In the last issue of Phlit, I made some comments on Iraq. These comments prompted the following response from a Phlit subscriber in California:

I am glad to hear your positive views on what the US is doing in Iraq. I don’t know if I told you my family (both my mother’s and father’s side) is originally from North Korea. The recent reports of what’s happening there keep me up at night! Without the US military, I’m aware I’d either be speaking Japanese or living under the rule of one of the cruelest governments in modern history. My grandmother was reunited with her family in North Korea after forty years. Everybody there (who isn’t a government official) was sick, thin, and hungry. The government staged a “welcome” party when she arrived at their village. They set out a lot of food to show her, I suppose, that their communist system was working. During the first five minutes she witnessed her family struggling to gulp down as much food as possible... they were literally starving!!! The reports about the prison camps are unbelievable. I can’t read them without weeping. I can empathize with the Iraqi people.

The subscriber asked me to withhold their name, lest publication bring harm to someone in North Korea.

The harm inflicted by a despotism such as North Korea’s or Stalin’s or Saddam’s can’t be measured simply by the number of people killed, imprisoned, tortured, etc. Such despotisms reduce the entire population to a kind of slavery, and the first people to be killed are those who are the least servile — people of character, intelligence, etc.

One of the best literary works to emerge from a modern despotism is Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn is still alive, and living in Russia, and he tries to preserve the memory of those who suffered in the Gulag; many other Russians seem eager to forget the Gulag. I suspect that Solzhenitsyn is aware of the situation in North Korea, that he’s troubled by it, and that he would do what he could to publicize it.

Camps similar to those described by Solzhenitsyn still exist in Russia; they’re run by North Korean police, and manned by North Korean slave-workers. This from the New York Times:

North Korea’s worker control system is especially harsh in remote Siberian logging camps which, according to Amnesty International, are directly run by North Korea’s ruthless Public Security Service. Escapees interviewed in Moscow in recent years have told human rights researchers that the North Korean camp authorities maintain private prisons and prevent escapes by rationing food and punishing would-be escapees with torture and sometimes execution. During the Soviet era, most logging in Siberia was done by prisoners in forced labor camps. On May 3, Ben Christie and Nicholas Wrathall, two documentary filmmakers, visited the Alonka camp, a 16-hour train ride and a 3-hour jeep ride from Khabarovsk, a regional capital. Even though the team had filming permits from Khabarovsk officials, Mr. Christie said, North Korean authority was made clear by a North Korean flag on a crane emblazoned with Korean slogans. Mr. Christie recalled in an interview what happened when the workers spotted the team filming. “The chief came running up to the car,” he said. “He tried to pull the aerial off. Then, he tried to pull the door off. Then he reached inside the car for the camera.” After the driver turned around, Mr. Christie said, “they threw a huge rock at the car.”1

A. A Consumer Culture The Wall Street Journal reported recently that parents are now giving their newborns brand names, they’re naming their babies “Lexus”, “Chanel”, “Porsche”, etc.2

B. Nietzsche says that the early Greeks had a Dionysian art that combined poetry, music, and dance.3 But over the course of time, poetry, music, and dance were separated, and became specialized. What we call “classical music” usually doesn’t include poetry or dance. Popular music, however, returns to the old tradition, the tradition in which poetry, music, and dance existed together. Elvis Presley said, “I can’t listen to music without moving. I tried, but I can’t do it.” Michael Jackson danced even in the recording studio. This popular tradition, this Dionysian tradition, has probably existed at all times — below the surface, on the fringe of society, underneath “higher culture.” In China, this popular tradition flourished among minority peoples, while majority Chinese (Han Chinese), were closer to the specialized Western tradition. In the center of China, people often listened to music silently, motionlessly, while on the periphery of China, minorities were “moving to the beat.”

C. In the last issue of Phlit, I mentioned that I applied for a job as a writing teacher at Harvard. Well, I didn’t get the job. They said they had more than 450 applicants, so I had only about a 1-in-100 chance of getting a job. It would have been a long commute anyway; as a fox once said, the grapes were probably sour anyway.

