Along the coast, it was the sort of morning one can describe only as “Homeric.” You know what I mean: rhododactylic Dawn rising from her loom to spread her shimmering gossamers over the shadowy mountains and echoing sea, dark-prowed fishing-barks drawn up on the milky strand and caressed by the golden foam, the distant thunders of ennosigaean Poseidon and argikeraunic Zeus vying above the wine-dark waves, and so on. Or so I imagine. I was actually a few hundred miles inland, in a montane grove of loblolly pines and mixed deciduous trees, awash in flickering sunlight, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. But I had Homer on my mind just then, for various reasons, and so was in a somewhat epic mood: overflowing with an unwonted sense of animal vitality, the world about me all joy and power, terror and fluent beauty, I was Diomedes upon his day of glory . . .
Such moods are fleeting, alas. As Chmei knew, even the remotest mountain retreat cannot keep the pains of transience at bay. My eyes alighted upon a report that Roland Emmerich (director of such cinematic masterworks as Independence Day and 2012) had just released Anonymous, a movie all about how the works of Shakespeare were really written by Edward de Vere, a very minor poet and the 17th Earl of Oxford. All at once, the world had lost its glowing vigor; rosy-fingered Dawn was now a scowling crone with withered talons, laboriously carding the coarse wool of the dreary clouds; the sea had turned to molten lead; Poseidon and Zeus had long ago retired to a managed care facility. I set my coffee aside and went to fetch the gin from the cupboard.
If you are unacquainted with the “Oxfordian hypothesis,” count yourself blessed. It was born in 1920, in a book by a demented English Comtean whom Fate, with her unerring sense of poetic justice, had given the name J. Thomas Looney—a man whose ignorance was so profound it verged on a kind of genius. Looney offered no actual proof for his claim; instead, he attempted to divine the private philosophy of the author of the Shakespearean corpus and then sought out a highborn Elizabethan gentleman who seemed to fit the portrait he had drawn. He also asserted that Oxford was the true author of the works of John Lyly, Anthony Munday, and Arthur Golding (an incoherent farrago of disparate styles, true, but—hey—in for a penny, in for a pound).
Patently worthless as it was, Looney’s book inaugurated yet another conspiracy theory concerning the nonexistent mystery of the “true identity” of the author of Shakespeare’s plays, and, since then, the Oxfordians have elbowed themselves to the front of the “anti-Stratfordian” mob. What is fascinating about the theory itself, in a purely morbid way, is not only that it lacks even a shadow of a scrap of documentary evidence, but that in fact all the real documentary evidence, which is quite substantial, shows it to be incontestably false (and, indeed, leaves no room for rational doubt that the true author of Shakespeare’s plays was Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford).
Now, to say that the Oxfordians have no evidence for their beliefs is not to say they have no arguments. The devout Looneyite can produce a 900-page tome in defense of his delusion at the drop of a lavender-scented handkerchief. But to venture into one of those unwholesome volumes (say, Charlton Ogburn’s psychedelic rhapsody The Mysterious William Shakespeare or the ghastly Joseph Sobran’s Alias Shakespeare) is to wade into a swamp of misstatements, insinuations, suppressions, confusions, historical blunders, and quasi-occult cryptology. Even so, the sheer weight of all that claptrap has the power to sway the credulous, even among persons otherwise competent in their own fields (actors, journalists, statisticians, Supreme Court justices, and so on) who simply lack enough knowledge to sift the truth from the nonsense. Oxfordianism is to Shakespearean studies what The Chariots of the Gods is to archaeology or The Da Vinci Code is to Christian history, and genuine scholars of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature routinely publish unanswerable demolitions of its claims. But, in a media-addled age, mere scrupulous scholarship is rarely a match for shameless intellectual dishonesty or emotional derangement.
Really, the most hilarious aspect of Looneyism is probably its choice of protagonist. I say this not just because Oxford died about a decade too early to cover Shakespeare’s career (and Oxfordian attempts to re-date the plays accordingly fail dismally); nor because “stylometric” computer analysis (which is frighteningly accurate) repeatedly reckons the odds against Oxford being the “true” Shakespeare as roughly infinite; nor because the conspiracy would have required the complicity of an absurdly large range of Shakespeare’s associates, friends, and collaborators, as well as lawyers and Masters of the Revels and so on; nor because Oxford was a vicious, pompous, inane fop; nor because… (well, the list is endless).
