Scene 1, Arthur says to Hubert:

THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

By Appleton Morgan

Author Of "The Law Of Literature,"

"Notes To Best's Principles Of Evidence," Etc., Etc=

````Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves;

````Sic vos non vobis vellera fertis oves;

````Sic vos non vobis melliflcatus apes;

````Sic vos non vobis fertis aratra boves.

`````--_P. Virgil. Maro_=

Cincinnati, Robert Clarke & Co

1881

TO D. T. MORGAN, ESQ.,

OF WHIP'S CROSS, WALTHAMSTOW, ESSEX, ENGLAND.

My Dear Sir:

I do not know your opinion on the matter treated in these pages. Very

possibly you will disagree with every line of my Brief. But it gives me

pleasure to connect my name with yours on this page, and to subscribe

myself

Very faithfully, your kinsman,

APPLETON MORGAN.

October, 1881.

PREFACE.

|M. Guizot, in his History of England, states the Shakespearean

problem in a few words, when he says: "Let us finally mention the great

comedian, the great tragedian, the great philosopher, the great poet,

who was in his lifetime butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical

manager, and whose name is William Shakespeare. In twenty years, amid

the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of

instructing his actors, he composed the thirty-two tragedies and

comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of

human nature, and an unequaled power of imagination, terrible and comic

by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to

every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of

his experience and for ever remaining the treasure of the age--all this

being accomplished, Shakespeare left the theater and the busy world,

at the age of forty-five, to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where lived

peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing and never

returning to the stage--ignored and unknown if his works had not forever

marked out his place in the world--a strange example of an imagination

so powerful, suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing, once for all, the

door to the efforts of genius."

But M. Guizot is very far from suggesting any prima facie inconsistency

in this statement as it stands.

Since every man reads the Shakespearean pages for himself and between

the lines, much of what we are expected to accept as Shakespearean

criticism must fail of universal appreciation and sympathy. But none who

read the English tongue can well be unconcerned with the question as

to <b>who wrote</b> those pages; and it would be affectation to deny that

the intense realism of our day is offering some startling contributions

to the solution of that question.

For instance, the gentlemen of the "New Shakespeare Society" (whom

Mr. Swinburne rather mercilessly burlesques in his recent "_Studies of

Shakespeare_") submit these dramas to a quantitative analysis; and,

by deliberately counting the "male," "female," "weak," and "stopped"

endings, and the Alexandrines and catalectics (just as a mineralogist

counts the degrees and minutes in the angles of his crystals), insist on

their ability to pronounce didatically and infallibly what was written

by William Shakespeare, and at what age; what was composed by Dekker,

Fletcher, Marlowe, or anybody else; what was originally theirs, touched

up by William Shakespeare or _vice versa_, etc. It is curious to observe

how this process invariably gives all the admirable sentiments to

William Shakespeare, and all the questionable ones to somebody else; but

at least these New Shakespearean gentlemen have surrendered somewhat of

the "cast-iron" theory of our childhood--that every page, line, and word

of the immortal Shakespearean Drama was written by William Shakespeare

demi-god, and by none other--perhaps, even opened a path through which

the unbelievers may become, in due time, orthodox.

There are still, however, a great many persons who are disposed to wave

the whole question behind them, much as Mr. Podsnap disposed of the

social evil or a famine in India. It is only a "Historic Doubt," they

say, and "Historic Doubts" are not rare, are mainly contrived to exhibit

syllogistic ingenuity in the teeth of facts, etc., etc. The French, they

say, have the same set of problems about Molière. Was he a lawyer?

was he a doctor? etc.--and they all find their material in internal

evidence--e. g., an accurate handling of the technique of this or that

profession or science: parallelism, practical coincidence, or something

of that sort.

The present work is an attempt to examine, for the benefit of these

latter, from purely external evidence, a question which, dating only

within the current quarter century, is constantly recurring to confront

investigation, and, like Banquo's troublesome shade, seems altogether

indisposed to "down."

I have to add my acknowledgments to Mr. Julian Norris, for his careful

preparation of the Index to these pages.

Grandview-on-Hudson, October 2, 1881. {009}

THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH.

PART I. THE MYSTERY.

[Illustration: 9015]

HE thirty-seven plays called, collectively, "Shakespeare," are a

phenomenon, not only in English letters, but in human experience. The

literature of the country to which they belong, had, up to the date

of their appearance, failed to furnish, and has been utterly powerless

since, to produce any type, likeness, or formative trace of them; while

the literature of other nations possesses not even a corresponding type.

The history of a century on either side of their era discloses, within

the precints of their birth, no resources upon which levy could have

been made for their creation. They came and went like a meteor; neither

borrowing of what they found, nor loaning to what they left, their own

peculiar and unapproachable magnificence.

The unremitting researches of two centuries have only been able to

assign their authorship (where it rested at first) to an hiatus in the

life of a wayward village lad named William Shakespeare--who fled his

native town penniless and before the constable, to return, in a few

years, a well-to-do esquire--with a coat of arms and money in his

pocket. {010}We have the history of the boy, and certain items as to

the wealthy squire, who left behind him two or three exceedingly

common-place and conventional epitaphs (said to be his handiwork) and

a remarkable will; but, between them, no hint of history, chronicle, or

record. Still, within this unknown period of this man's career, these

matchless dramas came from somewhere, and passed current under his name.

The death of their reputed author attracted no contemporary attention,

and for many years thereafter the dramas remained unnoticed. Although

written in an idiom singularly open to the comprehension of all classes

and periods of English-speaking men, no sooner did they begin to be

remarked, than a cloud of what are politely called "commentators" bore

down upon them; any one who could spell feeling at liberty to furnish

a "reading;" and any one who supposed himself able to understand one of

these "readings," to add a barnacle in the shape of a "note." From these

"commentators" the stately text is even now in peril, and rarely, even

to-day, can it be perused, except one line at a time, across the top

of a dreary page of microscopic and exasperating annotation. But, up to

within a very few years, hardly a handful of Shakespearean students

had arisen with courage to admit--what scarcely any one of the

"commentators" even, could have failed to perceive--the utterly

inadequate source ascribed to the plays themselves.

It is not yet thirty years since an American lady was supposed to have

gone crazy because she declared that William Shakespeare, of the Globe

and Black-friars theaters in London, in the days of Elizabeth, was not

the author of these certain dramas and poems {011}for which--for almost

three hundred years--he has stood sponsor.

Miss Bacon's "madness," indeed, has been rapidly contageous. Now-a-days,

men make books to prove, not that William Shakespeare did not write

these works, but that Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, or some other

Elizabethan, did not. And we even find, now and then, a treatise written

to prove that William Shakespeare was, after all, their author; an

admission, at least, that the ancient presumption to that effect no

longer covers the case. And, doubtless, the correct view is within this

admission. For, probably, if permitted to examine this presumption by

the tests which would be applied to any other question of fact, namely,

the tests of contemporary history, muniments, and circumstantial

evidence, it will be found to be quite as well established and proved

that William Shakespeare was not the author of the plays that go by his

name, as any other fact, occurring in London between the years 1585

and 1616, not recorded in history or handed down by tradition, could be

established and proved in 1881.

If a doubt as to the authorship of the plays had arisen at any time

during or between those years, and had been kept open thereafter, the

probability is that it would have been settled by this time. But, as it

is, we may be pretty certain that no such doubt did arise, and that

no such question was asked, during the years when those who could have

dispelled the doubt or answered the question were living. When we

are about to visit a theater in these days, what we ask and concern

ourselves with is: Is the play entertaining? Does it "draw?" And, when

we wit{012}ness it, the question is: Do we enjoy it--or does it bore us?

Will we recommend our friends to come that they may be entertained, too,

and that we may discuss it with them? or will we warn them to keep away?

We very speedily settle these questions for ourselves. Doubtless we

may and do inquire who the author is. But we do not enter into any

discussion upon the subject, or charge our minds enough with the matter

to doubt it when we are told. The author's name is, not unusually,

printed on the play-bill before us; we glance at it indifferently, take

what is told us for granted, and think no more about it. If the name

happens to be assumed, we may possibly see its identity discussed in the

dramatic columns of our newspapers next morning, or we may not. If the

play entertains us, we commend it. If it drags, we sneer at it, get up

and go off. That is all the concern we give it. The evening has slipped

away; and, with it, any idle speculations as to the playwright who has

essayed to amuse us for an hour.

If, three hundred years hence, a question as to who wrote the play we

saw at Mr. Daly's theater or Mr. Wallack's theater last evening should

come up, there would be very little evidence, not any records, and

scarcely an exhibit to refer to in the matter. Copies of the play-bill

or the newspapers of the day might chance to be discovered; but

these--the internal testimony of the play itself, if any, and a sort

of tacit presumption growing out of a statement it was nobody's cue to

inquire into at the time it was made, and had been nobody's business to

scrutinize since--would constitute all the evidence at hand. How this

supposititious case is precisely all-fours with the facts {013}in the

matter of the dramatic works which we call, collectively, Shakespeare's.

Precisely: except that, on the evenings when those plays were acted,

there were no play-bills, and, on the succeeding morning, no daily

newspaper. We have, therefore, in 1881, much fewer facilities for

setting ourselves right as to their authorship than those living three

hundred years after us could possess in the case we have supposed.

The audiences who witnessed a certain class of plays at Shakespeare's

theaters, in the years between 1585 and 1606, were entertained. The

plays "drew." People talked of them about town, and they become valuable

to their proprietors. The mimic lords and ladies were acceptable to

the best seats; the rabble loved the show and glitter and the alarum of

drums; and all were Britons who gloated over rehearsal of the prowess

of their own kings and heroes, and to be told that their countrymen at

Agincourt had slain ten thousand Frenchmen at an expense of but five

and twenty of themselves. But, if M. Taine's description of the

Shakespearean theaters and the audience therein wont to assemble may be

relied upon, we can pretty safely conclude that they troubled themselves

very little as to who fashioned the dialogue the counterfeit kings and

queens, soldiers, lords, and ladies spoke; or that they saw any thing in

that dialogue to make such speculation appear worth their while. Nor can

we discover any evidence, even among the cultured courtiers who listened

to them--or in the case of Elizabeth herself, who is said to have loved

them (which we may as well admit for the argument's sake)--that

any recognition of the plays as works worthy of any other than a

stage-manager, occurred. {014}Even if it should appear that these plays

thus performed were the plays we now call Shakespeare's; had any of this

audience suspected that these plays were not written for them, but for

all time; that, three hundred years later--when the plays should not

only be extant, but more loved and admired than ever--the thinking world

should set itself seriously to probe the mystery of their origin; there

might have been some interest as to their producer manifested, and we

might have had some testimony competent to the exact point to-day.

But it is evident enough that no such prophetic vision was vouchsafed

to them, and no such prophetic judgment passed. Nor is the phenomenon

exceptional. The critic, does not live, even to-day, however learned or

cultured or shrewd, who would take the responsibility of affirming upon

his own judgment, or even upon the universal judgment of his age and

race, that any literary composition would be, after a lapse of three

hundred years, not only extant, but immortal, hugged as its birthright

by a whole world. Such a statement would have been contrary to

experience, beyond the prophecy of criticism, and therefore only to be

known--if known at all--as a Fact. Moreover, it could only be known as

a fact at the expiration of the three hundred years. Doubtless, few

critics would care, in any case, to commit themselves upon record one

way or the other in a matter so hypothetical and speculative as the

judgment of posterity upon a literary performance, and certainly nothing

of the sort occurred in Shakespeare's day, even if there were any

dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the subject. There can be

no doubt--and it must be conceded {015}--that certain acted plays _did_

pass with their first audiences, and that certain printed plays, both

contemporaneously and for years thereafter, did pass with the public

who read them, as the compositions of Mr. Manager Shakespeare; and that

probably even the manager's pot companions, who had better call to know

him than any others, saw nothing to shake their heads at in his claim

to be their author (provided he ever made any such claim; which, by the

way, does not appear from any record of his life, and which nobody ever

asserted as a fact). If they did--with the exception only of Robert

Greene--they certainly kept their own counsel. On the one hand, then,

the question of the authorship was never raised, and, on the other

hand, if it had been, the scholars and critics who studied the plays

(supposing that there were any such in those days) could not possibly

have recognized them as immortal. If they had so recognized them, they

would doubtless have left us something more satisfactory as to the

authorship of the compositions than the mere "impression that they were

informed" that the manager of the theater where they were produced wrote

them; that they supposed he was clever enough to have done so, and they

therefore took it for granted that he did. That is all there is of the

evidence of Shakespeare's own day, as to the question--if it still is a

question--before us.

But how about the presumption--the legal presumption, arising from such

lapse of time as that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary--the

presumption springing from tradition and common report--that William

Shakespeare composed the Shakespearean plays? It is, of course,

understood that one presump{016}tion is as good as another until it is

disturbed. It is never safe to underrate an existing presumption; as

long as it stands at all, it stands as conclusive; once overthrown,

however, it is as if it had never existed.

A presumption three hundred years old may be a strong one to overthrow.

But if its age is all there is of it--if it be only strong in years--it

can yet be toppled over. Once overthrown, it is no more venerable

because it is three hundred years old than if it were only three. An

egg-shell will toss upon the crest of an angry surf, and, for very

frailty, outride breakers when the mightiest ship man ever framed could

not survive an instant. But it is only an egg-shell, for all that, and a

touch of the finger will crush and destroy it. And so, formidable as it

was in age, the presumption as to William Shakespeare's authorship of

the great dramas which for three hundred years had gone by his name, had

only to be touched by the thumb and finger of common sense to crackle

and shrivel like the egg that sat on the wall in the Kindergarten rhyme,

which all the king's army and all the king's men could not set up again,

once it had tumbled over.

But as the world advanced and culture increased, why did not the

question arise before? Simply because the times were not ripe for it.

This is the age and generation for the explosion of myths, and, as

one after another of them falls to pieces and disappears, who does not

wonder that they have not fallen sooner? For how many years has the myth

of William Tell been cherished as history! And yet there is no element

of absolute impossibility or even of improbability--much less of

miracle--in the story of an archer with a sure eye and a steady aim. Or,

in the case of physical {017}myths--which only required an exploration

by physical sense for their explosion--the maps of two centuries or

so ago represented all inaccessible seas as swarming with krakens and

ship-devouring reptiles. And it is not twenty years since children were

taught in their geographies that upon the coast of Norway there was a

whirlpool which sucked down ships prow foremost. And here, in our

midst, a cannon-shot from where we sit and write these lines, there was

believed to be and exist a Hell Gate which was a very portal of death