D. Esoterica Phlit often discusses the occult, so perhaps I should mention that an online journal, Esoterica, publishes articles on a variety of esoteric/occult subjects. The editor, Arthur Versluis of Michigan State University, says that the occult is beginning to be recognized, within academia, as a distinct field, an inter-disciplinary field that draws on art history, literary history, philosophy, etc. Versluis recently published a book called Shakespeare the Magus, which deals with Shakespeare’s interest in the occult.

E. Interest in the occult can be found in every country, and in every epoch of history. Paulo Fernandes, a Phlit subscriber in Brazil, tells me that primitive Polynesians “had practices that make their ancestors materialize and talk to them,” just as the American psychic John Edward talks to the dead every day on TV.

Perhaps the only societies that despised the occult, and regarded it as superstition, are modern Western societies (influenced by the Scientific Revolution), and classical societies (influenced by Greek philosophy and science). In both cases, contempt for the occult existed side-by-side with respect for the occult; however popular scientific-rational thinking was, it never completely supplanted the mystical tradition, the Hermetic tradition, the occult tradition.

Many of the most famous Greek thinkers, however, seem to have had little interest in the occult. The Greeks initiated two things that were hostile to the occult (or at least remote from the occult): logic and materialism. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle — all were fascinated by logic. Democritus and Epicurus developed the atomic tradition, and tried to reduce everything to atoms and the void; their materialist world-view left no space for the occult, for the invisible world. Marx and other modern thinkers continued this materialist tradition (when he was a student, Marx wrote his thesis on the Greek materialists). Marxists have only contempt for the occult.

I recently called Grace Calí, an Oxfordian (an “Oxfordian” is one who believes that “William Shakespeare” was the pen name of the Earl of Oxford). I asked Grace for a copy of her essay on The Tempest, which she was kind enough to send me.4 I had read the essay years ago, but then I had misplaced it, and I was eager to read it again since my book group is planning to read The Tempest.

Grace’s essay discusses the “Gosnold/Tempest Theory” — that is, the theory that The Tempest is based on a 1602 voyage by the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold. Gosnold sailed to Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the nearby Elizabeth Islands. Gosnold’s boat was shipwrecked on Cuttyhunk, one of the Elizabeth Islands. Gosnold’s account of his voyage contains some striking similarities to The Tempest; these similarities were first discovered by Edward Everett Hale, a 19th-century American writer. Hale noticed that

1. in both the play and the voyage, “the survivors broke up into two parties — the seamen and the ‘gentlemen adventurers’”5
2. in both the play and the voyage, these two parties were at odds with each other
3. accounts of the voyage, like the play, repeatedly refer to logs — cutting and collecting logs (an example: in The Tempest, Ferdinand says, “I must remove some/thousands of these logs and pile them up”[III, i, 9])
4. in both the play and the voyage, the task of log-gathering falls to the gentlemen, not the seamen

Hale wasn’t an Oxfordian (he died in 1909, eleven years before the Oxford theory was revealed to the world by its discoverer, J. Thomas Looney). But though Hale wasn’t an Oxfordian, his Gosnold/Tempest Theory strengthens the case for Oxford. Gosnold was from an aristocratic family based in Suffolk County, England. The Gosnold family seat is “less than 25 miles from Castle Hedingham, the ancient seat of the de Vere family [Edward de Vere = 17th Earl of Oxford] in the adjacent county of Essex.”6 The Gosnold and de Vere families were connected (as Grace discovered) by multiple marriage ties. Thus, it is reasonable to suppose that Edward de Vere knew about Gosnold’s 1602 voyage and shipwreck, especially since de Vere had a keen interest in voyages to the New World, and invested much of his inheritance in such voyages. Gosnold’s ship arrived back in England on July 23, 1602; since de Vere died on June 23, 1604, he would have had enough time to learn about Gosnold’s voyage, and then write The Tempest.

Stratfordians, who adhere to the traditional view of Shakespeare and reject the Oxford theory, argue that The Tempest is based on a 1609 shipwreck on Bermuda. They point out that Oxford died in 1604, hence he couldn’t have written The Tempest. (Stratfordians try to disqualify Oxford by arguing that several of the works of Shakespeare were written after Oxford’s death.) What evidence is there to support the Stratfordian view, to support the Tempest/Bermuda Theory? The play mentions “the still-vex’d Bermoothes” (I, ii). But how do we know that this is a reference to the 1609 shipwreck? Grace points out that “well before 1600, contemporary accounts appeared in London about several Bermuda shipwrecks.”7 Indeed, the Bermudas are named after a Spanish navigator who was shipwrecked there about 1503. Hence Edward de Vere may have thought of the Bermudas as “vex’d” (buffeted by storms) even if he didn’t live to hear about the 1609 shipwreck.