I say it principally because Edward de Vere was almost sublimely devoid of talent. At least the Baconian and Marlovian factions in the anti-Stratfordian cult champion men who actually possessed literary gifts. Looney chose a man who was, if anything, the anti-Shakespeare of his age. But Oxford was an aristocrat, and Looney believed fanatically in class distinction and purity of blood. A few lesser critics had been claiming for decades that Shakespeare’s plays were written by some widely traveled man with a classical education and an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Elizabeth’s court, rather than by some tradesman’s son, educated at a grammar school. Nothing could have been further from the truth, actually—unlike the plays of, say, Ben Jonson or the “University Wits,” Shakespeare’s show no signs of excessive classical or cosmopolitan culture—but Looney did not know that, having little education himself, and the idea of a Shakespeare with aristocratic pedigrees suited his social philosophy perfectly.
I suppose I should not really care. Oxfordianism is annoying and silly, granted, but in time will subside in popularity. But I find the whole phenomenon morally troubling. I cannot prove it (which should not bother the Looneyites), but I suspect that the most fervent Oxfordians are motivated principally by resentment: the capon’s envy of the cock, so to speak. Persons of mediocre talent, consigned to a middling rung on nature’s scale, but who imagine themselves tremendously gifted, often take violent offense at real greatness. And Shakespeare’s genius is so exorbitant, and the fecundity of his literary imagination so monstrous; the thought that such prodigious art was produced just by nature, unassisted by special advantages and attainments, must seem intolerable to a certain sort of person. Ah, but if in fact the “real” writer was a child of privilege, forged in the crucible of social eminence, possessed of secret inner knowledge—why, then, his genius is somehow more explicable. And that in turn makes more explicable the conspiracy-theorist’s own lack of achievement, for this too can be ascribed to a conspiracy—a conspiracy of circumstance, the connivance of fate, a cosmic miscarriage of justice.
Who knows, though? The real issue is one of common decency. When we talk about, say, the authorship of Homer, we know that the attribution is irreducibly uncertain: part legend, part conjecture, and part (but what part?) truth. In the case of Shakespeare, however—one of the few literary figures who can plausibly be said to be greater than Homer—we know exactly who he was, when he lived, how he earned his bread and reputation. To attempt to rob him of his posterity out of envy, foolishness, or callous indifference to the truth is simply pernicious. There is no mystery about Shakespeare other than the perennial mystery of genius, which is at once prodigal and parsimonious: a gift granted regardless of social station or just deserts, but to only a very few. This truth may be excruciatingly galling to some, but to persons of good will and healthy mind it should simply elicit grateful admiration and ungrudging recognition.
Anyway, if this lot really wants to make their conspiracy theory interesting, they need to fill in the cracks better. No Oxfordian has yet convincingly responded to the “stylometry” problem, for instance. If they were really on their game, however, they would argue that this merely exposes another conspiracy hitherto unsuspected, and that the works commonly attributed to Oxford are clearly products of another hand. I propose Francis Bacon. As for the inevitable discovery of similar incompatibilities between Bacon’s style and “Oxford’s,” one need only argue that, of course, “Bacon’s” works were really written by someone else altogether. As for who this might have been, the answer seems obvious: William Shakespeare of Avon, who it turns out was a far more cunning and mysterious figure than any of us ever suspected . . .
David Bentley Hart is contributing editor of First Things. His most recent book is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press). His other “On the Square” articles can be found here.
Comments:
Uh, whut? Actually I don't know what you mean. Does anybody? I think even Bill Buckley would have been stumped.
I would like to see Mr. Hart discuss the writings of Dr. Robert Price a.k.a. the Bible Geek as Mr. Price is relatively popular and he often touches on subjects that are up DBH's alley.
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/biblegeek.php
Sure, I know what this means. But then I've read Homer through in Greek and taught the epics for thirty years. You guessed it--a professional classicist.
Among the pleasures of reading DBH are his corruscating intelligence, preposterously wide and deep reading, and a command of the English language that beggars belief. Has this paragon any detectable flaws? Yup, he shows off a lot. But as Muhammed Ali said, if you can do it, it ain't braggin.
Regards,
Anonymous
Anonymous is not an attack on Shakespeare. It is a celebration of the magnificent plays and poems of perhaps the greatest writer in the English language. The film’s purpose is simply to set the record straight, to expose the mythology of the uneducated genius from Stratford, and give credit at long last to the true author. The only issue here is not whether you like the idea that a nobleman wrote the works attributed to William of Stratford but whether it is true. The issue is not about class, but about evidence and I believe that the evidence clearly points to Edward de Vere as the true author.
