I had never come across the name of William Nicholas Selig (1864-1948), an important but mainly forgotten figure in the early history of the movie business, until a few weeks ago; but he was clearly a man of parts. As is very frequently the case, my fleeting discovery of Selig was tangential to my ruminations on a couple of disparate bits of information that had crossed my consciousness at more or less the same time. The first was an announcement coming out of Princeton University that in the future undergraduate concentrators (majors) in the classical languages and literatures would not in fact be required to undertake formal study in either the Latin or the Greek language. This particular development has been the subject of a good deal of comment in the national press, where it has been connected, correctly, with many other “equity” initiatives undertaken here and elsewhere and supposed to address racial inequities in various aspects of higher education. I have now been retired from the faculty for some years, and I was not in any event a member of the Classics Department. My reactions to the announcement, aside from astonishment, are probably predictable, but of no special relevance to today’s topic anyway. So I proceed immediately to the second bit of information—or in this instance perhaps, speculation. It concerns Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright.
Marlowe was definitely a mysterious character. That’s not too unusual for espionage agents, and Marlowe seems to have been one, among other things. Most famously of course he was the author of at least two extraordinary plays, as well as several less extraordinary, and some fine poetry. Many scholars think that he had a part in the writing of some of the plays of his contemporary, Shakespeare. He would appear to have been a rather naughty fellow, whose possible sexual proclivities and probable religious unorthodoxies are of the sort to fascinate contemporary scholarship. What is definitely known—or at least I thought was definitely known—was the manner of his death. He is supposed to have been stabbed to death in a violent quarrel in a house, possibly a public house or tavern, in Deptford on London’s South Bank on May 30, 1593. The speculation which I encountered was that his death was actually staged. According to this theory the coroner’s report of the supposed event—which an eminent Shakespeare scholar discovered in the archives nearly a century ago—was but one element in an elaborate ruse designed by shadowy but politically powerful personages. They needed to secure for their asset Marlowe a most original kind of cover by disappearing him. Activating a sleeper agent is child’s play compared with activating a dead one, which was their eventual goal. In hiding, the supposedly defunct Marlowe continued to write plays, but of course they had to be attributed to other probable Shakespeare collaborators or ghosters such as Greene and Peele.
This isn’t exactly Q-Anon, perhaps, but it did remind me that a few of the better conspiracy theories I have encountered flowed from the pens of my fellow literary scholars. That’s how I happened brush up against the name invoked in the first sentence of this essay, that of William Nicholas Selig, one of the first moguls of the film industry. Things often come together in very strange ways. One of Selig’s pet projects, around the time of the tercentennial of Shakespeare’s death in 1913, was a plan to make a series of films of the Bard’s plays. In this effort he felt moved to launch a lawsuit against George Fabyan (1867-1936), the heir of a textile tycoon and a pioneer of military cryptography. Fabyan and Selig were actually old buddies, as well as fellow “cards”, as they used to be called. An example of Fabyan’s cardism is this: in 1905 he published a bound book of a hundred empty sheets entitled What I Know about the Future of Cotton and Domestic Goods. Yes, blank pages! Get it? What a card. As a cryptographer he had swallowed both hook and sinker of the main line of the “Bacon cypher”, the phantasmagoric “proof” that Sir Francis Bacon was the actual author of the plays that a hoodwinked world had for three centuries attributed to some theatrical nonentity called Will Shakespeare. Selig was probably burnishing his own credentials as a card when he sued Fabyan on the grounds that Fabyan’s expert opinion threatened the reputation of Shakespeare and therefore of the prospective profits from the planned series of filmed plays. Coverage of the lawsuit made great press for both men.
What most Shakespeare scholars today call the “Baconian heresy” had a good run. For at least half a century a lot of serious and consequential people maintained that since Shakespeare could not possibly have written the so-called plays of Shakespeare, somebody else must have done it, and that somebody else must have been Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). There would be a lot to talk about here, but my particular interest in this essay is not the who but the why. Why was it impossible that Shakespeare could have written his own plays? Answer: Because those plays are full of learned lore, and he was a commoner who had not gone to university! More particularly, because he did not know Latin. That is, the Baconians regarded Shakespeare with what in today’s lingo is sometimes called the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you are convinced that either by nature or by nurture a fellow is incapable of doing something, you are unlikely to credit the fact that he has actually done it.
The Baconian heresy really got going in mid-Victorian times, but it had had some seventeenth-century preparation. In an introductory poem in the Shakespeare first folio (1623) the Bard’s great admirer Ben Jonson, himself deeply steeped in the classical tongues, famously marveled that a writer with “small Latine, and lesse Greeke” could have written such masterpieces. By the time Milton wrote “L’Allegro” (1645) Shakespeare has progressed, or perhaps regressed, to the role of rustic vernacular prodigy, in contrast to the erudite classicist Jonson. One of the things that L’Allegro the “cheerful man” likes to do is to take in a comedy at the local theater: “Then to the well-trod stage anon,/ If Jonson’s learned sock be on, /Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, / Warble his native wood-notes wild.” Here Jonson’s own classical learning—the sock being an erudite allusion to the footgear of comic actors on the ancient Greek stage—is contrasted to Shakespeare’s supposed naively gorgeous hillbilly English. As a matter of fact Shakespeare’s small Latin was probably bigger than that of even some Princeton classics majors of yore, the ones who actually studied Latin, let alone those of our brave new future.
There is probably still a general consensus among institutions of higher education on both sides of the Atlantic concerning their fundamental two-fold mission: the preservation of “old” knowledge on the one hand, and the search for and discovery of “new” knowledge on the other. The recognition that there is such a thing as new knowledge necessarily implies pedagogic and curricular change as well as continuity, guaranteeing that there will in perpetuity always be some vanishing good old days for alumni to lament. One of Princeton’s nineteenth-century alumni crises came when the faculty struck from the list of required prerequisites for application for admission to the place a demonstrated competence in ancient Greek. Many alumni were sure that civilization as previously recognized had ended. The faculty, however, were merely acknowledging the reality of the expansion and increasing democratization of American public education. Princeton students could do their Greek after arriving on campus.