and slaughter to hapless mariners. But there are no krakens, and not

much of a Maelstrom; and, for twenty years before General Newton blew

up a few rocks at Hell Gate, people had laughed at the myth of its

ferocity. And again: nothing is easier than to invent a story so utterly

unimportant and immaterial that it will be taken for granted, without

controversy, and circulate with absolute immunity from examination,

simply because worth nobody's while to contradict it. For example, it

is likely enough that Demosthenes, in practicing oratory, stood on

a sea-beach and drilled his voice to outroar the waves. The story is

always told, however, with the rider, that Demosthenes did this with his

mouth filled with pebble-stones; and, as nobody cares whether he did or

not, nobody troubles himself to ascertain by experiment that the

thing is impossible, and that nobody can roar with a mouth full of

pebble-stones. And not even then would he succeed in removing the

impression obtaining with the great mass of the world, that a thing is

proven sufficiently if it gets into "print." Charles II. set the Royal

Society of his day at work to {018}find the reason why a dead fish

weighed more than a live one--and it was only when they gave it up, that

the playful monarch assured them that the fact they were searching for

the reason of was not a fact at all. It is not impossible to demonstrate

from experience, that the human mind will be found--as a rule--to prefer

wasting laborious days in accounting for, rather than take the very

simplest pains to verify even a proposition or alleged fact, which, if a

fact at all, is of value beyond itself. It was objected to the system of

Copernicus, when first brought forward, that, if the earth turned on its

axis as he represented, a stone dropped from the summit of a tower would

not fall at the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west, in the

same manner that a stone dropped from the masthead of a ship in full

sail does not fall at the foot of the mast, but toward the stern. To

this it was answered that a stone, being a part of the earth, obeys

the same laws and moves with it, whereas it is no part of the ship,

of which, consequently, its motion is independent. This solution was

admitted by some and opposed by others, and the controversy went on with

spirit; nor was it till one hundred years after the death of Copernicus

that, the experiment being tried, it was ascertained that the stone thus

dropped from the head of the mast does fall at the foot of it. And so,

if, in the case of the Shakespearean authorship, the day has come for

truth to dispel fiction, and reason to scout organic miracle, why should

we decline to look into an alleged Shakespearean myth simply because it

happens to be a little tardy in coming to the surface?

But, most of all, it is to be remembered that it is, practically,

only our own century that has compre{019}hended the masterliness and

matchlessness of the "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," and the rest of those

transcripts of nature, the prophetic insight of whose author "spanned

the ages that were to roll up after him, mastered the highest wave of

modern learning and discovery, and touched the heart of all time, not

through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting mankind up

ont of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity; who

so wrote that to his all-seeing vision schools and libraries, sciences

and philosophies, were unnecessary, because his own marvelous intuition

had grasped all the past and seen through all his present and all his

future, and because, before his superhuman power, time and space had

vanished and disappeared." * The age for which the dramas were written

had not come, in that Elizabethan era.

* Jean Paul Frederich Richter. {020}deed, why our question

did not arise sooner. Nobody asked, "Who wrote Shakespeare?"

because nobody seemed to consider "Shakespeare" as any thing

worth speculating about. Let us pause right here to

demonstrate this.

The tongues of the actors were tied, the ears of the audience were deaf

to syllables whose burden was for the centuries that were to come

after. The time for the question, "Who wrote them?" was not yet. For two

hundred years more--from the day of William Shakespeare's death down to

years within the memory of those now living--down to at least the date

of Lord Byron (who admits that it is the perfectly correct thing to call

Shakespeare "god-like," "mighty," and the like, but very unfashionable

to read him),--we may ransack the records of scholarship and criticism,

and unearth scarcely a hint of what is now their every-where conceded

superiority, to say nothing of their immortality. In short, we can not

rise from such a search without understanding, very clearly in Fuller,

in 1622, chronicles that William Shakespeare's "genius was jocular," his

comedies merry, and his tragedies wonderful; his wit quick, but that his

learning was very little. Evelyn notes that, in 1661, he saw "Hamlet,

Prince of Denmark," played: "but now the old plays begin to disgust this

refined age, since His Majesty has been so long abroad." * Pepys, his

contemporary, says that the "'Midsummer-Night's Dream' was the most

insipid, ridiculous play he had ever seen.... and, but having lately

read the 'Adventures of Five Hours,' 'Othello' seemed a mean thing,"

though he liked Davenant's opera of "Macbeth," with its music and

dancing. ** When spending some money in books he looks over Shakespeare,

but chooses "'Hudibras,' the book now in the greatest fashion for

drollery," instead. It is doubtful if Milton ever read the Shakespearean

plays, in spite of the eloquent verses, "What needs my Shakespeare,"

etc.; since, in "L'Allegro," he speaks of his (Shakespeare's) "native

wood-notes wild." ***

* Amenities of Authors--Shakespeare," p. 210.

** Ibid., p. 211.

*** Dr. Maginn, in his Shakespearean papers ("Learning of

Shakespeare"), endeavors to explain what Milton meant by

"native wood-notes wild."

Surely if there is any thing in letters that is not "native wood-notes,"

it is the stately Shakespearean verse, full of camps and courts, but

very rarely of woodlands and {021}pastures; besides, whatever Milton

might say of the book called "Shakespeare" in poetry--like Ben

Jon-son--he showed unmitigated contempt for its writer in prose: about

the worst thing he could say about his king in "The Iconoclast," was

that Charles I. kept an edition of Shakespeare for his closet companion.

* "Other stuff of this sort," cries the blind poet, "may be read

throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the poet used much license in

departing from the truth of history." **

In 1681, one Nahum Tate, supposed to be a poet (a delusion so widespread

that he was actually created "poet laureate") stumbled upon "a thing

called Lear," assigned to one William Shakespeare, and, after much

labor, congratulated himself upon having "been able to make a play out

of it." ***

* "Amenities of Authors--Shakespeare," vol. ii, p. 208.

Ibid., p. 209, note.

** It is fair to say that "stuff" may only have meant

"matter," but it is indisputable that the passage was meant

as a slur on one who would read "Shakespeare."

*** The "play" he did make out of it is to be found in W.

H. Smith's "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 129. {022}so meanly

written that the comedy neither caused your mirth nor the

serious part your concernment....

John Dryden, in or about 1700, in his "Defence of the Epilogue," a

postscript to his tragedy "The Conquest of Granada," says: "Let any man

who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and

Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either

some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; and yet

these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven." He denounces

"the lameness of their plots," made up of some "ridiculous incoherent

story,... either grounded on impossibilities, or, at least, he writes,

in many places, below the dullest writers of our own or any precedent

age." Of the audiences who could tolerate such matter, he says: "They

knew no better, and therefore were satisfied with what they brought.

Those who call theirs the 'Golden Age of Poetry,' have only this reason

for it: that they were then content with acorns before they knew the

use of bread," etc. * To show the world how William Shakespeare _should_

have written, Mr. Dryden publishes his own improved version of "Troilus

and Cressida," "with an abjectly fulsome dedication to the Earl of

Sunderland, and a Preface," ** in which he is obliging enough to

say that the style of Shakespeare being "so pestered with figurative

expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure;" that, though

"the author seems to have began it with some fire, the characters of

'Pandarus' and 'Troilus' are promising enough, but, as if he grew weary

of his task, after an entrance or two, he lets 'em fall, and the latter

part of the tragedy is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets,

excursions and alarms. The chief persons who give name to the tragedy

are left alive. 'Cressida' is left alive and is not punished."

* "Works," edited by Malone, vol. ii, p. 252.

** "Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late." Written

by John Dryden, servant to his Majesty, London (4to) printed

for Abel Small, at the Unicorn at the West End of St.

Paul's, and Jacob Tonson, at the Judge's Head, in Chancery

Lane, near Fleet street. 1679.

"I have undertaken to remove that heap of rubbish.... I new-modelled the

plot; threw out many unnecessary persons, improved {023}those characters

which were begun and left unfinished,... made, with no small trouble, an

order and connection of the scenes, and... so ordered them that there is

a coherence of 'em with one another,... a due proportion of time allowed

for every motion,... have refined the language, etc."

The same thing was done in 1672, by Ravenscroft, who produced an

adaptation of "Titus Andronicus," and boasted "that none in all the

author's works ever received greater alterations or additions; the

language not only refined, but many scenes entirely new, besides most of

the principal characters heightened, and the plot much increased." John

Dennis, a critic of that day, declares that Shakespeare "knew nothing

about the ancients, set all propriety at defiance,... was neither master

of time enough to consider, correct, and polish what he had written,...

his lines are utterly void of celestial fire," and his verses

"frequently harsh and unmusical." He was, however, so interested in the

erratic and friendless poet that he kindly altered "The Merry Wives of

Windsor," and touched up "Coriolanus," which he brought out in

1720, under the title of "The Invader of his Country, or the Fatal

Resentment." The play, however, did not prosper, and he attributed it

to the fact that it was played on a Wednesday. Dean Swift, in his "The

Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris, concerning the Strange and Deplorable

Frenzy of John Dennis," relates how the said Dennis, being in company

with Lintot, the bookseller, and Shakespeare being mentioned as of a

contrary opinion to Mr. Dennis, the latter "swore the said Shakespeare

was a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which gave Mr. Lintot

a very ill opinion of the said Shake{024}speare." Lord Shaftesbury

complains, at about the same date, of Shakespeare's "rude and unpolished

style and antiquated phrase and wit." *

* Mr. De Quincy's painful effort to demonstrate that

neither Dryden nor Shaftesbury meant what he said is amusing

reading. See his "Shakespeare" in the "Encyclopaedia

Britannica." Also Knight, "Studies of Shakespeare," p. 510,

as to Dr. Johnson.

Thomas Rymer knows exactly how Othello, which he calls "a bloody farce,

the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief," ought to have been done. In

the first place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a-moor, and

that the army should be insulted by his being a soldier. Of "Desdemona"

he says: "There is nothing in her which is not below any country

kitchen-maid--no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly."

Speaking of expression, he writes that "in the neighing of a horse or

in the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is as lively

expression, and, I may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights

of Shakespeare." He is indignant that the catastrophe of the play should

turn on a handkerchief. He would have liked it to have been folded

neatly on the bridal couch, and, when Othello was killing Desde-mona,

"the fairy napkin might have started up to disarm his fury and stop his

ungracious mouth. Then might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for

dead; then might he, believing her dead, and touched with remorse, have

honestly cut his own throat, by the good leave and with the applause

of all the spectators, who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet

mind, and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and truly represented

in the theater. Then for the unraveling, of the plot, as they call

it, never was old {025}deputy recorder in a country town, with his

spectacles on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so blundered

and be doltified as is our poet to have a good riddance and get the

catastrophe off his hands. What can remain with the audience to carry

home with them? How can it work but to delude our senses, disorder our

thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt our appetite, and till our

head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what

all the parish clerks in London could ever pretend to?" He then hopes

the audience will go to the play as they go to church, namely, "sit

still, look on one another, make no reflection, nor mind the play

more than they would a sermon." With regard to "Julius Cæsar," he is

displeased that Shakespeare should have meddled with the Romans.

He might be "familiar with Othello and Iago as his own natural

acquaintances, but Cæsar and Brutus were above his conversation." To put

them "in gulls' coats and make them Jack-puddens," is more than public

decency should tolerate--in Mr. Rymer's eyes. Of the well-known scene

between Brutus and Cassius, this critic remarks: "They are put there

to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and

muscles. They are to play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and

swaggering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reckoning." Rymer

calls his book "A Short View of Tragedy, with Some Reflections on

Shakespeare and Other Practitioners for the Stage." Hume thought that

both Bacon and Shakespeare showed "a want of simplicity and purity

of diction with defective taste and elegance," and that "a reasonable

propriety of {026}thoughts he (Shakespeare) can not at any time uphold."

Voltaire thought the Shakespearean kings "not completely royal."

Pope (who declared that Rymer, just quoted, was "a learned and strict

critic"), to show that he was not insensible to the occasional merits

of the plays, was good enough to distinguish, by inverted commas, such

passages as he thought might be safely admired by the rest of mankind;

while Richard Steele, in "The Tatler," * borrows the story of the

"Taming of the Shrew," and narrates it as "an incident occurring in

Lincolnshire," feeling, no doubt, that he did a good deed in rescuing

whatever was worth preserving from the clutches of such obscure and

obsolete literature!

And then came the period when scholars and men of taste were ravished

with Addison's stilted rhymes, and the six-footed platitudes of Pope,

and the sesquepedalian derivatives dealt out by old Samuel Johnson. The

Shakespearean plays are pronounced by Mr. Addison ** "very faulty in

hard metaphors and forced expressions," and he joins them with "Xat.

Lee," as "instances of the false sublime."

* Vol. vi, No. 31. He complains, in number 42, that the

female characters in the play make "so small a figure."

** Spectator, 30; p. 235.

Samuel Johnson is reported as saying that William Shakespeare never

wrote six consecutive lines (he subsequently made it seven) without

"making an ass of himself," (in which speech he seems to have followed

his namesake without the "h," old Ben, in the "Discoveries")--backing up

his assertion with some very choice specimens of literary criticism. Let

any one, interested enough in {027}the matter to see for himself, take

down Dr. Johnson's own edition of Shakespeare, and read his commentaries

on the Shakespearean text. Let him turn, for example, to where he says

of "Hamlet":

_We must allow to the tragedy of "Hamlet" the praise of variety. The

incidents are so numerous that the argument of the play would make a

long tale. The scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and

solemnity,... that includes judicious and instructive observations....

New characters appear from time to time in continual succession,

exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation.

The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth;... the catastrophe

is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an

expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be

formed to kill Hamlet with the dagger and Laertes with the bowl._

Again, of "Macbeth":

_This play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fiction,

and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action, but it has no nice

discriminations of character.... I know not whether it may not be

said in defense of some parts which now seem improbable, that in

Shakespeare's time it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and

illusive predictions._

Again, of "Julius Cæsar":

_Of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and the

contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally

celebrated. But I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and

think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc._

Was "Hamlet" a low comedy part, in the days when all England bowed at

the feet of an unkempt and mannerless old man, awed by the brilliancy of

his literary judgment? And did Hamlet's "pretended madness" cause "much

mirth" to the age, or only to {028}Samuel Johnson? People now-a-days do

not sit and giggle over "the pretended madness of Hamlet." But, waiving

these questions, let him turn to the "Rambler," * of this excellent

lexicographer, and read him (patiently, if he can), citing the

magnificent lines--=