Questioning the Stratfordian attribution has been around for over a hundred years as you say for one reason alone – the truth has not been told. We have little information about Shakspere of Stratford that would in any way designate him as a writer, let alone the greatest writer in the English language. The so-called historical facts do not stand up upon scrutiny.
Biographies of William of Stratford contain one page of fact and 599 of speculation such as “he might have”, “he could have”, it is probable that”, and so forth. The few facts we know about Shakespeare from Stratford are stretched, pulled, and twisted to make it plausible that he was the author. There is nothing in his biography to connect him with the works.
The fact that some works were published under the attribute of William Shakespeare does not identify the man behind the name. There is nothing in his handwriting ever discovered except for six almost illegible signatures. There are no letters, no correspondence, no manuscripts, no paper trail at all to identify the man behind the name, not a single word. Nobody claims to having ever met the man. When contemporaries refer to William Shakespeare, they are referring to the name on the title page and nothing else.
The attack on de Vere has been promoted by academics whose reputations and possibly their careers are at stake and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust whose Stratford Tourist bonanza may be permanently derailed.
The list of those who have doubted the Stratfordian attribution contain some of the most prominent authors, actors, and thinkers in American history including Henry and William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Mortimer Adler, Mark Rylance, Derek Jacobi, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Supreme Court Justice Henry Blackmun, Harvard Professor William Y. Elliott, Clifton Fadiman, John Galsworthy, and many others. See http://doubtaboutwill.org/past_doubters.
Mr. Emmerich has stated that his film provides one possible alternative explanation of the fact that we know next to nothing about the great Shakespeare, not the only explanation. While the film’s treatment of Shakespere is admittedly a bit over-the-top, the evidence points to the fact that he was an opportunistic play broker who was willing to take credit for the works of another man.
As far as 1604 is concerned, the year that Oxford died, no source for any Shakespearean play is dated after 1604. No sonnets were written after 1604. Between the years 1593 to 1604, seventeen plays attributed to Shakespeare were published. From 1605 to 1623 there were only five, said to be collaborations. Dates of performance or publication do not indicate the date of composition.
You have chosen to make this into a class issue and bring up the familiar straw man argument about snobbery. The issue is about evidence, not about class. The assumption behind the support for William Shakespeare of Stratford as the author has to be that he was no ordinary mortal because otherwise there is no accounting for the detailed knowledge of the law, foreign languages, Italy, the court and aristocratic society, and sports such as falconry, tennis, jousting, fencing, and coursing that appears in the plays. I do not have any doubt that genius can spring from the most unlikely of circumstances. The only problem here is that there is in this case no evidence to support it. Would the greatest writer in the English language have allowed his daughters to remain illiterate?
If you are looking for class distinctions, you have to look no further than the plays and Sonnets. Of the 37 plays, 36 are laid in royal courts and the world of the nobility. The principal characters are almost all aristocrats with the exception perhaps of Shylock and Falstaff. From all we can tell, Shakespeare fully shared the outlook of his characters, identifying fully with the courtesies, chivalries, and generosity of aristocratic life. Lower class characters in Shakespeare are almost all introduced for comic effect and given little development. Their names are indicative of their worth: Snug, Stout, Starveling, Dogberry, Simple, Mouldy, Wart, Feeble, etc. The history plays are concerned mostly with the consolidation and maintenance of royal power and are concerned with righting the wrongs that fall on people of high blood.
Edward de Vere was not a jaded aristocratic. He was a recognized poet and playwright of great talent who was singled out in 1598 as being “best for comedy.” Oxford was a man of the theater and a patron of the arts who operated two successful playing companies: Oxford’s Men and Oxford’s Boys. Although no play under Oxford's name has come down to us, his acknowledged early verse and his surviving letters contain forms, words, and phrases resembling those of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare plays and poems show that the author had specific knowledge of certain works of literature, certain prominent persons in Elizabeth's court, and events connected with them. In the sonnets and the plays there are frequent references to events that are paralleled in Oxford's life.
You seem to base your knowledge on the claims of the entrenched academic orthodoxy that have, with some exceptions, refused to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves. Your “review” is simply an emotional rant.
