for imbibing and assimilating knowledge. The capacity is often exercised
unconsciously. When my eldest son, at the age of six, was taught to read
in the course of a few weeks of daily instruction, it was suddenly
discovered that his four-year-old brother also could read. Nobody could
tell how it happened. Of course the younger boy must have taken keen
notice of what the elder one was doing, but the process went on without
attracting attention until the result appeared.
This capacity for unconscious learning is not at all uncommon. It is
possessed to some extent by everybody; but a very high degree of it is
one of the marks of genius. I remember one evening, many years ago,
hearing Herbert Spencer in a friendly discussion regarding certain
functions of the cerebellum. Abstruse points of comparative anatomy and
questions of pathology were involved. Spencer's three antagonists were
not violently opposed to him, but were in various degrees unready to
adopt his views. The three were: Huxley, one of the greatest of
comparative anatomists; Hughlings Jackson, a very eminent authority on
the pathology of the nervous system; and George Henry Lewes, who,
although more of an amateur in such matters, had nevertheless devoted
years of study to neural physiology, and was thoroughly familiar with
the history of the subject. Spencer more than held his ground against
the others. He met fact with fact, brought up points in anatomy the
significance of which Huxley confessed that he had overlooked, and had
more experiments and clinical cases at his tongue's end than Jackson
could muster. It was quite evident that he knew all they knew on the
subject, and more besides. Yet Spencer had never been through a course
of "regular training" in the studies concerned; nor had he ever studied
at a university, or even at a high school. Where did he learn the
wonderful mass of facts which he poured forth that evening? Whence came
his tremendous grasp upon the principles involved? Probably he could not
have told you. A few days afterward I happened to be talking with
Spencer about history, a subject of which he modestly said he knew but
little. I told him I had often been struck with the aptness of the
historic illustrations cited in many chapters of his "Social Statics,"
written when he was twenty-nine years old. The references were not only
always accurate, but they showed an intelligence and soundness of
judgment unattainable, one would think, save by close familiarity with
history. Spencer assured me that he had never read extensively in
history. Whence, then, this wealth of knowledge,--not smattering, not
sciolism, but solid, well-digested knowledge? Really, he did not know,
except that when his interest was aroused in any subject he was keenly
alive to all facts bearing upon it, and seemed to find them whichever
way he turned. When I mentioned this to Lewes, while recalling the
discussion on the cerebellum, he exclaimed: "Oh, you can't account for
it! It's his genius. Spencer has greater instinctive power of
observation and assimilation than any man since Shakespeare, and he is
like Shakespeare for hitting the bull's-eye every time he fires. As for
Darwin and Huxley, we can follow their intellectual processes, but
Spencer is above and beyond all; he is inspired!"
Those were Lewes's exact words, and they made a deep impression upon me.
The comparison with Shakespeare struck me as a happy one, and I can
understand both Spencer and Shakespeare the better for it. Concerning
Spencer one circumstance may be observed. Since his early manhood he has
lived in London, and has had for his daily associates men of vast
attainments in every department of science. He has thus had rare
opportunities for absorbing an immense fund of knowledge unconsciously.
It is evident that the author of Shakespeare's plays possessed an
extraordinary "instinctive power of observation and assimilation." There
was nothing strange in such a genius growing up in a small Warwickshire
town. The difficulty is one which the Delia-Baconians have created for
themselves. As it is their chief stock in trade, they magnify it in
every way they can think of. Shakespeare's parents, they say, were
illiterate, and he did not know how to spell his own name. It appears as
Shagspere, Shaxpur, Shaxberd, Chacsper, and so on through some thirty
forms, several of which William Shakespeare himself used indifferently.
The implication is that such a man must have been shockingly ignorant.
The real ignorance, however, is on the part of those who use such an
argument. Apparently, they do not know that in Shakespeare's time such
laxity in spelling was common in all ranks of society and in all grades
of culture. The name of Elizabeth's great Lord Treasurer, Cecil, and his
title, Burghley, were both spelled in half a dozen ways. The name of
Raleigh occurs in more than forty different forms, and Sir Walter, one
of the most accomplished men of his time, wrote it Rauley, Rawleyghe,
Ralegh, and in yet other ways. The talk of the Baconizers on this point
is simply ludicrous.
Equally silly is their talk about the dirty streets of Stratford. They
seem to have just discovered that Elizabeth's England was a badly
drained country, with heaps of garbage in the streets. Shakespeare's
father, they tell us, was a butcher, and evidently from a butcher's son,
living in an ill-swept town, and careless about the spelling of his
name, not much in the way of intellectual achievement was to be
expected! In point of fact, Shakespeare's parents belonged to the middle
class. His father owned several houses in Stratford and two or three
farms in the neighbourhood. As a farmer in those days, he would
naturally have cattle slaughtered on his premises and would sell wool
off the backs of his own flocks, whence the later tradition of his
having been butcher and wool dealer. That his social position was good
is shown by the facts that he was chief alderman and high bailiff of
Stratford, and justice of the peace, and was styled "Master John
Shakespeare," or (as we should say) "Mr.;" whereas, had he been one of
the common folk, his style had been "Goodman Shakespeare." A visit to
his home in Henley Street, and to Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shottery,
shows that the two families were in eminently respectable circumstances.
