The Collected Drama of H L Mencken by S T Joshi

Author:S T Joshi [Joshi, S T]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780810883697
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

William Shakespeare

Stratford-on-Avon, that sleepy old town, is as crowded and lively just now as a Chesapeake excursion boat on the Fourth of July, for today is the birthday of William Shakespeare, and thousands of tourists have flocked to his birthplace to see the festival performances in the Shakespeare Theatre. This year’s festival will last, not the usual two weeks, but a full month, and all the actors, including Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Lewis Waller and Sir John Hare,1 will have some hand in it.

That April 23 is Shakespeare’s birthday is nothing more than a convenient assumption, for no one really knows when he was born. All that the most painstaking research has been able to discover is that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. It was the general custom in those days to have a child baptized three days after birth, and so it is assumed that the greatest of all dramatists first saw the light on April 23.

To be strictly accurate, we should really celebrate his birthday on May 3, for he was born while the old style, or Julian, calendar was still in force, and there is a difference of 10 days between that calendar and the one now in use. The change was made by Pope Gregory XIII in October, 1582, when Shakespeare was 18 years old. To correct the error that the old calendar, with its few minutes loss of time every year, had brought about in the course of centuries Gregory decreed that October 5, 1582, should be called October 15. Thus everyone then living grew 10 days older in one day. In Russia, where the Julian calendar has never been ousted by the Gregorian, they are still 10 days behind us.

In late years a radical change has come over the world’s view of Shakespeare—a change in the direction of better understanding and sounder judgment. Time was, and not so long ago, when the poet was set upon a pedestal so high and his worshipers adored him so vociferously that the voice of common sense could not be heard. It was accepted as an axiom that every line in his plays was beyond criticism, that his art was perfect in the smallest things as well as in the largest, that he rose above all ordinary human limitations and wrote with the inspiration of a divine prophet.

In those days a horde of so-called “Shakespearean scholars,” male and female, wrote endless commentaries upon his plays—commentaries as ingenuous and as fatuous as some of the old-time homiletes’ expositions of Holy Writ. The rash critic who ventured to point out clumsiness in the dramatist’s plots, plagiarism in his rhetoric, inconsistencies in his characters and banality in his philosophy was hooted down as a loathsome ignoramus. That “scholar” was most esteemed who had memorized most passages from the plays (typographical errors and the childish interpolations of early editors included), and who could spout them with the greatest affectation of earnestness and reverence.

Such foolishness had to end, and end it did.

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