`````Come thick night

```And pall thee in the dun nest smoke of hell;

```That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

```Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

```To cry "_hold, hold!"_=

as an example of "poetry debased by mean expressions;" because "dun"

is a "low" expression," seldom heard but in the stable;" "knife" an

instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employment; and

asking "who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the

avengers of guilt _peeping_ through the blanket of the dark!"

* No. 168.

Let the reader look on a little further, and find this fossil-scanning

machine telling off the spondees and dactyls in the dramas (to ascertain

if the cæsura was exactly in the middle) on his fingers and thumbs, and

counting the unities up to three, to see if he could approve of what the

ages after him were to worship! if, haply, this Shakespeare (although he

_might_ have devised a scheme to kill Laertes with the bowl and Hamlet

with the dagger, or _might_ have thrown a little more fire into the

quarrel with Brutus and Cassius) could be admitted to sit at the feet

of Addison, with his sleepy and dreary "Campaign;" or Pope, with his

metrical proverbs about "Man;" or even the aforesaid Samuel Johnson

himself, with his rhymed dic{029}tionaries about the "vanity of human

wishes," and so on. Let him find the old lexicographer admitting, in his

gracious condescension, that "The Tempest" "is sufficiently regular;"

of "Measure for Measure" that "the unities are sufficiently preserved;"

that the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was "well written;" that the style

of the "Merchant of Venice" was "easy:" but that in "As you Like It"

"an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson" is unhappily lost. The

"Winter's Tale" is "entertaining;" in "King John" he finds "a pleasing

interchange of incidents and characters," remarking that "the lady's

grief is very affecting." Of "Troilus and Cressida" the old formalist

says, that it "is one of the most correctly written of Shakespeare's

plays;" of "Coriolanus," that it "is one of the most amusing." But,

he says, that "Antony and Cleopatra" is "low" and "without any art of

connection or care of disposition." he dismisses "Cymbeline" with

the remark that he does not care "to waste criticism upon unresisting

imbecility; upon faults too evident for detection and too gross for

aggravation." He is pleased to approve of "Romeo and Juliet," because

"the incidents are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly

affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such

probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as

tragedy requires" and, while on the whole, approving of "Othello," he

can not help remarking that, "had the scene opened in Cyprus, and the

preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little

wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity." And so

on every-where! Let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these

mighty and deathless monographs to-day! Let him {030}imagine a better

illustration, if he can, of what our Johnson's friend Pope called--in

long meter--"fools rushing; in where angels feared to tread!" And let

him confess to himself that these were not the times nor the men to

raise the question.

Is it not the fact that, until our own century, the eyes of the world

were darkened, and men saw in these Shakespearean dramas only such stage

plays, satisfying the acting necessities of almost any theater, as

might have been written--not by "the soul" of any age; not by a man

"myriad-minded" not by a "morning-star of song," or a "dear son of

memory," but--by a clever playwright? The sort of days when an Addison

could have been pensioned for his dreary and innocent "Campaign," and

a Mr. Pye made poet-laureate of the laud where an unknown pen had once

written "Hamlet were, consequently, _not_ the days for the discovery

with which this century has crowned itself--namely, the discovery that

the great first of poets lived in the age when England and America were

one world by themselves, and that they must now draw together again to

search for the master "who came"--to use, with all reverence, the words

of Judge Holmes--"upon our earth, knowing all past, all present, and

all future, to be leader, guide, and second gospel of mankind." But the

fullness of time has come, and we now know that, whoever was the poet

that he "kept," he was of quite another kidney than the manager of the

theater, "William Shakespeare, who employed him to write Plays, and who

wrote Revelations and Gospels instead.

If we were interested to inquire what manner of man Mr. Manager

Shakespeare was, we have only to {031}look about us among the managers

of theaters in this latter half of our nineteenth century. Let us take

Mr. Wallack or Mr. Daly, both of whom arrange plays for the stages

of their own theaters, for example; or, better yet, take Mr. Lion

Boucieault, who is an actor as well as a manager, and is, moreover, as

successful in his day as was William Shakespeare in his. Mr. Boucieault

has, so far, produced about one hundred and thirty-seven successful

plays. Mr. William Shakespeare produced about a hundred less. All of

Mr. Boucicault's plays show that gentleman's skillful hand in

cutting, expanding, arranging, and setting for the stage; and in the

representation of them, Mr. Boucieault has himself often participated.

In like manner, Mr. Shakespeare, the manager, we are told by tradition,

often assisted at the representation of the dramas produced on his

boards, playing the Ghost in "Hamlet," * and the King in "Henry VI,"

which indicate very readily that his place in the "stock" was that of a

"walking (or utility) gentleman."