The son of the high bailiff would see the best people in the
neighbourhood. There was in the town a remarkably good free grammar
school, where he might have learned the "small Latin and less Greek"
which his friend Ben Jonson assures us he possessed. This expression, by
the way, is usually misunderstood, because people do not pause to
consider it. Coming from Ben Jonson, I should say that "small Latin and
less Greek" might fairly describe the amount of those languages
ordinarily possessed by a member of the graduating class at Harvard in
good standing. It can hardly imply less than the ability to read Terence
at sight, and perhaps Euripides less fluently. The author of the plays,
with his unerring accuracy of observation, knows Latin enough at least
to use the Latin part of English most skilfully; at the same time, when
he has occasion to use Greek authors, such as Homer or Plutarch, he
usually prefers an English translation. At all events, Jonson's remark
informs us that the man whom he addresses as "sweet swan of Avon" knew
_some_ Latin and _some_ Greek,--a conclusion which is so distasteful to
one of our Baconizers, Mr. Edwin Reed, that he will not admit it. Rather
than do so, he has the assurance to ask us to believe that by the
epithet "sweet swan of Avon" Jonson really meant Francis Bacon! Dear me,
Mr. Reed, do you really mean it? And how about the editor of Beaumont
and Fletcher in 1647, when, in his dedication to Shakespeare's friend
the Earl of Pembroke, he speaks of "Sweet Swan of Avon Shakespear"? Was
he too a participator in the little scheme for fooling posterity? Or was
he one of those who were fooled?
Whether Shakespeare had other chances for book-lore than those which the
grammar school afforded, whether there was any interesting parson at
hand, as often in small towns, to guide and stimulate his unfolding
thoughts,--upon such points we have no information. But there were
things to be learned in the country town quite outside of books and
pedagogues. There, while the poet listened to the "strain of strutting
chanticleer," and watched the "sun-burn'd sicklemen, of August weary,"
putting on their rye-straw hats and making holiday with rustic nymphs,
he could rejoice in
"Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty;
Vines with clust'ring bunches growing;
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;"
there he could see the "unbacked colts" prick their ears, advance their
eyelids, lift up their noses, as if they smelt music; there he knew,
doubtless, many a bank where the wild thyme grew and on which the
moonlight sweetly slept; there he watched the coming of "violets dim,"
"pale primroses," flower-de-luce, carnations, with "rosemary and rue" to
keep their "savour all the winter long,"
"When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail."
Such lore as this no books or college could impart.
It was this that Milton had in mind when he introduced Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson into his poem "L'Allegro." Milton was in his thirtieth year
when Jonson, poet laureate, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey; he
was only a boy of eight years when Shakespeare died, but the beautiful
sonnet written fourteen years later shows how lovingly he studied his
works:--
"What needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones," etc.
The poem "L'Allegro" and its fellow "Il Penseroso" describe the delights
of Milton's life at his father's country house near Windsor Castle. He
used often to ride into London to hear music or pass an evening at the
theatre, as in the following lines:--
"Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child,
Warble his native woodnotes wild."
This accurate and happy contrast exasperates the Baconizers, for it
spoils their stock in trade, and accordingly they try their best to
assure us that Milton did not know what he was writing about. They
asseverate with vehemence that in all the seven-and-thirty plays there
is no such thing as a native woodnote wild.
But before leaving the contrast we may pause for a moment to ask, Where
did Ben Jonson get his learning? He was, as he himself tells us, "poorly
brought up" by his stepfather, a bricklayer. He went to Westminster
School, where he was taught by Camden, and he may have spent a short
time at Cambridge, though this is doubtful. His schooling was nipped in
the bud, for he had to go home and lay brick; and when he found such an
existence insupportable he went into the army and fought in the
Netherlands. At about the age of twenty we find him back in London, and
there lose sight of him for five years, when all at once his great
comedy "Every Man in his Humour" is performed, and makes him famous.
Now, in such a life, when did Jonson get the time for his immense
reading and his finished classical scholarship? Reasoning after the
manner of the Delia-Baconians, we may safely say that he could not
possibly have accumulated the learning which is shown in his plays:
therefore he could not have written those plays; therefore Lord Bacon
must have written them! There are daring soarers in the empyrean who do
not shrink from this conclusion; a doctor in Michigan, named Owen, has
published a pamphlet to prove, among other things, that Bacon was the
author of the plays which were performed and printed as Jonson's.