Howard Schumann
Vancouver, BC
Mr Art Deco, May I assume you are one of those poor sad souls who thinks the Oxfordian hypothesis has any merits and so has to be refuted? You can only refute theories that make actual intelligible arguments, and the Oxfordians do not. They appeal only to those too ignorant to know how badly they've been misled. There is no theory to delineate, no argument to describe, no point of view to clarify. It's all hogwash and should be mocked and nothing more.
Mr Anonymous, I'm with you. I enjoy it all, and mostly because it is always somewhat self-mocking.
Plus I agree with the argument. I recently attended a lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library---the topic was "Datamining Shakespeare" and the speaker was Folger director Michael Witmore. Despite his introductory plea to be spared questions about the film "Anonymous" and its claims, one audience member persisted in pushing the Oxfordian cause. Witmore told him that if there was any evidence that anyone but Shakespeare wrote the works, that proof would be found in the Folger Library. So the skeptic was invited to get a library card, spend years doing the research, then to write his paper, get it published and subject it to peer review.
As an aside, the third paragraph alone is worth the price of entry.
You are correct, by the way, Alan my friend, in saying that the language here was not meant to enlighten. It was not even meant to impress, because the words aren't even real English, but hilariously anglicized forms of Greek words from the Iliad. It was meant to amuse. In my case, it succeeded admirably. And, to be perfectly honest, I can't really feel much sympathy for anyone who does not get the joking tone. I feel that, just as with the Oxfordians and Shakeseare's authorship, someone who objects to intentionally ludicrous displays of erudition of that sort is probably of a slightly weak and resentful nature, and gets angry at other people being much cleverer than he is, while the healthy response is to laugh at the carnival atmosphere. I guess I'm just a Nietzschean.
In fact, no. The repetitions are a feature of both the demands on the memory of a long, improvisatory composition in an oral tradition and the demands of metrical placement of a hero's (or whatever's) epithets. As for the repetitions being "tiresome," they are no more so than the repetitions and variations of motifs in Bach or Mozart. The issue is best grasped by one who has enough Greek to hear the music of Homer's line, but for all I know J.P. may be a past master of the language.
Regards,
Anonymous
You are probably correct about the repetitions. I read them only in translation.
regards
jack perry
Lots of writers are praised in their own time though they have no talent at all. That's doubly so when the author is a powerful and prominent man. But in the case for Oxford, we have his verse, and it is excruciatingly lousy.
As for the 'similarities' between Oxford's phrases and some found in Shakespeare, the world's acknowledged authority on Edward de Vere's verse, Steven May, has pointed out repeatedly that they are commonplaces of te poetry of the time, found no more in Oxford than in any other poets who have left verse behind in any quantity. He has also pointed out that in dialect, vocabulary, style, and talent, Oxford was clearly not the author of Shakespeare's verse.
You can attempt to rebut the argument if you like, but you can't pretend that it wasn't made. It was. You're mistaken.
It became clear as the scholar continued that this locale gave young rustic Shakespeare the perfect milieu for the crafting of the plays he is reputed to have written. As an actor, he had access to past and contemporary plays, which he borrowed from freely. And in the free-wheeling, open society the Inns of Court provided, he had access to the presence of the kind of upper class rogues he never would have met in Stratford.
We know Shakespeare lived there for a time, and it's extremely likely he would have found material enough and more to fuel his imagination for the creation of all those histories, comedies and tragedies featuring royalty and aristocracy. So, now after listening to the lecture, I lean much more strongly towards the contention that Shakespeare did indeed write Shakespeare's plays.
In my view, your arguments do not persuade.
The "entrenched academic orthodoxy", which is the leitmotif of your argument, doesn't shy from designating the authorship of certain works as "unattributed", when the preponderance of data demands it.
Also, if the evidence in this case was as mixed as you suggest, there would be schools of thought among serious scholars in the field (I emphasise the word "serious"), back and forth papers, symposia, etc. This is not what we see here, but we do see it in other fields of inquiry. The argument that what's preventing the record from being set straight is the "Stratford Tourist bonanza", or protection of academic reputations, is one of those unprovable, yet at the same time, un-disprovable, casting of suspicions - red meat for conspiracy buffs.
The question that forms itself in my mind is this - why was a certain part of the English society during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such fertile ground for un-orthodoxies of various kinds - Religion of Humanity, Theosophy, spiritism, phrenology, clubbishness, gurus of various kinds, etc. It is from this compost that movies like the "Anonymous", or the "Da Vinci Code", sprout today.
