Joseph C. Hart
| Joseph C. Hart | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Joseph Coleman Hart 1798 |
| Died | 1855 |
| Resting place | Santa Cruz de Tenerife |
| Nationality | US |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Years active | 1830s until his death |
| Notable work | Miriam Coffin, The Romance of Yachting |
Joseph Coleman Hart (1798–1855) was an American writer. He is now best known as the first person to assert in print that William Shakespeare was not the true author of the plays published under his name. His novel Miriam Coffin influenced Herman Melville, though Melville was also highly critical of Hart.
Hart was a lawyer by profession, who also served as a Colonel in the National Guard and as a school principal. During this period he wrote a number of textbooks on geography. He was a longtime resident of New York and friend of several literary figures, occasionally working as a journalist. He later served as an American consul to Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where he died.
Hart became widely known with his novel Miriam Coffin; or, The Whale-Fisherman (1835). This was the first novel to deal with whaling in Nantucket, a subject later made famous by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick. Hart's work was the most important fictional influence on Melville's novel. Hart wrote the book to encourage congressional support for the whaling industry. He interviewed local people to obtain an accurate account of their lives and the workings of the industry. Unlike Melville, Hart concentrates on the community in Nantucket, and places less emphasis on the whalers. The novel was based on the historical career of profiteer Kezia Coffin (1723–1798). It describes the corrupt financial dealings of Miriam, a whaler's wife, whose unproductive market speculations are contrasted with the heroic and productive labors of her husband, fighting nature and dangerous savage peoples to bring home useful raw materials.
Hart’s views on Shakespeare were published in The Romance of Yachting (1848), a narrative of his travels to places that give him occasion for musings on a variety of topics. Pondering the fact that Shakespeare erroneously identifies a sea coast in landlocked Bohemia in The Winter's Tale, Hart argues that the mixture of ignorance and scholarship in Shakespeare's work suggests that the plays were collaborative productions, and that Shakespeare merely adapted the writings of more educated playwrights in order to make them commercially viable for the popular theater. Hart described Shakespeare as a "mere factotum of the theatre" and a "vulgar and unlettered man". He believed that adding obscene jokes to the plays of other writers was Shakespeare's main contribution.
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