To return to Shakespeare. Somewhere about 1585, when he was
one-and-twenty, he went to London, leaving his wife and three young
children at Stratford. His father had lost money, and the fortunes of
the family were at the lowest ebb. In London we lose sight of
Shakespeare for a while, just as we lose sight of Jonson, until literary
works appear. The work first published is "Venus and Adonis," one of the
most exquisite pieces of diction in the English language. It was
dedicated to Henry, Earl of Southampton, by William Shakespeare, whose
authorship of the poem is asserted as distinctly as the title-page of
"David Copperfield" proclaims that novel to be by Charles Dickens, yet
some precious critics assure us that Shakespeare "could not" have
written the poem, and never knew the Earl of Southampton. Some years
ago, Mr. Appleton Morgan, who does not wish to be regarded as a
Baconizer, published an essay on the Warwickshire dialect, in which he
maintained that since no traces of that kind of speech occur in "Venus
and Adonis," therefore it could not have been written by a young man
fresh from a small Warwickshire town. This is a specimen of the loose
kind of criticism which prepares soil for Delia-Baconian weeds to grow
in. The poem was published in 1593, seven or eight years after
Shakespeare's coming to London; and we are asked to believe that the
world's greatest genius, one of the most consummate masters of speech
that ever lived, could tarry seven years in the city without learning
how to write what Hosea Biglow calls "citified English"! One can only
exclaim with Gloster, "O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought!"
In those years Shakespeare surely learned much else. It seems clear that
he had a good reading acquaintance with French and Italian, though he
often uses translations, as for instance Florio's version of Montaigne.
In estimating what Shakespeare "must have" known or "could not have"
known, one needs to use more caution than some of our critics display.
For example, in "The Winter's Tale" the statue of Hermione is called "a
piece ... now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio
Romano." Now, since Romano is known as a great painter, but not as a
sculptor, this has been cited as a blunder on Shakespeare's part. It
appears, however, that the first edition of Vasari's "Lives of the
Painters," published in 1550 and never translated from its original
Italian, informs us that Romano did work in sculpture. In Vasari's
second edition, published in 1568 and translated into several languages,
this information is not given. From these facts, the erudite German
critic Dr. Karl Elze, who is not a bit of a Delia-Baconian, but only an
occasional sufferer from _vesania commentatorum_, introduces us to a
solemn dilemma: either the author of "The Winter's Tale" must have
consulted the first edition of Vasari in the original Italian, or else
he must have travelled in Italy and gazed upon statues by Romano. Ah!
prithee not so fast, worthy doctor; be not so lavish with these "musts."
It is, I think, improbable that Shakespeare ever saw Italy except with
the eyes of his imperial fancy. On the other hand, there are many
indications that he could read Italian, but among them we cannot attach
much importance to this one. Why should he not have learned from
_hearsay_ that Romano had made statues? In the name of common sense, are
there no sources of knowledge save books? Or, since it was no unusual
thing for Italian painters in the sixteenth century to excel in
sculpture and architecture, why should not Shakespeare have assumed
without verification that it was so in Romano's case? It was a tolerably
safe assumption to make, especially in an age utterly careless of
historical accuracy, and in a comedy which provides Bohemia with a
sea-coast, and mixes up times and customs with as scant heed of
probability as a fairy tale.
In arguing about what Shakespeare "must have" or "could not have" known,
we must not forget that at no time or place since history began has
human thought fermented more briskly than in London while he was living
there. The age of Drake and Raleigh was an age of efflorescence in
dramatic poetry, such as had not been seen in the twenty centuries since
Euripides died. Among Shakespeare's fellow craftsmen were writers of
such great and varied endowments as Chapman, Marlowe, Greene, Nash,
Peele, Marston, Dekker, Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. During his earlier
years in London, Richard Hooker was master of the Middle Temple, and
there a little later Ford and Beaumont were studying. The erudite
Camden was master of Westminster School; among the lights of the age
for legal learning were Edward Coke and Francis Bacon; at the same time,
one might have met in London the learned architect Inigo Jones and the
learned poet John Donne, both of them excellent classical scholars;
there one would have found the divine poet Edmund Spenser, just come
over from Ireland to see to the publication of his "Faerie Queene;" not
long afterward came John Fletcher from Cambridge, and the acute
philosopher Edward Herbert from Oxford and one and all might listen to
the incomparable table-talk of that giant of scholarship, John Selden.
The delights of the Mermaid Tavern, where these rare wits were wont to
assemble, still live in tradition. As Keats says:--
"Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"
It has always been believed that this place was one of Shakespeare's
favourite haunts. By common consent of scholars, it has been accepted as
the scene of those contests of wit between Shakespeare and Jonson of
which Fuller tells us when he compares Jonson to a Spanish galleon,
built high with learning, but slow in movement, while he likens
Shakespeare to an English cruiser, less heavily weighted, but apt for
victory because of its nimbleness,--the same kind of contrast, by the
way, as that which occurred to Milton.