I've always been puzzled why otherwise intelligent people would believe the utter nonsense that Shakespeare, didn't write the works attributed to him. The evidence is beyond reasonable dispute that he did, and the fact that Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and many others doubted this, has never failed to amaze me.
Shakespeare's works are repositories of beauty, truth, goodness, and just great entertainment. And it can be suprising that all of these literary works of art, could come from one sixteenth/seventeenth century, nonuniversity educated brain.
But they did.
I have to admit, my favorite part of reading Hart's columns is when all the commentators emerge from the woodwork and miss the jokes. The regularity of this is kind of frightening.
Wrong, enosichthon and ennosigaean (ennosigaios) both occur in the Iliad as designations of Poseidon, both meaning basically the same thing. Please recall that the author of this column is a classicist. And, for the sake of the joke here, the latter epithet is easier to anglicize.
@ Sally Morem
Right. Exactly.
And tamiasmin's remark about scansion makes no sense. Any Greek word scans in Greek poetry, depending on where it's placed in the line.
I share your sentiment exactly, and I too find it kind of frightening. Maybe the world around us is much more literal-minded than we realize, and we should all be careful about the use of irony. I'm just waiting for the rumour to go out on the net that Dr Hart has seriously proposed the triangular authorship conspiracy of his last paragraph.
Best,
Richard
I am not 'pretend [ing] it was not made'. My precise phrase was 'never clearly delineated'. I have no intention of rebutting David Bentley Hart because I have no interest in the question of whether or not 'William Shakespeare' was a merchant from Stratford, a member of the peerage, or some other sort of character. My point was that David Bentley Hart is making an ass of himself and will persuade no one of anything (and appears not to care to persuade anyone). There is little or no authentic humor in it either.
If this piece does not intend to have any serious point - then why write it? Why would anyone devote so much time, to mimicking a classic, florid fop? Full of sound and fury and grandiloquence - but having no real point? Or in other words, "signifying nothing"? Hart to be sure, has created a mildly interesting and entertaining character. But what's his point? That grandiloquence in itself, is pointless, or funny? That point has been made before. So what else, if anything, is Hart doing?
Suppose we take his point semi-seriously? In that case, of course it would have been easy enough for 1) the real author of S's plays to remain anonymous. Anonymity was a very, very earnest and very professionally-practiced art, in an era in which authors were being executed for religious differences. Indeed, 2) countless authors throughout history were quite successful in fooling whole courts, and remaining all-but anonymous to this very day. It's not so difficult for writers to remain undiscovered: often writers have very different personalities in real life, than the persona they project in their books.
Then too: regarding the matter of how the plays have been put on, with an author in hiding? A real author of "Shakespeare's" work, could easily have handed his writings to an actor/director, to Shakespeare himself. Who was paid to pose as the author of the work, as well its director. That role shouldn't have been too hard, for an actor and director.
To be sure, as I noted above, I'm not entirely convinced that Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him. Still, it remains a plausible hypothesis.
As for etymological and lexicographical matters? Nietzsche began his career, as a philologist. But he later came to despise that as a "mole-ish" business, that ruined his eyes - grubbing for "worms," as he called them. Though to be sure, looking at the double and triple and quadruple meanings of Shakespeare's language, might begin to reveal a few possibilities, as to the author's personality, and identity; the man behind the "Shaking speare," and the "False-staff." Interestingly by the way, the name "Pontius Pilate," seems to refer to a spear-bearer.
But Hart, typically, never quite gets at anything of any possible serious significance or interest.
And so if readers left First Things, and went looking for more serious nourishment, I wouldn't blame them.
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is as cheap as beast's.
As someone or another once wrote.
You may be right concerning irony. Perhaps Hart should use the :P emoticon more often!
As an untutored rube myself, I have to admit I miss a lot of the jokes as well. But I don't understand what would possess someone to start raging on the comment section about how unhappy they are with with the column, only to get upper-cut by all the people who figured out the little references and ploys. Better to be silent and then laugh afterwards, I would think.
Anyway, the conversation is silly. We know who wrote Shakespeare's plays: Shakespeare. ALL the evidence says so, NONE of the evidence says otherwise. Every other "hypothesis" is the deranged squealing of conspiracy theorists.
I've got to say, if you don't find that funny, especially after those wild, perversely parodic opening lines, then there really is something wrong with you. You probably suffer from "Andrew Sullivan syndrome": an unimaginative mind made worse by unearned self-regard.
