I was attending summer school at Ole Miss in the late 1990s when I first became aware of the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts building rising from a hole in the ground just outside the main entrance to the campus. I’d heard rumors regarding its provenance, something to do with William Shakespeare, but it wasn’t until I attended the 2024 Mississippi Book Fair in Jackson last month that I got the story straight. But, first, some background.
More books have been written about Shakespeare (1564-1616) than any other writer or creative person. While most books for the general reader focus on the man, books for academics focus on his works. Unfortunately, the historical record for the man is so sketchy that some question whether he wrote the works at all. He was born, baptized, owned shares in two theaters, and died; otherwise, he left little for us to identify him by – no letters, no manuscripts, and a will whose most interesting feature is that he bequeathed his wife, Anne, “the second best bed.” One biographer said that Shakespeare was “the literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there.” Another said that that his biography was “a man-shaped hole.”
Although he wrote more than 400 years ago, the words of Shakespeare remain timeless. He had the ability to capture human emotion succinctly, and many are unaware of how engrained his words and phrases are in our everyday speech. For example, just a few examples: “Love is blind” (“The Merchant of Venice”), “Break the ice” (“The Taming of the Shrew”), “The be all and end all” (“McBeth”), “A wild goose chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”), “To be or not to be” (“Hamlet”), “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once” (“Julius Caesar”), “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” (“Richard IV, Part 2”), “All that glitters is not gold” (“Merchant of Venice”), and “If music be the food of love, play on!” (“Twelfth Night”).
Much has been made of the influence of religion on Shakespeare. For example, there are over 2,000 “inferences” to Biblical objects or themes in his plays. It has been claimed that his works indicate variously that he was a secret Catholic, disliked Catholics, was Jewish, had Jesuit learnings, was a conforming Anglican or member of the Church of England, was interested in Buddhism, or that he had no religion whatsoever.
In the spirit of the “Da Vinci Code” (2006), I have always found the following two “mysteries” interesting: William Shakespeare was 46 years old when the King James translation of the Bible was printed in 1611. Although his name is not included in the extant list of translators, there have long been suggestions that he had a hand in it, for no other reason than it “sounds like Shakespeare” when read. While both probably just sound “Elizabethan,” one of the more interesting “proofs” involves Psalm 46. If you start with the first word of the Psalm and count down 46 words, you come to the word, “shakes.” Then, if you go to the last word of the Psalm, disregarding the word “Selah,” or “forever,” and count up 46 words, you come to the word, “spear:” Shakespear. Was the Bard a translator and slipped his name into the Old Testament? Some would like to believe so. Another interesting theory, proving to some devotees that Shakespeare had a hand in translating the King James version of the Bible, is that a code can be uncovered in the Book of Deuteronomy by compiling every fifth letter of every fifth word of the fifth chapter. Try it and see what you think. I got confused.
By the 1850s, all major documents relating to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon had been discovered, and the historical record was very slim. Some scholars found the literary evidence totally at odds with their sense of the author and his works. How could such a person as William Shakespeare have accomplished so much? He only had a grammar school education; he had never traveled to speak of; he left both of his daughters functionally illiterate; his will mentions nothing that one might associate with a literary life – a desk, or even a bookcase. It’s not surprising that many began to question his authorship of the plays attributed to him, including the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Individuals such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlow, and Edward de Vere have been proposed as the true authors of works attributed to Shakespeare. These doubters are known as “anti-Stratfordians.”
It seems as if Mrs. Gertrude C. Ford, the major donor for the construction of the Ford Center for the Performing Arts at Ole Miss, was a dedicated anti-Stratfordian, convinced that de Vere “authored Shakespeare,” and was willing to put her money where her mouth was. By all accounts, she was a lovely lady, the daughter of a Georgia congressman and the widowed wife of a Mississippi congressman from Ackerman. She was a lover of the fine arts, fluent in French, Latin and Spanish, and she was an accomplished flautist, violinist and pianist. Born with an incisive wit, she was extremely well-read in both poetry and classical literature. Very wealthy and a dedicated philanthropist, in the mid-1980s, she contacted Ole Miss regarding the possibility of a large donation to build a performing art center on campus.