* And played it, it is thought by some, so wretchedly that

he made "the gods" hoot. At any rate, in a pamphlet

published by Lodge, in 1593, "Witt's Miserie and the World's

Madness; Discovering the Devil's Incarnate of this age," a

devil named "Hate-Vertue" is described as looking "as pale

as the vizard of the ghost, which cried so miserably at the

theatre like an oister-wife, 'Hamlet--Revenge.'" But perhaps

Shakespeare did not play the ghost that night. Shakespeare

also played "Old Knowell," Jonson's "Every Man in his

Humor," "Adam," in "As You Like It," and, according to

Jonson, apart in the latter's "Legacies," in 1603.

We happen to know, also, that Mr. Shakespeare rewrote for the stage what

his unknown poet, poets, or friends composed, from the tolerable hearsay

testimony of his fellow {032}actor, Ben Jonson, who tells us that he

remembers to have heard the players say that the stage copies of the

plays were written in Shakespeare's autograph, and were all the more

available on that account, because he (Shakespeare), was a good penman,

in that "whatever he penned, he never blotted line." * Mr. Boucicault,

while claiming the full credit to which he is entitled, is quite too

clever, as well as too conscientious to set up for an original author

or a poet, as well as a playwright. Neither does Shakespeare (as we have

already said), anywhere appear to have ever claimed to be a poet, or

even to have taken to himself--what we may, however, venture to ascribe

to him--the merit of the stage-setting of the dramatic works,

which, having been played at his theater, we collectively call the

"Shakespearean plays" to-day. Why, then, to begin with, should we not

conceive of Mr. Manager Shakespeare discharging the same duties as

Mr. Wal-lack, Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault? as very much--from the

necessities of his vocation--the same sort of man as either of them?

* Post, part III, the Jonsonian Testimony.

There is scarcely any evidence either way; but the fact that the actors

were in the habit of receiving their fair copy of these plays from the

manager's--William Shakespeare's--own hand, seems to make it evident

that he did not originally compose them. Indeed, if Shakespeare had

been their author, well-to-do and bustling manager as he was, he would

probably have intrusted their transcription to some subordinate

or supernumerary; or, better yet, would have kept a playwright of

experience to set his compositions for the {033}stage, to put in the

necessary localisms, "gags," and allusions to catch the ear of the penny

seats. Such a division of labor is imperative to-day, and was imperative

then--or at least to suppose that it was not, is to suppose that of his

dozen or so of co-managers, William Shakespeare was the one who did all

the work, while the others looked on.

But, it is surmised that Shakespeare was his own playwright; took

the dramas and rewrote them for the actors; he inserted the requisite

business, the exits, and entrances, and--when necessary--suited the

reading to the actor who was to pronounce the dialogue, according as he

happened to be fat or lean. *

* It may be noted that the line, "He's fat and scant of

breath," does not occur in the early and imperfect edition

of "Hamlet" of 1603. Was it added to suit Burbadge? And was

there a further change made also to suit Mr. Burbadge, the

leading tragedian of the time? In the edition of 1603, the

grave-digger says of Yorick's skull:

Looke you, here's a skull hath bin here this dozen year,

Let me see, ever since our last King Hamlet

Slew Fortenbrasse in combat, young Hamlet's father,

He that's mad.

But in all subsequent editions, the grave-digger says:

"Here's a skull now; this skull has lain i' the earth three

and twenty years." The effect of this alteration is to add

considerably to Hamlet's age. "Alas, poor Yorick!" he says,

"I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most

excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand

times; and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My

gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed,

I know not how oft," etc. How old, then, was Hamlet when

Yorick died? But Hamlet's age is even more distinctly fixed

by other lines which do not occur in the early edition of

1603:

_Hamlet._--How long hast thou been a grave-maker?

_First Clown_.--Of all the days of the year, I came to 't that

day that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortenbras.

_Hamlet._--How long is that since?

_First Clown._--Can not tell that? Every fool can tell that;

it was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is

mad and sent to England.

And presently he adds: I have been sexton here, man and boy,

thirty years.

Mr. Marshall writes: "It would appear that Shakespeare added

these details, which tend to prove Hamlet to have been

thirty years old, for much the same reason as he inserted

the line, 'He's fat and scant of breath,' namely, in order

to render Hamlet's age and personal appearance more in

accordance with those of the great actor, Burbadge, who

personated him." The edition of 1603 is generally accounted

a piratical copy of the first sketch of the play.--_All the

Year Found._

{034}Such was the employment which fell to the part of William

Shakespeare, in the division of labor among the management in which

he was a partner, and the resulting manuscript was what Ben Jonson's

friends told him of. For nobody, we fancy, quite supposes that the poet,

whoever he was, produced "Hamlet" one evening, "Macbeth" on another,

and "Julius Cæsar" on another, without blotting or erasing, changing,

pruning or tiling a line, and then handed his original drafts to the

players next morning to learn their parts from! This is not the way that

poems are written (nor, we may add, the way theaters are managed). The

greater the geniuses, the more they blotch and blot and dash their pens

over the paper when the frenzy is in possession of them. And besides,

the fact that there exist to-day, and always have existed, numerous and

diverse readings of the Shakespearean text, does very clearly show that

their author or authors did, at different times, vary and alter

the construction of the text {035}as taste or fancy dictated, and,

therefore, that the manuscripts Ben Jonson's friends saw and told him

of (and Heminges & Condell, as far as their testimony is of any value,

confirm Jonson, for they assert that what he thought, he uttered

with that easiness that we have received from him "scarce a blot in his

papers", were the acting copies, and not the original manuscripts of

the Shakespearean plays.

With the exception of Ben Jonson (to whose panegyric we devote a chapter

in its place further on), the contemporaries of William Shakespeare,

who celebrated his death in verse, nowhere assert him to have been the

myriad-minded Oceanic (to use Coleridge's adjectives) genius which we

conceive him now-a-days--which he _must_ have been to have written the

works now assigned to him. Let any one doubting this statement open

the pages of Dr. Ingleby's "Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse," a work

claimed by its compiler to be inclusive of every allusion to, comment or

criticism on Shakespeare, which Dr. Ingleby has been able to unearth in

print, dating anywhere within one hundred years of Shakespeare's death.

We have industriously turned every page of this work, and will submit to

any other who will do the same, the question whether it contains a line

which exhibits William Shakespeare as any other than a wit, a successful

actor, a poet of the day, a genial and generous friend, a writer of

plays, or whether--when eulogistic of the plays called his seven

years after his death (a very different list, by the way, than the one

assigned him during his life), rather than biographical as to the

man, they are of any more value as _evidence_ than Gray's or Milton's

magnificent apostrophes to a genius with whom their {036}only

familiarity was through report, rumor, or impression derived from the

ever immortal works. For, like Gray, Coleridge, Emerson--all that John

Milton knew about William Shakespeare was pure hearsay, derived from

local report or perusal of the Shakespearean plays ("a book invalued,"

he calls them). Even if we were called upon to do so, we could hardly

conceive Milton--a Puritan, and a blind Puritan at that--as much of

a play-goer or boon companion of actors and managers. But we are not

called upon to imagine any thing of the sort; for, as a matter of fact,

John Milton was exactly seven years and four months old when William

Shakespeare died. And so, what is called "the Milton testimony,"

upon examination, proves to be no testimony at all, but only

hearsay--venerable, perhaps--but hearsay, nevertheless; * as utterly

immaterial as his "Marbling his native wood notes wild"--a line that

might be, not inaptly, applied to Robert Burns, but which suggests

almost any thing except the stately and splendid pages of the

Shakespearean opera--to which we have before alluded as justifying us,

indeed, in wondering if the Puritan poet had ever gone so far, before

formulating his opinion, as to open the book assigned to the Shakespeare

he wrote of.

* Milton was the enemy of all the ilk. "This would make them

soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rimers

and playwriters be," he says in his essays "of Education,"

in 1634.

And so, in the first place, there was no great call or occasion for

discussion as to the authorship of the Shakespearean dramas in the days

when they first began to be known by the public; and, as for Mr.

Manager Shakespeare's friends, and the actors of his company, {037}they

testified to what they had heard, and, if they knew any thing to the

contrary, they kept it to themselves. If his friends, jealous of his

reputation, they were not solicitous of heralding him a fraud; and if

the "stock" upon his pay-roll, they held their bread at his hand, and

were not eager to offend him. If--as we shall notice further on--a wise

few did suspect the harmless imposition, either they had grounds for not

mentioning it, or there were reasons why people did not credit them.

And so, in the second place, the times were not ripe for the truth to be

known, because there was nobody who cared about knowing it, and nobody

to whom it could be a revelation.

To suppose that William Shakespeare wrote the plays which we call his,

is to suppose that a miracle was vouchsafed to the race of man in London

in the course of certain years of the reign of Elizabeth. If, however,

instead of probing for miracles, we come to consider that men and

managers and theaters in the age of Elizabeth were very much the same

sort of creatures and places that we find them now; that, among the

habitues of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in that reign, were

certain young gentlemen of abundant leisure and elegant education who

admitted managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange for the

entre of the green-room; and that managers in those days as in these,

were always on the alert for novelties, and drew their material--in the

crude, if necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they were so

fortunate--from wherever they could find it; if, in short, we find that

among the curled darlings who frequented Master William Shakespeare's

side doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, {038}at

least one ready writer who was so placed as to be eager to write

anonymously for bread (and who, moreover, had access to the otherwise

sealed and occult knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the

giants of his day--to say nothing of the theater-managers--did not and

could not dream)--if, we say, we consider all this, we need pin our

faith to no miracles, but expect only the ordinary course of human

events.

If William Shakespeare were an unknown quantity, like Homer, to be

estimated only by certain masterly works assigned to him, this answer

might, indeed, be different. For, just as Homer's writings are so

magnificent as to justify ascribing to him--so far as mere power to

produce them goes--any other contemporary literature to be discovered,

so the works attributed to William Shakespeare are splendid enough to

safely credit him with the compositions of any body else; of even so

great a man as Bacon, for example. But William Shakespeare is no unknown

quantity--except that we lose sight of him for the few years between

his leaving Stratford, and (as part proprietor of the largest London

play-house) accepting Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in His Humour"--we

know pretty well all about him. There are half a hundred biographies

extant--new ones being written every day--and any one of them may

be consulted as to the manner of life William Shakespeare's was. The

breakneck marriage bond, which waived all formalities, the consent of

any body's parents, justification of sureties, three askings of banns,

etc., so he could only be fast married; the beer-bouts, youthful and

harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, Sir Thomas Lucy thought, to

justify instructing a War{039}wick attorney to prosecute the lad before

the law: all these are matter of record, amply photographing for-us

William Shakespeare in Stratford. Then the hiatus--and this same lad

appears, prosperous, and in the great town; sending home money to his

impoverished family--part proprietor of a theater, purchasing freehold

estates in London--a grant of arms for his father--the great house in

his native village for his own homestead; investing in the tithings of

his county, and beginning a chancery suit to recover lands which his

father--in his poverty--had allowed himself to forfeit by foreclosure.

