“My notes always grow longer if I shorten them. I mean the process of compression makes them more pregnant and they breed new notes.” — Samuel Butler, Notebooks

Who wrote the works of Shakespeare? Here’s a novel way to decide the question: In 1987 Supreme Court justices Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, and John Paul Stevens presided over a moot-court debate at American University to consider whether the author was really Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. (The session was underwritten by David Lloyd Kreeger, a noted benefactor of theater in Washington, D.C., and an ardent Oxfordian.)

After considering evidence presented by two American University law professors, all three justices chose Shakespeare, though Stevens expressed some uncertainty based on the author’s refined sensibilities.

“Just reading it cold,” he said, “I would tend to draw the inference that the author of these plays was a nobleman; there are just too many places in which nobility is stressed as a standard. In Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, the standard is which ‘is the nobler in the mind.’ There are all sorts of references to nobility and skills that are familiar to the nobility but unknown to most common people. So, you can’t help but have these gnawing doubts that this great author may perhaps have been someone else.”

Blackmun agreed that, of the various alternative claimants, Oxford had come closest to proving his case. “Whether that is enough is something that we’re supposed to say, I suppose; and yet, I am reluctant to say it.” Brennan added, “My conclusion is that Oxford did not prove that he was the author of the plays. And so, I feel that the 200 years that elapsed — I gather at least that long — after Shakespeare’s death before any doubt was cast on whether or not he was the author, leaves the thing about where we started.”

The debate was attended by more than a thousand people and published afterward in the American University Law Review (37:3, 1988).

Similarly, in 1892 the Boston monthly Arena set up a “tribunal of literary criticism” to decide whether Francis Bacon deserved the credit. After more than a year of contributions from various authorities, including the actor Sir Henry Irving, a panel of judges decided overwhelmingly for Shakespeare.

Here’s a creepy fragment by English ghost story writer M.R. James, published shortly after his death in 1936 — he’s recalling a memory from his childhood, when, alone one day in his father’s Suffolk rectory, he had looked out upon a wooden gate in a grove of trees:

As was but right it was shut, and nobody was upon the path that led to it or from it. But as I said a while ago, there was in it a square hole giving access to the fastening; and through that hole, I could see — and it struck like a blow on the diaphragm — something white or partly white. Now this I could not bear, and with an access of something like courage — only it was more like desperation, like determining that I must know the worst — I did steal down and, quite uselessly, of course, taking cover behind bushes as I went, I made progress until I was within range of the gate and the hole. Things were, alas! worse than I had feared; through that hole a face was looking my way. It was not monstrous, not pale, fleshless, spectral. Malevolent I thought and think it was; at any rate the eyes were large and open and fixed. It was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows.

There is something horrifying in the sight of a face looking at one out of a frame as this did; more particularly if its gaze is unmistakably fixed upon you. Nor does it make the matter any better if the expression gives no clue to what is to come next. I said just now that I took this face to be malevolent, and so I did, but not in regard of any positive dislike or fierceness which it expressed. It was, indeed, quite without emotion: I was only conscious that I could see the whites of the eyes all round the pupil, and that, we know, has a glamour of madness about it. The immovable face was enough for me. I fled, but at what I thought must be a safe distance inside my own precincts I could not but halt and look back. There was no white thing framed in the hole of the gate, but there was a draped form shambling away among the trees.

“Do not press me with questions as to how I bore myself when it became necessary to face my family again. That I was upset by something I had seen must have been pretty clear, but I am very sure that I fought off all attempts to describe it. Why I make a lame effort to do it now I cannot very well explain: it undoubtedly has had some formidable power of clinging through many years to my imagination. I feel that even now I should be circumspect in passing that Plantation gate; and every now and again the query haunts me: Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them; and perhaps that is just as well for the peace of mind of simple people.”

Raymond Chandler similes:

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
“She looked almost as hard to get as a haircut.”
“The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”
“Her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust.”
“This car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic.”
“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.”
“A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.”
“Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.”

“If you use similes,” he once suggested, “try and make them both extravagant and original.”

Proverbs of Latin America:

• Of the doctor, the poet, and the fool we all have a small portion. (Mexico)
• Each of us bears his friend and his enemy within himself. (Costa Rica)
• The mother-in-law does not remember she was a daughter-in-law. (Venezuela)
• Halfway is 12 miles when you have 14 miles to go. (Panama)
• Diligence is the mother of good fortune. (Peru)
• Face to face respect appears. (Ecuador)
• You may believe every good report of a grateful man. (Guatemala)
• Many go for wool and come back shorn themselves. (Dominican Republic)
• He who marries prudence is the brother-in-law of peace. (Bolivia)
• Nothing is so burdensome as a secret. (Colombia)
• The vulgar keep no account of your hits, but of your misses. (Paraguay)
• Grief shared is half grief; joy shared is double joy. (Honduras)
• A “no” in time is better than a late “yes.” (Uruguay)
• When you mourn, you cannot sing; when you sing, you cannot mourn. (Argentina)

(From Guy Zona, Eyes That See Do Not Grow Old, 1996.)