A close reading of the play shows that “the castaways were on an island different from Bermuda.”8 When Prospero asks Ariel about the state of the ship, he receives this response:

Safely in harbor
Is the king’s ship; in the deep nook, where once
Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vex’d Bermoothes, there she’s hid (I, ii, 260)

So the ship is in a deep nook, from which Ariel once set out for the Bermudas to fetch dew. The deep nook is not in Bermuda, “the castaways were on an island different from Bermuda.”

Grace points out that, while the play speaks of the Mediterranean, the plants and animals mentioned in the play are such as one would expect to find in a temperate climate, and are similar to those mentioned by Gosnold’s party. Grace also points out that Gosnold’s party was surprised to encounter a native American who spoke some English, just as Stephano, in The Tempest, is surprised to find that Caliban speaks his own language. “Where the devil should he learn our language?” Stephano asks. (The native Americans also wore some European clothing, suggesting earlier contact between them and European fishermen or explorers.)

The Tempest was once an argument against The Oxford Theory. Now, however, thanks to the Gosnold/Tempest Theory, The Tempest has become an argument for The Oxford Theory. Grace’s essay shows that The Oxford Theory has opened up a new world for Shakespeare researchers, and many discoveries remain to be made.

Gosnold’s voyage may have been sponsored, Grace says, by the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley. Stratfordians have long regarded Southampton as Shakespeare’s patron; they note that both “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece” were dedicated to Southampton. Oxfordians take a different view of Southampton. Grace argues that there were “strong parallel interests and tastes” between Southampton and de Vere. These parallel interests suggest, Grace argues, “a relationship akin to father and son.”9 Both Southampton and de Vere appear to have been interested in voyages to the New World, and both probably sponsored such voyages. Both attended Cambridge. Both studied law at Gray’s Inn. Both were raised as royal wards in the household of the Queen’s chief advisor, Lord Burghley. Both were generous patrons of literature (Southampton was a patron of Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Nashe, and Gervase Markham, among other writers).

Many scholars — Stratfordian as well as Oxfordian — believe that Southampton is the handsome young man addressed in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and they also believe that the aim of many of the sonnets was to encourage Southampton to marry Oxford’s daughter.10 Southampton was 23 years younger than Oxford (Southampton was born in 1573, and died in 1624). Some of the sonnets address a youth as one would address one’s own child. Sonnet 39, for example:

O, how thy worth with manners may I sing
When thou art all the better part of me?
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?11

When I called Grace, I asked her, “who do you think was Southampton’s father?” “Oxford.” “And who do you think was Southampton’s mother?” “Queen Elizabeth.” We know that Oxford was raised in the court circle, that he was close to the Queen, and that he was a handsome man. Is it really that far-fetched to suppose that Elizabeth became pregnant by Oxford? Many Oxfordians believe that Elizabeth did become pregnant by Oxford, that Elizabeth and Oxford were secretly married, and that Elizabeth secretly gave birth to Southampton. (Why secretly? Why not publicly? Perhaps Elizabeth wanted to preserve the appearance of a single woman, an eligible woman; this appearance was advantageous for diplomatic reasons.) Some Oxfordians reject this theory, and fear that it will bring discredit to The Oxford Theory. But Phlit never shies away from disreputable theories, cutting-edge theories.

In an earlier issue of Phlit, I mentioned that “an English professor at Berkeley, Alan Nelson, has researched the life of Edward de Vere, though he doesn’t believe that de Vere wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.” I recently looked at the results of Prof. Nelson’s research, a 450-page biography of de Vere called Monstrous Adversary.

Nelson’s biography isn’t the first biography of de Vere. The first biography of de Vere was written in 1928 by an Oxfordian named Bernard Ward. Nelson refers to Ward’s biography as “the only documentary biography of Oxford until the present,” and Nelson says that he respects Ward as a historian. Nelson faults Ward, however, for (among other things) modernizing the spelling and punctuation of original documents. Nelson himself fills his biography with original documents, and leaves the poor reader to struggle with archaic language and spelling. Nelson doesn’t seem to understand that a collection of original documents does not a biography make.