Surely we will not go far astray if we set it down that some pretty hard

work at what this rising lad found to do in London, and learned to do

best, has filled up those unrecorded years! Was all this money made by

writing plays for the Globe, or by working on Bacon's Novum Organum,

or by other literary labor? Was that the hard work William Shakespeare

found to do, and laid up money at, in the interval between his last crop

of wild oats at Stratford, and the condescension of the man of affairs

in London? If it were, it is curious that no rumor or tradition of

it comes from Stratford. Nothing travels quite so fast in rural

neighborhoods as a reputation for "book learning," while the local

worthy, who has actually written a book of his own, is a landmark in his

vicinage. Now, William Shakespeare died one of the richest men--if

not the richest--in all Stratford. It is strange that the gossip

and goodwives, who so loaded themselves with his boyish freaks and

frailties, should never have troubled themselves about his manly

pursuits and accomplishments. The only English compositions he is

credited within Stratford gossip are one {040}or two excessively

conventional epitaphs on Elias James, John a Coombe, and others--the

latter of which is only to be appreciated by a familiarity with

Warwickshire patois. He sprang from a family so illiterate that they

could not write their own name; and, moreover, lived and died utterly

indifferent as to how anybody else wrote it--whether with an "x" or

a "g," a "c" or a "ks." And as he found them, so he left them. For,

although William Shakespeare enjoyed an income of $25,000 (present value

of money) at his death, he never had his own children taught to read and

write, and his daughter Judith signed her mark to her marriage bond.

That the rustic youth, whom local traditions variously represent as a

scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's apprentice, and the like, but never

as a school-boy, a student, a reader, a poet--as ever having been seen

with a hook in his hand--driven by poverty to shift for himself, should

at once (for the dates, as variously given by Mr. Malone and Mr. Grant

White, are exceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that

most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman about town,

Southampton, is almost incredible. But, it is no more incredible than

that this ill-assorted friendship can be accounted for by the lad's

superhuman literary talents. Southampton never was suspected, during his

lifetime, of a devotion to literature, much less of an admiration for

letters so rapt as to make him forget the gulf between his nobility

and that of a peasant lad--who (even if we disbelieve his earliest

biographers as to the holding horses and carrying links) must

necessarily have been employed in the humblest pursuits at the outset of

his London {041}career. But yet, according to the various "chronologies"

(which, in the endeavor to crowd these works into William Shakespeare's

short life, so as to tally with the dates--when known--of their

production, only vary inconsiderably after all), the Stratford boy

hardly puts in his appearance in London before he presents Lord

Southampton, as the "first heir of his invention," with--if not the most

mature--at least the most carefully polished production that William

Shakespeare's name was ever signed to; and, moreover, as polished,

elegant, and sumptuous a piece of rhetoric as English letters has ever

produced down to this very day.

Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all the Latin and Greek

extant; this poem, dedicated to Southampton, coming from his pen, is

a mystery, if not a miracle. The genius of Robert Burns found its

expression in the _idiom_ of his father and his mother, in the dialect

he heard around him, and into which he was born. When _he_ came to

London, and tried to warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into

formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a peasant, born in the

heart of Warwickshire; without schooling or practice, pours forth the

purest and most sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace of

that Warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke--the

language of his own fireside! As a matter of fact, _English_, was a much

rarer accomplishment in the days when Thomas Jenkins and Thomas

Hunt were masters of Stratford Grammar School, than Greek and Latin.

Children, in those days, were put at their hic, hæc, hoc at an age when

we {042}send them to kindergartens. But no master dreamed of drilling

them in their own vernacular. Admitting William Shakespeare to have been

born a poet, he must also have been born a master of the arbitrary rules

of English rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and prosody, as well, to have

written that one poem. But, say the Shakespeareans, even if William did

not study English at the Stratford Grammar School, or read it in those

crowded days when earning his bread by menial employment in stranger

London, he had an opportunity to study Lyly, Nash, Greene, Peele,

Chettle, and the rest. But the Shakespearean vocabulary--like the

whole canon of the plays--is a thing apart--unborrowed, unimitated, and

unlearned from any of these. _These_ were satisfied to write for the

stages of the barns called "play-houses," and for their audiences,

which--according to all reports--were decidedly indifferent as to

scholarship. _These_ might introduce a Frenchman, but they never

troubled themselves to make him French; or a Scotchman, but they never

stopped to make him Scotch. But even if William Shakespeare, in the

immersions of the management, was author of that intellectual Dane,

over-refined in a German university of metaphysics, he called Hamlet; or

of that crafty Italian, named Iago; or of that Roman iceberg, Brutus--it

is quite as difficult to conceive either the skylarking boy in

Stratford, where there were no libraries, and his father too poor (not

daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest for debt) to buy

books; or the self-made man toiling from the bottom rung of poverty to

the top of fortune--with leisure to study the characteristics of race

and nationality--as acquiring all the grandeur of dic{043}tion, insight

into the human heart (which, at least, is not guess-work), knowledge and

philosophy, we call his to-day. Even if we go no further than the "Venus

and Adonis"--appearing at a date preluding a drill that, for the sake

of the argument, we might even assume--how could that poem have

been written by the peasant who only knew his native dialect, or the

penniless lad earning his bread in stranger London, at the first shift

at hand--with no entre to the great libraries, and no leisure to use

one if he had it? Ben Jonson spent some years at Cambridge before he

was taken away and set at brickmaking--he is said to have been a very

studious brickmaker, working, according to Fuller, with a trowel in one

hand and a book in the other. As to his career as a soldier--a soldier,

when not actually in the field or on the march, may find considerable

opportunity for rumination; and, when lying in jail, he would certainly

have ample leisure for his Greek and Roman. But Jonson wrote for the

Elizabethan theaters; he lived and died hungry and poor, a borrower,

over his ears in debt to the last. William Shakespeare, his

contemporary, loaned Ben Jonson money; rose rapidly from penury to

affluence; made his father rich, and a gentleman with an escutcheon;

bought himself the most splendid house in Stratford (so splendid as

to be deemed worthy a royal residence by Queen Henrietta); invested

in outlying lands; speculated in tithes, and lived, until his

death--according to Dominie Ward--at the rate of $25,000 a year. We are

familiar enough with these stories of self-made men (so-called) in our

daily newspapers. Let those who will, believe that William Shakespeare

accumulated this splendid fortune, _not_ by the success{044}ful

management of the best appointed and affected theater in London, but by

writing plays for its stage! and--at the same time--conceived,

evolved from his own inner consciousness, all the learning which other

playwrights (like Ben Jonson and the rest) were obliged--like ordinary

mortals--to get out of books!

The only efforts made to account for this wealth flowing into

the coffers of a poet, have been mere surmises, like the story of

Southampton's munificence, and of the royal favor of King James, who

wrote the manager a letter with his own hand. But neither of these

stories happens to be contemporary with William Shakespeare himself.

The first was an afterthought of Davenant, who was ten years old when

Shakespeare died; and who is not accepted as an authority, even as to

his own pedigree, by the very commentators who most eagerly seize upon

and swear to his Southampton fiction. The other is not even hearsay, but

the bold invention of Bernard Lintot, who published an edition of

the plays in 1710. Doubtless, as has been the ambition of all the

commentators, before Mr. Collier and since, Lintot was bound to be at

least one fact ahead of his rivals, even if he had to invent that fact

himself, he vouchsafes, as authority for this tale of the royal letter,

however, the statement of "a credible person now living," who saw

the letter itself in the possession of Davenant: in the teeth of the

certainty that, had Davenant ever possessed such a letter, Davenant

would have taken good care that the world should never hear the last of

it: and coyly preserves the incognito of the "credible person," whom,

however, Oldys conjectures must have been, if any body, the Duke of

Buckingham. {045}But, miracles aside, to consider William Shakespeare

as the author of the Shakespearean drama--for that he has christened

it, and that it will go forever by his name, we concede--involves us in

certain difficulties that seem altogether insurmountable. In the

first place, scholars and thinkers, whose hearts have been open to the

matchless message of the Shakespearean text, and who found themselves

drawn to conclude that such a man as William Shakespeare once lived,

were amazed to discover that the very evidence which forced them to that

conclusion, also proved conclusively that that individual _could not_

have written the dramas since known by his name. Coleridge, Schlegel,

Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Hallam, Delia

Bacon, Gervinus, and, doubtless, many more, clearly saw that the real

Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare we have described. "In spite of all

the biographies, 'ask your own hearts,' says Coleridge--'ask your

own common sense to conceive the possibility of this man being... the

anomalous, the wild, the irregular genius of our daily criticism. What!

are we to have miracles in sport? or (I speak reverently) does God

choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?'"

"If there was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect," says

Hallam--alluding to the fact that all the commentators told him of

the man Shakespeare, inferred him as anything but the master he was

cited--"there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to

learn more." * **

* "Notes to Shakespeare's Works," iv., 56.--Holmes

"Authorship of Shakespeare," 598.

** "Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 26.

{046}This evidence was of three sorts: 1. Official records and

documents; 2. The testimony of contemporaries; and, 3. That general

belief, reputation, and tradition, which, left to itself in the manner

we have indicated, has grown into the presumption of nearly three

hundred years. We will not recapitulate the well-thumbed records,

nor recite the dog's-eared testimony, which together gave rise to the

presumption. But the dilemma presented to the student was in this wise:

By the parish records it appeared that a man child was christened in

Stratford Church April 26th, (old style) 1564, by the name William. He

was the son of one John Shakespeare, a worthy man, who lived by either,

or all, the trades of butcher, wool-comber, or glover--three not

incompatible pursuits variously assigned him--was, at different times, a

man of some means, even of local importance, (becoming, on one occasion,

even ale-taster for the town,) and, at his son's birth, owner in

freehold of two plots of ground in Stratford village, on one of which

plots a low-raftered house now stands, which has come to be a Mecca to

which pilgrims from the whole world reverently repair. The next official

record of the son so born to John Shakespeare is the marriage-bond to

the Bishop of Worcester; enabling this son to wed one Anne Hathaway, his

senior in years, which bond remains to this day on file in the office of

the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.

Later on, the son, having become a person of means, purchases for his

father a grant of arms; and (the name being Shakespeare) the heralds

allot him an escutcheon on which is represented a shaking spear

(symbolically treated)--a device which, under the circumstances,

{047}did not tax the heralds' ingenuity, or commit them to any theory

about ancestors at Hastings or among the Saracens. The increasing

wealth of the son leaves its traces in the title-deeds to and records

of purchase of freehold and leasehold possessions, of the investment in

meadow-lands, and tithes, and of sundry law suits incidental to

these. Local tradition--which in like cases is perforce admitted as

evidence--supplements all this record, and, so far as it can, confirms

it, until we have an all but complete biography.

This biography the world knows by heart. It does not esteem the boy

William Shakespeare the less because he was a boy--because--in the

age and period reserved for that crop--he sowed and garnered his "wild

oats." It has reason to believe him to have been much more than a

mere wayward youth. Aubrey ("old Aubrey," "arch-gossip Aubrey," the

Shakespeareans call him, probably because he wrote his sketch fifty

years after his subject's death, instead of two hundred and fifty),

says that he was the village prodigy, that "he exercised his father's

trade--but, when he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make

a speech," etc., etc. Nor is there anything in the record of his mature

and latter years--of his investments in tithes, and messuages, and

homesteads--of his foreclosures and suits for money loaned and malt

delivered--of his begetting children and dying; leaving--still with

finical detail and nice and exact economy--an elaborate testament, in

which he disposes, item by item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down

to the second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he tenderly bestows

upon the wife of his youth and the {048}mother of his children--any

thing at which the world should sneer.