For some reason, the donation “hung fire” for a period and, as I learned at the Book Fair last month, in 1988, the then vice-chancellor of Ole Miss, Robert Khayat, hired the Ole Miss graduate and published novelist, Lawrence Wells, to “ghost write” a book for Mrs. Ford supporting the viewpoint that Edward de Vere did “write Shakespeare.” The purpose of the book was to encourage her donation. Not necessarily sharing her views, but up to the challenge and wanting to help the university open her purse strings, Mr. Wells, who also married the niece of William Faulkner, agreed to write the book, but only if it was presented as “fiction.” As he worked with her, he also learned that she believed she was the reincarnation of Queen Elizabeth I, who reputedly had a “love” child with Edward de Vere. You will have to read his excellent book, “Ghostwriter: Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and an Eccentric Patron’s Royal Obsession” (University of Mississippi Press, 2024), for the whole story. He was obviously successful as she ultimately contributed $30 million to the construction of the Ford Center, along with a $10 million appropriation from the Mississippi State Legislature. The Center opened in 2003 with the actor, Morgan Freeman, serving as Master of Ceremonies for the first night’s program.
Although I have made no monetary contributions, other than to my church, Shakespeare has followed me all my life. In the 11th grade at Lumberton High School, my English class was studying “Hamlet,” and the teacher, a wonderful lady who, to be honest, was the only teacher there who ever gave me the time of day, made the seemingly random statement: “Benny is the only person in the class who understands Shakespeare.” This statement is documented and still brought up at class reunions. On that day, every student turned to look at me like I had dropped in from outer space, with a “what in the world is she talking about” look on their faces, because the only things I’d been known for up to that point were sleeping in class and skipping school. I was as surprised as they were. Years later, when I wrote a thesis on Shakespeare for an MA in English literature at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, I dedicated it to her and sent her a copy. She was in a nursing home by then, but she sent me the following note, which is one of my most cherished possessions:
When I received your thesis and read page IV [the dedication], I was so surprised and overwhelmed that I sat down and cried. In my 77 years, I have never had an honor that I appreciated as much as this. Thank you so much. I plan to read each page after I reread “Richard II” and “I Henry IV.”
Much later, I learned that without her intervention with the principal, I wouldn’t have graduated high school. After wandering around in the graduate academic wilderness for years, I finally got smart. If you want to get a thesis or dissertation through your committee and especially the oral exams, you need to pick a chair that everyone else in the department is afraid to mess with. For example, at Rhode Island, my chair was a Harvard Ph.D., the editor of the “New England Journal of Poetry,” the author of at least five novels, a former chair of the English department who didn’t suffer fools lightly, and a woman who was just naturally mean.
When we went in for my oral exam on my Shakespeare thesis, where I felt like I was in medieval England’s Star Chamber, pleading for my life, she told me, “If you can’t answer a question from one of your committee members, just shut up. I will answer it.” Sure enough, a professor from the Language department, a Renaissance scholar, asked me a trick question about Occam’s Razor. I knew enough to say that it was the principle that the simplest solution is always the best, but my professor kicked me under the table and lectured the poor guy until he regretted asking the question. Later, I did the same thing at San Diego State. I wrote about U.S. foreign policy in the Philippines, so I got the only Filipino Ph.D. in the history department to be my chair; at the University of Oklahoma, I wrote about combat stress, so I got the only Vietnam veteran in the psychology department as my chair, etc. When you are dumb, you must scheme and plot to get ahead.
Thankfully, I hadn’t chosen to write about the authorship issue when I wrote my thesis at Rhode Island. I had just returned from Vietnam, where I saw the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I was very impressed by the sense of honor that I saw displayed by many under extreme duress. I wrote about Shakespeare, of course, and the title of my thesis was “Power vs. Principles: The Self-Fashioning of Honor in William Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy of History Plays.” Using the two heroes of four of his most famous history plays, I sought to illustrate how the historical moment defines the possibility of “constructing” an individual’s concept of himself or herself, specifically, their sense of honor. I’ll give you two examples: did you ever stand outside a movie theater at night, a theater that featured a particularly violent and “macho” film, and watch adolescent males exit the theater? Often, they take on, at least for a few steps, the persona and the swagger of the film’s protagonist. They have temporally “re-constructed” themselves to fit the role they saw depicted on the silver screen.
In the “real” world of Shakespeare’s era, theater-going Elizabethan gallants often paid extra to sit on the edge of the stage during performances. Their reasons for doing so were as modern as the motivation for 21st-century social “wannabes” who dress in bizarre “costumes” and flock to championship prize fights: they want to be seen, and, in being seen, to increase their sense of self-worth, public image and personal honor.
Shakespeare was heir to the high Renaissance (14th to 16th centuries) in feeling that virtue and honor were practically the same. This viewpoint was a synthesis, encouraged by the church, of at least three distinct approaches to honor: classical or pagan, Biblical/early Christian and, most recently, chivalric. And here is a warning for us: many Elizabethan personages, and even some today, particularly politicians, attempt to self-fashion themselves to an honorable status and to manage their own myths and reputations. Unfortunately, like the protagonists of my thesis, Richard II and Hotspur, such efforts usually fail with dire results for all.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
