Contested Will (12 page)

Back in 1794, even as Londoners were honoring ‘Drama's God' at Drury Lane, a German scholar at the University of Halle was completing a book that would forever cast doubt on the authorship – even the existence – of an even greater literary divinity, Homer. The publication of Friedrich August Wolf 's
Prolegomena ad Homerum
in 1795 sent shock waves through the world of classical studies and well beyond. Wolf argued that the oral composition of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
could be traced as far back as 950 BC, well before the Greeks were acquainted with literary writing (though Wolf proved to be wrong about this detail). Close philological analysis showed that these long poems could not have been the unchanged words of an ancient bard, preserved and transmitted orally from generation to generation for four hundred years. It was no longer possible, though, to recover exactly when the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
arrived at their final form or the identity of those involved in their composition and revision. According to Wolf, if there had been a Homer, he was no more than an illiterate and ‘simple singer of heroic lays'. The conventional biography of Homer – accepted almost without question from Herodotus and Aristotle on down through the Renaissance – was suddenly and permanently over-thrown. As Emerson put it a half-century later, ‘From Wolf 's
attack upon the authenticity of the Homeric poems dates a new epoch of learning.' Authorship would never be the same.

Admittedly, there had been rumblings about Homer going back to antiquity, when Josephus had claimed, without citing any evidence, that Homer was illiterate. More widespread scepticism began in earnest in the late seventeenth century, when the French critic François Hédelin attacked the
Iliad
's bad style, morality and inconsistencies; citing ‘ancient reports of Homer's illiteracy', he concluded that ‘there had never been such a person as Homer, and the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
were the patchwork creations of a later and incompetent editor'. Giambattista Vico expressed similar doubts in 1730: ‘Homer was the best poet ever, but he never existed.' In England, Robert Wood added that ‘the Greek alphabet was a late invention', and that Homer's works had only reached their current form because of the ‘deliberate intervention of learned collectors, after centuries of oral transmission as separate ballads'. It was clear what conditions had made the Homeric authorship controversy possible; according to Thomas Blackwell, the Greeks had come ‘to persuade themselves that a mind so vast could not belong to a man; that so much knowledge could only flow from a heavenly source; and having once firmly settled his Apotheosis in their own minds, they wanted next that everything about him should appear supernatural and divine'.

What set Wolf 's book apart – and made it one of the landmark works of modern scholarship – was not his conclusion, already shared by others, but the philological and historical method by means of which he explored how texts were transmitted over time, a method that would have profound implications for other fields of intellectual enquiry and other revered books and authors. Eighteenth-century readers were not quite ready to accept the conclusion, as one recent classicist has put it, that Homer was no more than ‘a discursive effect, the function of institutional apparatuses and practices that developed over time'. Yet these unnerving postmodern implications of Wolf 's work were grasped early on by critics like Friedrich Nietzsche, who addressed the problem
directly in his inaugural lecture at Basel in 1869, when he asked, regarding Homer: ‘has a person been made out of a concept' or ‘a concept out of a person?'

Scholars were soon confronted with a troubling set of questions (which would be dusted off and asked of Shakespeare a half-century later). Why were there no surviving contemporary references to so great a poet as Homer? Was ‘Homer' a pseudonym? Could authorship be determined by means of internal evidence and consistency (in other words, was there an identifiable style that transcended textual irregularities)? What now was the status of other poems long attributed to Homer, such as
The Battle of the Frogs
and
Mice
and
The Homeric Hymns?
And why were those with a professional investment in the traditional view of Homeric authorship so resistant to new ways of thinking about these issues?

Controversial theories of authorship were proposed, including one by the English novelist Samuel Butler, author of
Erewhon
and
The Way of All Flesh
, and a trained classicist. Butler, arguably the most autobiographical writer of his day, read the
Odyssey
as a fundamentally autobiographical poem. The Phaeacian episode convinced him that the poem had to have been written by a young and strong-willed Sicilian woman who drew on her own experience – and he published
The Authoress of the Odyssey
in support of this claim. Butler also saw what the Homeric controversy meant for Shakespeare: ‘Who would have thought of attacking Shakespeare's existence – for if Shakespeare did not write his plays he is no longer Shakespeare – unless men's minds had been unsettled by Wolf 's virtual denial of Homer's?' It was not an isolated view. One of Benjamin Disraeli's characters in his 1837 novel
Venetia
had already wondered: ‘And who is Shakespeare? We know of him as much as we do of Homer. Did he write half the plays attributed to him? Did he ever write a single whole play? I doubt it.'

Predictably, Romantic writers drawn to Shakespeare's story were also captivated by Wolf 's new theory about Homer. But they
had to overlook its focus on collaborative authorship, which undermined their conception of artistic creation as the product of solitary and autonomous genius. Coleridge carefully marked up his copy of Wolf, while ‘Friedrich Schlegel took it as the model for his own studies in Greek poetry, and his brother August Wilhelm popularised it in his lectures.' Thomas de Quincey wrote three essays on the Homeric question for
Blackwood's
in 1841, not long after he wrestled with the problem of Shakespeare's biography, wondering how ‘such a man's history' could have ‘so soon and so utterly have been obliterated'. It's difficult today to register how deeply Wolf 's arguments unsettled nineteenth-century readers. One last example must suffice: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Aurora Leigh
(1856), where Aurora denounces the work of that ‘kissing Judas, Wolf'. For Aurora,

When poets hurl around accusations of ‘atheist' and ‘kissing Judas', it's clear that far more is threatened by Wolf 's method than the authorship of a pair of ancient Greek poems.