If he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he shows no especial

anxiety that posterity shall hear of it. Besides such contracts and

business papers as he must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the

theaters, and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his name to

nothing except a declaration of debt against a poor neighbor who is

behind-hand with his account, footed at one pound fifteen shillings and

sixpence, and a not over-creditable last Will and Testament. This is his

own business, and who has any thing to say? But, when our biographers go

a step further and demand that we shall accept this as the record of

a demigod; of the creator of a "Hamlet" and an "Othello;" and this

practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to London--worked himself up

(as he must have worked himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater;

and, in that business and calling earned money and kept it--as the

identical man who singly and alone wrote the "Hamlet," the ".Julius

Cæsar," the "Othello," and all the splendid pages of the Shakespearean

drama--some of us have been heard to demur! The scholar's dilemma is how

to reconcile the internal evidence of the plays, which is spread before

them undimmed by age, with these records, which are as authentic and

beyond question as the internal evidence itself. And, once stated, the

dilemma of the scholar becomes the dilemma of the whole world. Let any

one try to conceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employment

to-day--when the theater is at its best, and half the world

play-goers--precarious for capital and industry; but in those days

an experiment, in every {049}sense of the word), who succeeded by

vigilance, exact accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in

securing and saving not only a competency, but a fair fortune; in

the mean time--while engaged in this engrossment of business--writing

Isabella's magnificent appeal to the duke's deputy, Angelo; or Cardinal

Wolsey's last soliloquy! Or conceive of the man who gave the wife

of his youth an old bedstead, and sued a neighbor for malt delivered,

penning Antony's oration above Cæsar, or the soliloquy of Macbeth

debating the murder of Duncan, the invocation to sleep in "King Henry

IV.," or the speech of Prospero, or the myriad sweet, or noble, or

tender passages that nothing but a human heart could utter! Let him try

to conceive this, we say, and his eyes will open to the absurdity of the

belief that these lines were written by the lessee and joint-manager

of a theater, and he will examine the evidence thereafter for

corroboration, and not for conviction; satisfied in his own mind, at

least, that no such phenomenon is reasonable, probable, or safe to have

presented itself.

Then, last and greatest difficulty of all, is the Will. This is by far

the completest and best authenticated record we have of the man William

Shakespeare, testifying not only to his undoubtedly having lived, but

to his character as a man; and--most important of all to our

investigation--to his exact worldly condition. Here we have his own

careful and ante-mortem schedule of his possessions, his chattels real

and chattels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety bedstead

under his roof. And we may be pretty sure that it is an accurate and

exhaustive list. But if he {050}were--as well as a late theater-manager

and country gentleman--an author and the proprietor of dramas that had

been produced and found valuable, how about these plays? Were they not

of as much value, to say the least, as a damaged bedstead? Were they

not, as a matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual source of

his wealth? How does he dispose of them? Does our thrifty Shakespeare

forget that he has written them? Is it not the fact, and is it not

reason and common sense to conceive, that, _not_ having written them,

they have passed out of his possession along with the rest of his

theatrical property, along with the theater whose copyrights they

were, and into the hands of others? This is the greatest difficulty and

stumbling-block for the Shakespeareans. If their hero had written

these plays, of which the age of Elizabeth was so fond, and in whose

production he had amassed a fortune--that he should have left a will, in

items, in which absolutely no mention or hint of them whatever should

be made, even their most zealous pundits can not step over, and so

are scrupulous not to allude to it at all. This piece of evidence

is unimpeachable and conclusive as to what worldly goods, chattels,

chattel-interests, or things in action, William Shakespeare supposed

that he would die possessed of. Tradition is gossip. Records are scant

and niggardly. Contemporary testimony is conflicting and shallow, but

here, attested in due and sacred form, clothed with the foreshadowed

solemnity of another world, is the calm, deliberate, ante mortem

statement of the man himself. We perceive what becomes of his secondhand

bedstead. What becomes of his plays? Is it possible that, after all

these years' experience of their {051}value--in the disposition of a

fortune of which they had been the source and foundation--he should have

forgotten their very existence?

But if, diverging from the scanty records, we go to the testimony of

contemporaries, what do we find there? Very little more of the man

William Shakespeare, but precisely the same dilemma as to his alleged

authorship of the plays. We find that the country lad William, the

village prodigy with whom the gossips concerned themselves, was no

milksop and no Joseph; that he was hail-fellow with his fellows of equal

age; that he poached--shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned their owner

when punished for the offense; went on drinking-bouts with his equals

of the neighboring villages; and, finally---just as any clever, country

lad, who had made his fellows merry with mock eulogies over the

calves he slaughtered might and probably would do to-day, and which is

precisely what his earliest and, therefore, safest biographer, Howe,

asserts that he did do--wound up with following a company of strolling

players to the metropolis; where he began his prosperous career by

holding gentlemen's horses at the theater door, while the gentlemen

themselves went inside to witness the performance. We turn to the

stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting, and the beer-drinking, with

relief. It is pleasant to think that the pennywise old man was--at least

in his youth--human. A little poaching and a little beer do nobody any

harm, and it is, at all events, more cheerful reading than the record

of a parsimonious freeholder taking the law of his poorer neighbor

who defaults in the payment of a few shillings for a handful of malt.

{052}There is a village school in Stratford, and Mr. De-Quincy, and all

his predecessors and successors who have preferred to construct pretty

romances, and call them "lives of William Shakespeare," rather than to

accept his known and recorded youth, boldly unite in making their

hero attend its sessions. Their assertions are bravely seconded by the

cicerones and local guides of Stratford, who, for a sixpence, will show

you the identical desk which Shakespeare, the lad, occupied at that

grammar school; and at Shottery, the same guides show us the chair in

which our hero sat while courting Mistress Anne; just as, in Wittemburg,

these same gentry point out the house where Hamlet lived when a student

in the University there; or, in Scotland, the spot where Fitz-James and

Roderick Dhu fought. But, William could not have attended this school

very perseveringly, since he turns up in London at about the age that

country lads first go to school. In London, he seems to have risen from

nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of co-manager, along with

a dozen others, of a theater. Here, just as young lords and swells take

theater managers into their acquaintance to-day, he became intimate with

greater men than himself, and so enlarged his skirts and his patronage,

as it was the part of a thrifty man to do. At this time there were no

circulating libraries in London, no libraries, accessible to the

general public, of any sort, in fact; no booksellers at every corner,

no magazines or reviews; no public educators, and no schools or colleges

swarming with needy students; even the literature of the age was a

bound-up book to all except professional readers. But, for all that,

this William Shakes-{053}peare--this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a

term at Stratford school (admitting that he went where the romancers

put him), cuts off to London at the heels of a crew of strolling

players--who begins business for himself somewhere (perhaps as

"link-boy" at a theater door, but we may be sure, at an humble end of

some employment) and, by saving his pence, works up to be actually a

part-proprietor in two theaters, and ultimately a rich man--begins to

possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the Past which, even to-day,

with all our libraries, lyceums, serials, and booksellers, it would need

a lifetime to acquire.

He did the work of a lifetime. Like Mr. Stewart, in New York, he

began penniless, and by vigilance, shrewdness, and economy, rose to

respectability, affluence, and fortune.

But, as we could not imagine Mr. Stewart, gentleman as he was, writing

all the tags and labels on his goods or making with his own hand every

pen-stroke necessary in the carrying on of his immense trade; or poems

or philosophical essays on the manufacture of the silks and linens

and cottons he handled while slowly coining his fortune, and revolving

poetry in his overworked brain while overseeing the business that was

evolving that fortune; so do we fail to conceive of William Shakespeare

doing all the pen-work on the dramas he coins his money by producing

on his boards. How much less can we conceive of this man composing, not

only poems of his own, but a Literature of his own--drawing his material

from the classic writers (and notably from those Greek plays not at

that time translated, and only accessible in the originals and in

{054}manuscript), from legal works, "caviare to the general;" from

philosophical treatises not known to have been available even for

reference; writing of the circulation of the blood in the human

system--a fact not discovered until years after his own death! Let us

find him, too, setting down, in writing, epitomes of all known wisdom;

ascertaining the past, prophesying of the future; laying down off-hand

the philosopher's, the lawyer's, the leech's, the soldier's, the

scholar's craft and art, which only these themselves, by long years

of study, might attain to--and all this while coining a fortune in the

management of two theaters; to have solved, in short, the riddle of

the sphinx and all the as yet unspinning whirligigs of time! Verily, a

greater riddle than the sphinx's is this the riddle of the boy--Master

Shakespeare. Thomas Chatterton found his wealth in a musty chest in

an old muniment room. But here the chest and imminent room were not

in existence till years after the boy Shakespeare has been a man, and

traveled on to his grave. It is no solution of this riddle to say the

lad was a genius, and that genius is that which soars, while education

plods. *

* This class of evidence can not be recapitulated in the

space of a foot note, but the curious reader will do well to

refer to the chapter on the attainments of the author of

Shakespeare, at pages 56-65 Holmes's "Authorship of

Shakespeare," third edition.

Genius itself can not account for the Shakespearean plays. Genius may

portray, but here is a genius that not only portrayed that which after

his death became fact, but related other facts which men had forgotten;

the actors in which had lain in the dust for centuries, and whose

records had slept sealed in dead languages, in manuscripts beyond

his reach! Genius, intuition, {055}is beyond education indeed. It may

prophesy of the future or conceive of the eternal; but only knowledge

can draw record of the past. If the author of Shakespeare had been

a genius only, his "Julius Cæsar" might have been a masterpiece of

tragedy, or pathos, or of rage; but it would have portrayed an ideal

Rome, not the real one. His "Comedy of Errors" might have been matchless

in humor and sparkling in contretemps, but, three years afterward, on

translating a hidden manuscript of Plautus, the comedies would not have

been found quite identical in argument. *

* Viz: with the Menæchmiof Plautus. In "Pericles," allusion

is made to a custom obtaining among a certain undiscussable

class of Cyprians, which it is fair to say could not be

found mentioned in a dozen books of which we know the names

to-day, and which, from its very nature, is treated of in no

encyclopaedia or manual of information, or of popular

antiquities. How could any one but an antiquarian scholar,

in those days, have possessed himself--not in this alone,

but in a thousand similar instances--of such minute,

accurate, and occult information?

The precocity of a child may be intuitive. But no babe learns its

alphabet spontaneously or by means of its genius; but out of a book,

because the characters are arbitrary. Pascal, when a child, discovered

the eternal principles of geometry, and marked them out in chalk upon

the floor; but he did not know that the curved figures he drew were

called "circles," or that the straight ones were called "lines;" so he

named them "rounds" and "bars." He discovered what was immutable and

could be found by the searcher, but his genius could not reinvent

arbitrary language that had been invented before his birth. In short,

to have possessed and to have written down, in advance, the learning and

philosophy of three centuries to come, {056}might have been the gift of

Prophecy (such a gift as has ere this fallen from we know not where upon

the sons of men) descending into the soul of a conceivable, genius. But

who can tell of more than he knows? Second sight is not retrospective.

And to have testified of the forgotten past, without access to its

record, was as beyond the possibilities of genius as the glowing wealth

of the Shakespearean page is above the creation of an unlettered man of

business in the age of Elizabeth or of Victoria.