Though Nelson intends to demolish The Oxford Theory, some of the documents he quotes strengthen it. For example, he quotes a letter that Oxford wrote while he was traveling in France in 1575: “perhaps I will bestow two or three months to see Constantinople, and some part of Greece.”12 (Nelson keeps the original spelling: “perhapes I will bestowe twoo or thre monthes to se Constantinople, and sum part of Grece.”) Oxford’s longing to travel suggests a person of culture; his longing to see Italy and Greece suggests a person with a passion for culture. Before he reached Italy, Oxford went to Strasbourg, and visited a scholar named Sturmius, whom Nelson describes as the “intellectual leader of European Protestantism.”13 This visit to Sturmius also suggests a person of culture.

In those days, traveling was more expensive, time-consuming and dangerous than it is today. Oxford made a will before he set out for the Continent. Once on the Continent, Oxford had to weave his way between Catholic Inquisitors and Turkish marauders. As he traveled, Oxford had to sell estates back home, to avoid running out of money; in As You Like It, Rosalind says to Jaques, “I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s.”14 Though Oxford never made it to Greece, the fact that he wanted to visit Greece, the birthplace and focal point of Western culture, is telling.

James Joyce was born in Ireland in 1882. During his early years, Joyce went in and out of Catholic schools, while his father went in and out of jobs. As a teenager, Joyce went through moral cycles: sin, followed by repentance and asceticism, eventually giving way to renewed sin. Joyce later described these cycles in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Some may regard these cycles as typical of a Catholic adolescence, but I regard them as typical of adolescence in general.

While still a teenager, Joyce felt that he was called to a literary life. Like other adolescents, the young Joyce had moments of inspiration in which his calling, his destiny, appeared to him like a vision or dream; as Joyce described it in A Portrait, “His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendor that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed.”15 Joyce was completely confident of his genius; George Russell, an Irish man-of-letters, said that the young Joyce was “proud as Lucifer.”16

Though Joyce was influenced by the Irish writer W. B. Yeats, his ambitions transcended his native land, he was international. He admired Ibsen, and even learned Norwegian in order to read Ibsen in the original, and write Ibsen a letter. At 22, Joyce eloped with Nora Barnacle, and began a life of voluntary exile; as he later wrote (in the peculiar and playful style of Finnegans Wake), “He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea.”17 Joyce lived most of his adult life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. A student of foreign languages, Joyce earned some money as a teacher at a Berlitz language school. He was also assisted by wealthy patrons.

While still in Ireland, Joyce had begun writing short stories for George Russell’s magazine. Eventually, he had enough stories for a book, which he called Dubliners. For years, he tried unsuccessfully to publish Dubliners; “publishers and printers alike,” he wrote, “seemed to agree among themselves, no matter how divergent their points of view were in other matters, not to publish anything of mine as I wrote it.” Joyce’s career took a turn for the better when Ezra Pound and Yeats began to admire his work, and to help him find publishers and patrons. By the time Joyce reached 40, he was internationally famous; the controversy surrounding Ulysses (it was initially banned as indecent) only enhanced Joyce’s fame.

In addition to being controversial, Ulysses was also experimental; Joyce tried to capture the miscellaneous thoughts that flit through one’s head, using a technique called stream-of-consciousness. In the following passage, Leopold Bloom is attending a funeral; after Bloom “moved behind the portly kindly caretaker,” Joyce tries to follow Bloom’s thoughts: “Well cut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next. Well it is a long rest. Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to I haven’t yet.”18

Humor plays an important role in Ulysses, as it does in Finnegans Wake. It was said that “no one could laugh more wholeheartedly or more infectiously”19 than Joyce. He worked on Ulysses at night, after his wife and two children had gone to bed, and his wife often heard his laughter ringing through their rented rooms.

Joyce’s early works — Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist — are extremely popular, while his later works — Ulysses and Finnegans Wake — are enjoyed by few readers. His play, Exiles, is largely forgotten. Dubliners is one of those rare books that one wishes were longer. Like Chekhov’s stories, Joyce’s stories contain little action — just enough to hold the reader’s attention. But while Chekhov often wrote hastily — to meet a deadline or to generate some cash — Joyce wrote carefully and seriously. Joyce’s stories may not be better than Chekhov’s best stories, but they’re more polished and more consistent than Chekhov’s stories.

