In Homeric, Biblical, and Shakespearean scholarship, unitarianism is the dominant trend.
Shifty eyes homer full#
Today, the wheel has come to a full turn. As late as 1934, Gilbert Murray could discover no reputable scholar ready to defend the view that a single poet had written either or both the Iliad and the Odyssey. This fine fury of decomposition lasted well into the 1930s. The plays attributed to that illiterate actor Shakespeare appeared to have been compiled by a committee which included Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Marlowe, recusant Catholics, and printers’ devils of extraordinary ingenuity.
Wilamowitz, a titan among Homeric scholars, declared that the Iliad was a “wretched patchwork.” In a single chapter of Luke, Germanic analysis revealed five distinct levels of authorship and interpolation. In the late nineteenth century, dismemberment was all the rage. Shakespeare - the currents of scholarship and judgment follow the same pattern. And the fascinating aspect is this: in each case - Homer, Christ. And there are numerous puzzles regarding Shakespeare’s plays and the range of reference in them baffling enough to convert sane men to Baconianism even now.īut, though the problems remain, our methods of approach to them change. The historical person of Christ and the composition of the Gospels are matters for conjecture no less than when Renan wrote the Vie de Fésus (1863). Yet the stubborn truth remains: today the Homeric question is not much nearer solution than it was in 1795, when Wolf published his Prolegomena ad Homerum. No one would deny the extraordinary accomplishments of historians, comparative linguists, and archaeologists. But behind the brutality and pontifications in high academic places, we hear a whistling in the dark. Housman’s reviews were founded on the axiom that a false emendation is a far worse crime than murder. There is something in philology that appeals to the worst in man. No areas of humane learning solicit more ferocious controversy.
Shifty eyes homer professional#
Homeric scholars, Semitic philologists, and professional students of Shakespeare, moreover, are themselves creatures of passion and fanatic conviction. An eighteenth-century civil servant, Maurice Morgann, was the first to bring to bear on a Shakespearean text modern psychological and historical insights.
A journalist - admittedly, an Edmund Wilson - was perhaps the first to realize the implications of the Dead Sea scrolls. An obsessed amateur dug up Troy, and a young architect with a passion for cryptography broke the secret of the Minoan script. But they are haunted by a curious fact: in each of these three pre-eminent riddles of literary and historical criticism, it is the outsider who has made some of the most brilliant and decisive discoveries. Professional scholars react to such beliefs with bitter scorn. Of late, we have been assured that the Odyssey was written by a young woman, that Christ survived Calvary and lies buried in Northern India, and that the manuscripts of Shakespeare are to be found in Marlowe’s tomb.
Here everyman has his persuasion, and no decade passes without its new theory. The Homeric question, scriptural exegesis, and the problem of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays have always been regarded by the layman as fair game. But in the wake of the great galleons of erudition there has always swarmed a motley host of amateurs, mystics, and inspired cranks. The discovery of the nature of Homeric composition, the analytic study of the Gospels and of the historical Jesus, and the quest for the identity of Shakespeare were the three classic mysteries toward which scholarship directed its modern weapons: archaeology, linguistics, bibliographic recension. On these deep waters scholarship had launched its grand armadas. Unaware, I had struck upon the great triple theme of what the nineteenth century called the higher criticism. Not out of any precocious sublimity, but because l was resolved to discover from each whether he had, in fact, existed and whether he had spoken the marvelous words attributed to him. I answered Homer, Christ, and Shakespeare. WHEN a small boy, I was confronted with one of those questionnaires inquiring what personages of history I should most like to have met.
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