Here is the dilemma with which the Shakespear-eans struggle: that in

those years the man William Shakespeare _did_ live, and was a theatrical

manager and actor in London; and precisely the same evidence which

convinces us that this man did live in those days, convinces the world

to-day--or must convince it, if it will only consent to look at it--that

the dramas we call Shakespearean were so called because they were first

published from the stage of William Shakespeare's theaters in London,

just as we call certain readings of the classics the "Delphin classics,"

because brought together for a Dauphin of Prance; or certain paintings

"Düsseldorf paintings," because produced in the Düsseldorf school. If,

however, in the course of ages it should come to be believed that the

Dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named Düsseldorf painted the

pictures, even then the time would come to set the world right. If there

had been no Dauphin and no Düsseldorf, we might have assigned those

names to a power which might have produced the poems or the pictures.

If there had been no William Shakespeare, we might easily have idealized

one who could have written the plays. But, unhap{057}pily, there was the

actual, living, breathing man in possession of that name, who declines

to assign it to another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the

Shakespeareans want. And, moreover, once the presumption is waived

and the question is opened again; there is a mass of evidence in the

possession of this century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately

waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped together, is a

mountain over which the airiest skeptic can not vault.

But did none of William Shakespeare's contemporaries suspect the

harmless deception? There is no proof at hand, nor any evidence at all

positive, that the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or to

have ever pretended to have been, the original author of the text of the

plays he gave to his players. Let us hasten to do William Shakespeare

the justice to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his having

asserted a falsehood. But, if he did so pretend to his intimates, and if

the dramas we now call "Shakespearean" were actually produced, in

those days, on William Shakespeare's own stage, under that pretension,

certainly some of them must have wagged their heads in secret. Surely,

Ben Johnson, who bears testimony that his friend Shakespeare had "small

Latin and less Greek," must have queried a little within himself as

to where certain things he read in the text of his friend's plays came

from, always supposing that he did not know perfectly well where they

_did_ come from. It seems more than probable, as we have already said,

that, whoever suspected or knew the source of the plays, and who also

knew, if such was the fact, that they were claimed as Shakespeare's

compositions {058}--had more cue to wink at than to expose the humbug.

We find, indeed, that one, Robert Greene, by name, did protest against

"an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and

adapter of other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when he was

not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes

he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and,

beeing an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceyt the

only Shake-scene in a countrey." That is to say, in language more

intelligible at this day, that, being a sort of Jack-of-all-trades

around the theater--holding horses, taking tickets, acting a little,

putting pieces on the stage, and writing out their parts for the

actors--he (Shakespeare) came in time to consider himself a dramatist,

a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. Doubtless Greene was inspired by

jealousy--for he was a writer of plays for the stage himself--in making

and publishing this sneer. But, as he was endeavoring to make his

remarks so personal to Shakespeare as to be readily recognized, he would

not have alluded to him except by some well-known characteristic. So

he calls him a "Jack-of-all-trades," that is, a man who did a little

of everything. Is a Jack-of-all-trades about a theater the ideal poet,

philosopher, and seer, who wrote the Shakespearean drama--the ideal of

the Sliakespeareans?

According to the chronicles and the record, then, one William

Shakespeare, a "general utility" actor, and _Johannes Factotum_, lived

and thrived in London, some two hundred and fifty odd years ago. At

about that date a book is likewise written. Who are these who find this

book, and make this man to fit it? {059}Verily, there are none so blind

as those who are determined not to see! To have written that book one

must needs have been, let us say--for he was at least all these--a

philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a leech, a naturalist, a traveler, a

student of Bible history! Strange to say, at the time this book--in

portions--is making its appearance, there are two men living, each of

whom is a poet, a philosopher, a student of laws and of physics, and a

traveler over the by-ways of many lands beside his own. One of them

is known to have read the Bible, then what we understand to-day by a

"current work." Together, these two men possess in themselves about all

of their age with which subsequent ages care to connect themselves. But

it is not suggested that these two men, Bacon and Raleigh, might have

written the book for which an author is wanted. We are to pass them

by, and sift the dust at their illustrious feet, if haply we may find a

fetich to fall down before and worship!

Must the man that wrote the dramas have visited Italy? Mr. Halliwell and

others inform us of Shakespeare's visit to Verona, Venice, and Florence.

Must Shakespeare have been at the bar? My Lord Campbell writes us a book

to show his familiarity with the science of jurisprudence. (That book

has traveled far upon a lordly name. It is an authority until it happens

to be read. Once we open it, it is only to find that, the passages of

the Shakespearean dramas which stamp their author's knowledge of the

common law are the passages his lordship does not cite, while over the

slang and dialect which any smatterer might have memorized from turning

the pages of an attorney's hornbook, his lordship gloats and postulates

and re{060}lapses into ecstasy). Must Shakespeare have been a physician?

There have not been wanting the books to prove him that. * And, crowning

this long misrule of absurdity, comes an authority out of Philadelphia,

to assure us that the youth Shakespeare, on quitting his virgin

Stratford for the metropolis, was scrupulous to avoid the glittering

temptations of London; that he eschewed wine and women; that he avoided

the paths of vice and immorality, and piously kept himself at home, his

only companion being the family Bible, which he read most ardently and

vigorously! **

* "The Medical Acquirement of Shakespeare." By C. W.

Stearns, M. D. New York, 1865. Shakespeare's Medical

Knowledge. By Dr. Bucknill. London. 1860.

** "Shakespeare and the Bible." By John Bees, etc., etc.

Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1876.

We commend to readers of this paper this latest authority,

and can not forbear noting a few of his "discoveries." Mr.

Rees has found out (p. 37) not only that William Shakespeare

wrote the lines--

"-------Not a hair perished,

On their sustaining garments not a blemish,

But fresher than before." ("The Tempest," i. 2)

But that he took them from Deuteronomy viii. 4.

And in Acts xxvii. 34:

There shall not a hair fall from the head of any of you.

In which the parallelism is in the word hair!!!

Or, again (p. 36) that the lines:

Though they are of monstrous shape,...

Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of Our human

generation you shall find Many, nay, almost any ("The

Tempest," iii. 3),

are taken from the following:

In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of

the island, whose name was Publius; who received us, and

lodged us three days courteously,... who also honored us

with many honors; and when we departed, they laded us with

such things as were necessary.--(Acts xxviii. 7-10.

In which--unless it be in the fact that one of these

passages is in an act and the other in Acts--the reader must

find the parallelism for himself, without assistance from

Mr. Rees.

Shakespeare, Mr. Rees tells us, never neglected his Bible,

because (p. 28) "he was indebted to one whose love added a

bright charm to the holy passages she taught him to read and

study--to his mother was Shakespeare indebted for early

lessons of piety, and a reverence for a book from whose

passages in afterlife he wove himself a mantle of undying

fame!"

It is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his latest authority

has truth for his color and testimony {061}for his oil. The picture has

at least the freshness and charm of utter novelty!

The work of Shakespeare-making goes on. The facts are of record. We may

ran as we read them! But rather let us, out of reverence for the errors

of our fathers, refuse to read at all, and accept the ideal of Malone,

of Halliwell and De Quincy, of Grant White, and of ten thousand more,

who prefer to write their biographies of William Shakespeare, not in the

first person, like Baron Munchhausen, nor in the second person, like

the memoirs of Sully, but in the probable and supposititious person of

"it is possible he did _this_," and "it is likely he did _that._"

Let those who will, disparage the boy and man William Shakespeare, who

married and made an honest woman of Anne Hathaway of Shottery; left home

to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the slender household

store; used his first wealth to make a gentleman of his father; and

who, with what followed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood's

{062}banks, where--"procul negotiis"--in the evening of life he might

enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. But that he ever claimed, much

less wrote, what we call the Shakespearean drama, let those bring proof

who can. {063}

PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY.

[Illustration: 0069]

UT, having taken the liberty of doubting whether--as matter of

record--one William Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, sometime

part-proprietor of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in London, could

have very well been himself and the author of what are known popularly

to-day as "the plays of Shakespeare," although there seemed to be ground

for supposing that he might have cast them into something of the acting

form they possess as preserved to us; and having come to the conclusion

that--once this presumption is lifted--all the evidence procurable as

to the life and times of the actual William Shakespeare is actually

evidence cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the record:

let us proceed to inquire whether--on review--a case rested on this

evidence can be rebutted by those certain considerations and matters, by

way of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to the surface

whenever these waters are troubled--which whoever ventures to canvass

the possibilities of an extra Shakesperean authorship of the dramas can

so infallibly anticipate.

Granted that the Shakespeare Will does not prove the testator oblivious

of his own copyrights or rights in the nature of copyrights; granted

that the story of the deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely

{064}rejected by the Shakespereans, because conceived to be unworthy of

the image they set up; granted that the fact of the circulation of the

blood was a familiar fact in the days of William Shakespeare; that the

"Menæchmi" of Plautus; that Iago's speech in "Othello" and the stanza

of Berni's _Orlando Innamorato_ were mere coincidences; or, better

yet, admit that there was an English version of the Italian poem in

Shakespeare's day *--admit, if required--that the "Hamlet" of Saxo, had

been translated; that the law in "The

* When Iago utters the often quoted lines, "who steals my

purse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with little

variation, this stanza of the _Orlando Innamorato_ of which

poem, to this day, there is no English version.

"Chi ruba un corno un cavallo, un anello E simil cose, ha

qualcha discrezione,

E patrebbe chimarsi ladroneello;

Ma quel ehe ruba la reputazione E de l'altrai patiehe si fa

bello,

Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone;

E tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno?"

As no English translation has been made of the Orlando

Innamorato, I must ask the reader who can not command the

original to be content with this rendering of the above

stanza:

"The man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring,

Or such a trifle, thieves with moderation,

And may be justly called a robberling;

But he who takes away a reputation And pranks in feathers

from another's wing His deed is robbery--assassination,

And merits punishment so much the greater As he to right and

truth is more a traitor."

Shakespeare, by R. G. White, vol. I, p. 23.

** Of Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian from whom the

plot of the "Hamlet" was taken, Whalley says, writing in

1748, that "no translation hath yet been made," must have

been read by the writer of "Hamlet" in the original. "An

Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare," etc. By Peter

Whalley, A. B.,

Fellow of St. John's College, London. Printed for J. Waller

at the Crown and Mitre, 1748--And see a suggestion that the

"Hamlet" came from Germany, in a pamphlet "On the Double

Personality of the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet of

Shakespeare. Its Relation to the German Hamlet." By Dr.

Latham, Royal Society of Literature Transactions. 1878.

Also, "Shakespeare in Germany. Alfred Cohn. Berlin and

London. 1874.

{065}"Merchant of Venice" was "Venetian" instead of "crowner's quest"

Jaw; admit that William Shakespeare "had the advantages in school of

something more than the mere rudiments of learning;" admit that "his

devotion to his family drove him forth from the rural seclusion of

Stratford into the battle of the great world;" that the immortal gift

of the second-best bed was, (we quote from Mr. Grant White, who is

apparently willing to sacrifice anybody's reputation if he can thereby

prove his William to have been a prodigy of virtue no less than

of genius), explained by the fact that, at the time of the hurried

marriage, a husband had to be provided for Mistress Hathaway without

loss of time, and that little Susannah was as much of a surprise to

William as to any body--in other words, that Anne was "no better than

she should be," (oblivious of the fact that "the premature Susannah" was

William Shakespeare's favorite child; that he, at least, never doubted

her paternity, for he left her the bulk of his fortune in his will);or

even that--according to Steevens, that testamentary second thought was

actually "a mark of rare confidence and devotion;" granted all these--if

they have anything to do with the question--and a dozen more, and

we only attenuate, by the exact value of these, {066}the mountain

of probability, nothing less than the complete dilapidation and

disappearance of which could leave room for substitution, In the stead

of the probability, the _possibility_ of such a suspension of the laws

of nature as is required by the Shakespearean theorists. For, as we have

said, the evidence is cumulative, and, therefore, no more to be waived

or disposed of by doubts as to, or even the dispelment of, this or

that or the other item--or disintegration of this or that or the other

block--of evidence than the Coliseum has been wiped away and disposed

of because its coping has crumbled, or because, for some centuries, the

petty Roman princes built their palaces from its debris.