The battle over Homer's identity, though no longer the struggle it once was, continues to this day. Classicists now have a better understanding of how oral poetry was transmitted; almost all accept that there was no Homer in the traditional sense which readers for over two thousand years had imagined. Happily, since nobody was advancing alternative candidates from ancient Greece – what contemporary rival, after all, could even be named? – there wasn't anything to fuel an authorship controversy, and the problem was more or less ignored; the less said, the better. Still, there are those who refuse to give up on the traditional story, including E. V. Rieu, who translated the Penguin paperback that introduces so many readers to the
Iliad
. Rieu warns there that ‘It will astonish people who know nothing of the “Homeric question” to learn
that these splendidly constructed poems, and especially the
Iliad
, have in the past been picked to pieces' by scholars who argue that ‘the
Iliad
is the composite product of a number of poets of varying merit'. Rieu will have none of it, reassuring readers that poems with such ‘consistency in character-drawing' could only have been written by one man.

As groundbreaking as Wolf 's book proved to be, his method wasn't original. It derived, most immediately, not from work done by other classicists, but from the latest in Biblical scholarship, which had been an especially rich field of intellectual enquiry since the Reformation. Post-Reformation theologians skilled in Semitic languages, familiar with a long tradition of Jewish textual scholarship and attuned to historical changes, recognised that the Old Testament was a very complicated text. Over a century or so, close textual analysis, as well as a richer understanding of the transmission of Scripture, called into question the idea that the words derived in unadulterated form from Moses himself. Some of the finest minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had addressed the historical problems posed by Biblical texts and laid the foundations for the radical scholarship that followed. Over time, an ever-widening gap opened up between the received understanding of the Bible – especially the books of the Old Testament – and the way that Holy Writ was received by the faithful. Wolf had studied under leading Biblical scholars at the University of Göttingen and was familiar with the path-breaking and controversial work of German Biblical criticism, especially Johann Gottfried Eichhorn's
Einleitung ins Alte Testament
, which had begun to appear in 1780. Eichhorn showed how to reconstruct the history of a text when the original had undergone significant changes over time. The implications for the study of Homer were obvious. As Anthony Grafton has shown, Wolf in essence ‘annexed for classical studies the most sophisticated methods of contemporary Biblical scholarship'.

Eichhorn is best remembered today for having coined the term the ‘Higher Criticism', a phrase that describes how he and others employed historical methods to study the origins, date, composition and transmission of the books of the Bible, especially the Old Testament (Lower Criticism was devoted to textual minutiae). Over time, the Higher Critics showed that Biblical works were rarely solo-authored. Collaboration of various sorts was the norm: while some books of the Bible have come down to us as composite works (with one author's ideas or writings collected in a single volume), others were more deeply collaborative, combining the words of a number of authors in a single Scriptural text – including the Five Books of Moses.

Arguing that Genesis wasn't written by Moses was one thing; saying that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could not have written eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus was far more subversive. But scholars couldn't avert their eyes forever from the Higher Critical problems raised by the Gospels – and in 1835 David Friedrich Strauss, a young lecturer at the Protestant seminary of Tübingen, took on the New Testament much as Eichhorn had the Old Testament and Wolf had Homer. Strauss's book was an immediate sensation, and its heretical implications ensured that Strauss would never again be employed at a German university or seminary. Copies of
The Life of Jesus
quickly made their way to America as well as to England, where it was translated by the young George Eliot.

Strauss focused his attack on biographical facts. He closely examined ninety evangelical stories – especially those recounting the miracles attributed to Jesus – and relentlessly exposed ‘the discrepancies, contradictions and mistakes in the Gospel narratives and made the supernatural explanations appear weak and untenable'. He further questioned the truth-value of the Gospels by pointing out that accounts of Jesus' life weren't written down until a generation after his death – so were based on second-hand and anecdotal testimony. After reading fifteen hundred pages of this assault, it was hard for anyone to escape the conclusion that there
had been ‘no incarnation, no supernatural, divine Christ, no miracles, and no resurrection of the dead'. For Strauss, the life of Jesus was composed in much the same way that children sitting in a circle pass along and inevitably embellish a story as each one whispers it in the next one's ear. Strauss imagined the earliest stories about Jesus ‘passing from mouth to mouth, and like a snowball growing by the involuntary addition of one exaggerating feature from this and another from that narrator'. It was all, as Strauss put it (in a term that became a byword for his approach), a ‘myth'. Jesus was a remarkable person but he was not divine. Strauss became the most notorious and vilified theologian of his day.

The shock waves of Strauss's work soon threatened that lesser deity, Shakespeare, for his biography, too, rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths. One of the first to recognise the extent to which the Shakespeare authorship question was fuelled by the Higher Criticism was H. Bellyse Baildon, editor of the 1912 Arden edition of
Titus Andronicus
. For Baildon,

It's surprising that nearly a century passed before scholars like Charles Laporte (in his fine 2007 essay on ‘The Bard, the Bible, and the Victorian Shakespeare Question') paid much attention to the connection between the
Life of Jesus
and the life of Shakespeare. The authorship controversy's theological roots also help explain why those debating Shakespeare's claims slid so quickly into the language of apostasy, conversion, orthodoxy and heresy. Had the impulse to speak of Shakespeare as a literary deity been curbed or repudiated, Shakespeare might not have suffered collateral damage from a controversy that had little to do with him. J. M. Robertson had suspected as much back in 1913, noting
that it ‘is very doubtful whether the Baconian theory would ever have been framed had not the idolatrous Shakespeareans set up a visionary figure of the Master. Broadly speaking, all error is consanguineous. Baconians have not invented a new way of being mistaken.'