But our Baconizing friends will not allow that Shakespeare ever went to
the Mermaid, or knew the people who met there; at least, none but a few
fellow dramatists. We have no documentary proof that he ever met with
Raleigh, or Bacon, or Selden. Let us observe that, while these sapient
critics are in some cases ready to welcome the slightest circumstantial
evidence, there are others in which they will accept nothing short of
absolute demonstration. Did Shakespeare ever see a maypole? The word
occurs just once in his plays, namely, in the "Midsummer Night's Dream,"
where little Hermia, quarrelling with tall Helena, calls her a "painted
maypole;" but that proves nothing. I am not aware that there is any
absolute documentary proof that Shakespeare ever set eyes on a maypole.
It is nevertheless certain that in England, at that time, no boy could
grow to manhood without seeing many a maypole. Common sense has some
rights which we are bound to respect.
Now, Shakespeare's London was a small city of from 150,000 to 200,000
souls, or about the size of Providence or Minneapolis at the present
time. In cities of such size, everybody of the slightest eminence is
known all over town, and such persons are sure to be more or less
acquainted with one another; it is a very rare exception when it is not
so. Before his thirtieth year, Shakespeare was well known in London as
an actor, a writer of plays, and the manager of a prominent theatre. It
was in that year that Spenser, in his "Colin Clout's Come Home Again,"
alluding to Shakespeare under the name of Aëtion, or "eagle-like," paid
him this compliment:--
"And there, though last, not least, is Aëtion;
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found;
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth, like himself, heroically sound."
Four years after this, in 1598, Francis Meres published his book
entitled "Palladis Tamia," a very interesting contribution to literary
history. The author, who had been an instructor in rhetoric in the
University of Oxford, was then living in London, near the Globe Theatre.
In this book Meres tells his readers that "the sweet witty soul of Ovid
lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his 'Venus
and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets among his private
friends, etc.... As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy
and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the
most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for comedy, witness his
'Gentlemen of Verona,' his 'Errors,' his 'Love's Labour's Lost,' his
'Love's Labour's Wonne,'[38] his 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and his
'Merchant of Venice;' for tragedy, his 'Richard II.,' 'Richard III.,'
'Henry IV.,' 'King John,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and his 'Romeo and
Juliet.' As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speak with Plautus's
tongue if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak
with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase if they would speak English." In
other passages Meres mentions Shakespeare's lyrical quality, for which
he likens him to Pindar and Catullus; and the glory of his style, for
which he places him along with Virgil and Homer. It thus appears that,
at the age of thirty-four, this poet from Stratford was already ranked
by critical scholars by the side of the greatest names of antiquity. Let
me add that the popularity of his plays was making him a somewhat
wealthy man, so that he had relieved his father from pecuniary troubles,
and had just bought for himself the Great House at Stratford where the
last years of his life were spent. His income seems already to have been
equivalent to $10,000 a year in our modern money. His position had come
to be such that he could extend patronage to others. It was in 1598 that
through his influence Ben Jonson obtained, after many rebuffs, his first
hearing before a London audience, when "Every Man in his Humour" was
brought out at Blackfriars Theatre, with Shakespeare acting one of the
parts.
To suppose that such a man as this, in a town the size of Minneapolis,
connected with a principal theatre, writer of the most popular plays of
the day, a poet whom men were already coupling with Homer and
Pindar,--to suppose that such a man was not known to all the educated
people in the town is simply absurd. There were probably very few men,
women, or children in London, between 1595 and 1610, who did not know
who Shakespeare was when he passed them in the street; and as for such
wits as drank ale and sack at the Mermaid, as for Raleigh and Bacon and
Selden and the rest, to suppose that Shakespeare did not know them
well--nay, to suppose that he was not the leading spirit and brightest
wit of those ambrosial nights--is about as sensible as to suppose that
he never saw a maypole.
The facts thus far contemplated point to one conclusion. The son of a
well-to-do magistrate in a small country town is born with a genius
which the world has never seen surpassed. Coming to London at the age
of twenty-one, he achieves such swift success that within thirteen years
he is recognized as one of the chief glories of English literature.
During this time he is living in the midst of such a period of
intellectual ferment as the world has seldom seen, and in a position
which necessarily brings him into frequent contact with all the most
cultivated men. Under such circumstances, there is nothing in the
smallest degree strange or surprising in his acquiring the varied
knowledge which his plays exhibit. The major premise of the
Delia-Baconians has, therefore, nothing in it whatever. It is a mere
bubble, an empty vagary,--only this, and nothing more.