A Portrait of the Artist is neither as readable as Dubliners nor as obscure as Ulysses. Many readers of Joyce regard A Portrait as one of their favorite books. Those who dedicate themselves to reading Ulysses will enjoy parts of it as much as A Portrait, if not more so. Few, however, will enjoy every chapter of Ulysses, and many won’t want to make the commitment that reading Ulysses requires. Ulysses can’t be read without help from an editor or commentator. Until Ulysses is published with notes on every page, as Shakespeare’s works are, readers will have to turn to commentators like Tindall, Burgess and Thornton.20

Finnegans Wake also requires commentary. Perhaps the best-known commentary on Finnegans Wake is A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, by Joseph Campbell (the mythology expert) and Henry Robinson. Campbell views Finnegans Wake as a mythological work, a work that deals with the circle of life — birth, death, rebirth. Indeed, the title of Finnegans Wake alludes to the circle of life: Finnegan alludes to the end of life (fin = end), followed by going around again (egan = again), and likewise Wake alludes to death (wake = funeral), and also to arising (wake = awake). Campbell insists that Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece, an immortal work.

Like many modern biographies, Ellman’s biography of Joyce is overly detailed. It’s sometimes interesting, however, and it helps one to understand Joyce’s work. Conversations With Joyce, by Arthur Power, is an excellent book, a book that fans of Joyce will thoroughly enjoy.

I have little sympathy with nationalists in general, or with Irish nationalists in particular, but I admire eloquence wherever I find it, and while I was preparing my Joyce essay, I stumbled across a remarkable example of eloquence, a short speech by the Irish poet and nationalist Patrick Pearse, delivered at the funeral of a fellow-nationalist, O’Donovan Rossa, on August 1, 1915, in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. In the following two sentences, note the parallel structure, the repetition of certain words: “We know only one definition of freedom: it is Tone’s definition, it is Mitchel’s definition, it is Rossa’s definition. Let no man blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and their definition.” Here’s the speech in full:

It has seemed right, before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of O’Donovan Rossa, that one among us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant man, and endeavor to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave. And if there is anything that makes it fitting that I, rather than some other, I rather than one of the grey-haired men who were young with him and shared in his labor and in his suffering, should speak here, it is perhaps that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been rebaptized in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian program. I propose to you then that, here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; that, here by the grave of this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakeable purpose, such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O’Donovan Rossa. [Note the conflation of religion and politics, often found in nationalism.] Deliberately here we avow ourselves, as he avowed himself in the dock, Irishmen of one allegiance only. We of the Irish Volunteers, and you others who are associated with us in today’s task and duty, are bound together and must stand together henceforth in brotherly union for the achievement of the freedom of Ireland. And we know only one definition of freedom: it is Tone’s definition, it is Mitchel’s definition, it is Rossa’s definition. Let no man blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and their definition. [Note how the speaker rejects compromise, equating it with blasphemy.] We stand at Rossa’s grave not in sadness but rather in exaltation of spirit that it has been given to us to come thus into so close a communion with that brave and splendid Gael. Splendid and holy causes are served by men who are themselves splendid and holy. O’Donovan Rossa was splendid in the proud manhood of him, splendid in the heroic grace of him, splendid in the Gaelic strength and clarity and truth of him. And all that splendor and pride and strength was compatible with a humility and a simplicity of devotion to Ireland, to all that was olden and beautiful and Gaelic in Ireland, the holiness and simplicity of patriotism of a Michael O’Clery or of an Eoghan O’Growney. The clear true eyes of this man almost alone in his day visioned Ireland as we of today would surely have her: not free merely, but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well. [Note the religious language: vow, baptism, holy.] In a closer spiritual communion with him now than ever before or perhaps ever again, in a spiritual communion with those of his day, living and dead, who suffered with him in English prisons, in communion of spirit too with our own dear comrades who suffer in English prisons today, and speaking on their behalf as well as our own, we pledge to Ireland our love, and we pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate. This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O’Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them. Our foes are strong and wise and wary but, strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of ’65 and ’67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today. Rulers and Defenders of Realms had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

© L. James Hammond 2004
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