), each one a very interesting critical study of Shakespeare, one from the 19th and the other from 20th century.

Both Dowden and Chapman have some very interesting insights into the author and they take these as far as they can. Sometimes, for the very reason that they have got the author's identity wrong, they take basic correct insights too far and make mistaken assumptions from them. Just as unfortunately, they fail to grasp other things which they might have seen and understood better had they been aware of the author's having been Edward, Earl of Oxford.

In every case, every critic loses important understanding from his or her failure to get the author's identity correct and, at some point in every case, this concerns, above all, getting at the "what?", the "how?" and the "why?" of the important things this writer had to say to us. A certain amount of that is lost through the failure to grasp Oxford's place as the author of "Shakespeare's" work. His intentions, his purposes, his meanings, the points in this or that sonnet or poem or play are not going to be appreciated to anything even approaching the way that they could be if the reader doesn't understand correctly the identity of author of the work. This simple fact is completely uncontroversial for practically all other writers. There's no great debate over whether or not knowing who Henrik Ibsen was or who James Joyce was helps us, helps anyone, to better understand their literary work and the meanings in it.

There is simply no good reason why that is not just as true about the author of "Shakespeare's" work.

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* Dowden's W.S. A Critical Study... was first published in 1875. A third edition was issued in 1918 with the introduction and bibliography added by Will David Howe.

While I agree with Bloom's point in the citation at the top of this post, I don't follow him in what he'd written just prior to that:

“It was a mistake to believe that literary criticism could become a basis for democratic education or for societal improvement.”

There may come a day when this can be asserted with confidence but I don't believe we've seen that day yet. If the study of literary criticism can elevate and improve the "cream" of society, it can do the same for some varying degree of the rest of us. So, if ever we come to have better luck as a society, this could eventually mean the success of "literary criticism as a basis for democratic education." My entire interest in our getting the identity of the author of "Shakespeare's" work correct ultimately rests on this potentiality. Meanwhile, nothing is stopping the curious and interested reader from making the best of the opportunities for self-improvement—against the grain, against all odds.