Anyway, taste is taste I suppose, but I thought it was the most amusing intro to a column I've ever come across.
Well played sirs! I thought at first that you were sincere in your petulance, but now I realize that you are just trying to embody mediocrity’s tribute here in the comment section. I must admit that you had me going there for a bit...
And nothing could be more fitting than that Andrew Sullivan should, as if on cue, pay mediocrity's tribute to excellence. Could the playfulness be any more obvious in that first paragraph, really?
I'm sure all of us remember the good old days, when Neuhaus dedicated every page of every issue to the Somalian crisis. Good old RJN would never have wasted a single column-inch on such humorous trifles as this.
It was all-famine-all-the-time back then. As I'm sure we'll all recall, the magazine itself was made to be edible, so that readers could mail their used copies off to Mogadishu to be used as emergency rations. That was why they were printed on such thick paper.
How the mighty have fallen. But then, what else can we expect from an age so devoid of theology and geometry?
Mrs May & Nelson go far to proving, linguistically, that de Vere was not the man who wrote these plays. The hoops that must be jumped through to support linguistic style changes in what would have been a late point in de Vere's writing career are just not supportable & the argument in the 17th Earl's favor become untenable on this basis alone.
Like Mr Hart, I can find no refute of this sort of philological study from any Oxfordian. Rather, like Mr Schumann, they make short mention of it dismissively while rapidly moving on to what they believe to be more solid ground. In light of such data, & that of similar, computer-driven studies which provide the same result, they really should look for another guy. Mr de Vere simply wasn't cut of Shakespearean cloth.
The words prove it.
For those of you who don't get the joke in the first paragraph:
Rhododactylic Dawn is rosy-fingered Dawn. It is a common Homeric epithet. Hence the later jest about her 'fingers' turning to claws when DBH discovers that someone has made a movie based on the Oxfordian hypothesis.
Ennosigaean Poseidon is Earth-encircling Poseidon. The epithet appears in Homer, Sophocles, and Hesiod. Maybe it means Earth-shaking, I don't have my Lexicon at hand.
Argikeraunic Zeus is an epithet I don't recognize, but Wikipedia says it means "of the dazzling bolt."
Those of you who are offended by polymathematical displays of sesquipedalian pyrotechnics, or scorn such verbal exuberance as snobbery, kindly put a sock in it. Not everything in life can be expressed in monosyllables.
(n.b. polymathematical is not a real word. I was merely being exuberant.)
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is as cheap as beast's."
That's a great quote from Shakespeare!
In Hart's article, we see a thoughtful love of nature. But with a potential intellectual content. Its classical allusions, classical observations of nature, remind us especially that after all, the Greek and Roman gods were often personifications of different aspects of Natural History: Aphrodite and Venus stood for Love. Neptune for the Sea. Zeus in part for lightning. Boreas, for the (East?) wind. Persephone and Demeter in part, for agriculture.
I suggest that in naming "gods," the ancient Greeks were looking for ways to symbolize and categorize, the major elements of what they saw in the natural/spiritual world around them. Especially, the great forces: like Love and War, the Sea and the Air. And they came up with different gods, to symbolize some of the major elements of nature, and natural history.
If Hart is (as he seemed to be lately) looking for a way to conceptualize a Natural Law understanding of Religion, Christianity - especially as tied to the concerns of a Classicist? His allusions to Homer's view of the rosy sky, might well lead to a fullblown and fascinating discussion, of the tie of many theological motifs, to the many different aspects of Nature.
Guess nobody ever heard of that, here on the Internet?
In any case though, I'm enclined to accept the idea of a real Shakespeare, as author. And if as it happens, an ordinary Englishman like Willy, just happen'd to evidence exensive knowledge of the classics? I attribute that to the high quality of English education, the public school, at the time. For some, by 1600 AD it was possible for even the son of a minor clerk, to go to the same school as the Earl of Oxford. And to sound very much like him.
At the same time though? The author of Shakespeare's works, seems to have left some evidence that even his own name might have been after all, a literary invention: a "shaking speare" reminds one suspiously, of the "False staff"; a congenial but after all, not entirely steady staff to lean on.
In the era in which the King James Bible appeared, c. 1607, there were already hundreds of writers around, with enough sophistication to write texts that say two, even three, even a hundred things, all at once. And possibly one or two of those writers chose to leave behind a few hints, in their many-layered writings, that after all, the very things we lean on as our literary (and religious?) canon, may after all, only be an unstead, "shaking spear."