`Unclasp a Secret Book'

In the stacks of my university library, in the narrow aisles of the Shakespeare collection, I listened on Monday to the most enthusiastic literary monologue I’ve heard since a newspaper colleague years ago tried unsuccessfully to seduce me with the charms of Toni Morrison. That’s “monologue.” The talk was one-way.

A woman about my age asked for help finding a title and I obliged. She quickly identified herself as an “Oxfordian,” like her mother before her. This is a species I knew only from the field guides and had never observed in the wild. They believe Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays and poems the rest of us gullibly assume were written by William Shakespeare. That makes us Stratfordians – a benighted species.

The lady was intelligent, articulate, attractive and absolutely in earnest. She asked where I came down on the authorship issue, and I tried to weasel out by saying I just enjoyed reading the plays, thank you. That seemed to briefly confuse her but it didn’t slow her down. In outlining a program of Oxfordian reading, she reminded me of the young man at a campground in Kentucky who once suggested I read The Book of Mormon. He had seen me reading Leaves of Grass and said, with chilling sincerity, “We have a book, too.”

Of course, her tutorial also reminded me of a passage in Shakespeare, from King Henry IV, Part I, Act I, Scene 3, in which the Earl of Worcester says to Hotspur:

“And now I will unclasp a secret book,
And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous,
As full of peril and adventurous spirit
As to o’er-walk a current roaring loud
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear.”

I don’t mean to mock this woman. She was obviously well read and she cares enough to get worked up over deathless literature that most Americans will never bother to read. She publishes articles and attends conferences with fellow-Oxfordians, and she’s also carrying on her late mother’s work. She seemed, however, to illustrate the phenomenon I wrote about last week, borrowing from “On People with One Idea,” by William Hazlitt. This passage from his essay has applications for my Oxfordian friend, but also for me:

“It is well to hear what other people have to say on a number of subjects. I do not wish to be always respiring the same confined atmosphere, but to vary the scene, and get a little relief and fresh air out of doors. Do all we can to shake it off, there is always enough pedantry, egotism, and self-conceit left lurking behind; we need not seal ourselves up hermetically in these precious qualities, so as to think of nothing but our own wonderful discoveries, and hear nothing but the sound of our own voice. Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito. Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller's shop, or bear to be five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are.”