And we may as well remark that, just here, it is always in order to

mention Archbishop Whately's "Historic Doubts." We wish some of the

gentlemen who cite it so glibly, would take the trouble to read that

clever little book. It is a logical, not a whimsical effort. It was

intended by its author as an answer to "Hume's Essay on Miracles."

Hume's argument being, in the opinion of the Archbishop, reducible

to the proposition that miracles were impossible because they were

improbable, his lordship wrote his little work to show that the history

of Napoleon was actually most improbable, and, written of feigned

characters, would read like the most extravagant fable. Surely it can

not be necessary to reiterate the difference between the Archbishop's

brochure and the proposition of "The Shakspearean Myth!" The one was

the argument from improbability, applied to facts in order to show

its dangerous and altogether vicious character. The other is the

demonstration {067}that history--that the record--when consulted, is

directly fatal to a popular impression, and directly contradictory of

a presumption, born of mere carelessness and accident, and allowed to

gather weight by mere years and lapse of time.

But, for the sake of the argument, let us leave the discussion, for the

moment, just where it stands, and take still bolder ground. Instead of

sifting evidence and counting witnesses, let us assume that, when

we painted William Shakspeare--who lived between the years 1564 and

1616--as an easy-going rural wag, with a rural wit, thereafter to be

sharpened by catering to the "gods" of a city theater; a poacher on

occasion, and scapegrace generally in his youth, who chose the life of

"a vagabond by statute"--i. e. a strolling player--but who turned up

in London, and found his way into more profitable connection with a

permanent play-house; and, in his advancing years, became thrifty,

finally sordid--we had only taken the liberty of conceiving, like every

other who ever wrote on a Shakespearean theme, yet one more William

Shakespeare; so that, instead of ten thousand William Shakespeares,

no two of which were identical, there were now ten thousand and one!

Admitting _that,_ the next question would of necessity be--and such an

investigation as the present must become utterly valueless if prosecuted

with bias or with substitution of personal opinion for historical

fact--whose William Shakespeare is probably most a likeness of the true

William Shakespeare, who _did_ wander from Stratford to London, who

_did_ sojourn there, and who _did_ wander back {068}again to Stratford,

and there was gathered to his fathers, in the year 1616?

The popular William Shakespeare, built to fit the plays, is a masterless

philosopher, a matchless poet, a student of Greek manuscripts and

classic manners, of southern romance and northern sagas, a traveler and

a citizen of the world, a scientist, a moralist, a master of statecraft,

and skilled in all the graces and amenities of courtly society! Which

of these two portraits is nearest to the life? Let us take an appeal to

History.

There appears to be but one way to go about to discover; that way is to

appeal to the truth of history; to go as nearly back as we can get to

the lifetime of the actual man we are after, and inquire, wherever a

trace of him can be touched, what manner of man he was. How, it happens

that the very nearest we can come to an eye-witness as to the personnel

of William Shakespeare is the Reverend John Ward, Vicar of Stratford,

who wrote in that town a diary or memoranda, between February, 1662, and

April, 1663, say forty-seven years after William Shakespeare's death.

The following meager references to his late fellow-townsman are all

(except an entry to the effect that he had two daughters, etc.; and

another memorandum, "Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays, etc.,)

thought worth while by Dominie Ward, viz:

"I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at

all; he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days

he lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year,

and for that he had an allowance so large that {069}he spent at the rate

of £1,000 a year, as I have heard."

"Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merrie meeting, and,

it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feaver there

contracted."

Next, chronologically, we come to a gentleman named Aubrey. This Mr.

Aubrey was himself a native of Warwickshire; was born in 1627--that is,

eleven years after Shakespeare died. He entered gentleman commoner of

Trinity College, Oxford, and so, presumably, was no Puritan. He was

considerable of a scholar himself, and was esteemed, we are told, a

Latin poet of no mean abilities, he was admitted a barrister of the

Inner Temple in 1646; and so, a scholar, a poet, and a lawyer,

might presumably know the difference between a wag and a genius. His

manuscripts are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. He gives an account

of his fellow-countyman, and, coming as it does, next to Dominie Ward's,

nearer to the lifetime of William Shakespeare than any chronicle extant,

(Malone admits it was not written later than 1680), we give it entire:

"Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county

of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore

by some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he exercised his

father's trade; but when he killed a calfe he would doe it in a high

style, and make a speech. There was, at this time, another butcher's son

in that towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural

witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young. This Wm. being

inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about

eighteen, {070}and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did

act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson never was a good actor, but an

excellent instructor.) He began early to make essays at dramatic poetry,

which at that time was very lowe, and his plays took well. He was a

handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a verie redie

and pleasant smooth witt. The humour of the Constable in 'A Midsummer

Night's Dream,' he happened to take at Gremlon, in Bucks, * which is

the road from London to Stratford, and there was living that Constable,

about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish,

and knew him.

* Aubrey says, in a note at this place: "I think it was a

midsummer's night that he happened there. But there is no

Constable in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'" Aubrey probably

intended reference to Dogberry, in the "Much Ado."

Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came.

One time, as he was at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, an old rich

usurer, was to be buryed; he makes there this extemporary epitaph:=

```Ten in the hundred the Devil allows,

```But Combes will have twelve, he swears and vows.

```If any one asks who lies in this tomb,

```"Hoh," quoth the Devil, "'tis my John a Combe!"=

He was wont to go to his native country once a year. I think I have been

told that he left £200 or £300 a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. I

have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell (who is counted

the best comedian we have now) say that he had a most prodigious witt,

and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramaticall writers.

He was {071}wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life;

says Ben Jonson, 'I wish he had blotted out a thousand.' His comedies

will remain witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that

he handles _mores hominum_: How our present writers reflect much upon

particular persons and coxcombites that twenty years hence they will not

be understood. Though, as Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little

Latin and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been,

in his younger days, a school-master in the country." *

* Aubrey's MSS. was called "Minutes of Lives," and was

addressed to his "worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquary

of Oxford." A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680,

accompanied it, in which Aubrey says: "'T is a task that I

never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon

me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general

acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century

of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up

and down in it, which hath made me so well known. Besides

the modern advantage of coffee-houses, before which men knew

not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or

societies, I might add that I come of a long-aevious race,

by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings of

time for several generations, which does reach high."

Imagine this as the record of a real "Shakespeare!" Could we imagine

it as the record of a Milton? Let us conceive of a fellow-countryman of

John Milton's, a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the author

of "Paradise Lost;" "He was a goodish-looking sort of man, wore his hair

long, was a clerk, or secretary, or something to Cromwell, or some of

his gang; had some trouble with his wife; was blind, as I have heard;

or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." And conceive of this, a few years

after Milton's death being {072}actually all the information accessible

concerning him!

But to continue our search in the vicinage. On the 10th day of April,

1693 (thirteen years later), a visitor to Warwickshire wrote a letter to

his cousin, describing, among other points of interest, the village and

church of Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as the letter was discovered among

the papers of a well-known nobleman, addressed to a person known to have

lived, and indorsed by this latter, "From Mr. Dowdall; description of

several places in Warwickshire"--as it bears on its face evidence of its

genuineness, and, above all, mentions William Shakespeare, precisely

in the same strain that it alludes to other worthies of the county--the

Beauchamps, the Nevilles, etc.--it has always been accepted as

authentic. After a description of the tomb and resting place of "our

English tragedian, Mr. Shakespeare," the writer continues:

"The clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. * He

says that this Shakespeare was formerly of this town, bound apprentice

to a butcher; but that he ran from his master to London, and there

{073}was received into the play-house as a servitour, and by this means

had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of

his family, but the male line is extinguished. Not one, for fear of

the curse abovesaid, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and

daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him."

* I.e. (more than "above" three years old when she died.)

This letter was among the papers of Lord DeClifford, which

were sold by auction--and was purchased by Mr. Rodd, a well-

known antiquarian bookseller, of Great Newport Street,

London, in 1834. Mr. Rodd printed it in pamphlet form in

1838 (at least the copy we have bears imprint of that year).

It is dated "Butler's Merston in Warwickshire, April, the

10th, 1693;" is signed, "Your very faithful kinsman and most

aff'te humble serv't till death, John at Stiles," and is

addressed, "These for Mr. Southwell, pr. serv't." This is

Mr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed in his

handwriting, "From Mr. Dowdall. Description of several

places in Warwickshire." Mr. Rodd says that the writer was

"an Inns'-of-Court-Man."

Next, chronologically, comes the contribution preserved to us by a

Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of Sapperton, * in Gloucestershire. The

Reverend William Fulman, who died in 1688, bequeathed certain of his

biographical collections to this Reverend Davies. Davies died in 1708,

leaving many annotations to his friend's manuscripts. Among these

annotations he writes the following of William Shakespeare: "William

Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, about

1563-4, much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits,

particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and some times

imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great

advancement. But his revenge was so great that he is his 'Justice

Clodpate' ** and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his

name, bore three lowses rampant for his arms. From an actor he became

a composer. He died April 23, 1616, aetat fifty-three, probably at

Stratford--for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd.)

* His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Rev. William Fulman

(in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all in

the library of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford.

** Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in "Merry Wives

of Windsor." p. 520.

{074}on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one who shall remove his

bones. He died a papist. Whatever these may be worth--for, of course,

like the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay--it is fair to

include them in a collection of what the law calls "general reputation,"

"general report," or "common fame," and it is fair to offset this

collection, at least, against that "common fame" and "common reputation"

which has grown up during the last hundred years or so concerning

William Shakespeare, which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown.

Much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with a tradition, related

by one John Jordan, a townsman of Stratford, (who was known in the

days of Malone and the Ireland forgeries as "the Stratford poet,") who

claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent to a tradition of

an alleged drinking-bout of Shakespeare and others (as representing

Stratford) against the champions of Pebworth, Marston, Hillborough,

Grafton, Wixford, Broom, and Bidford, in which William was so worsted

that his legs refused to carry him farther homeward than a certain

thorn-tree, thereafter to come in for its share of worshipful adoration

from the Shakespearean sticklers. But the tradition is of no value

except as additional testimony to the impression of his boon companions,

associates, and contemporaries, that William Shakespeare was a jolly

dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his wench--was almost any

thing, in short, except the student of history, antiquity, and classic

manners, no less than the scholar of his own times, that he has been

created since by those who knew him not. Nothing travels faster in

rural communities, as we {075}have remarked, than a reputation for

"book-learning;" let us continue our search for Shakespeare's.

When an interest in the Shakespearean drama began to assert itself, and

people began to inquire who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond

the Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At the outset they ran

full against this village "ne'er-do-weel" and rustic wag, who worked

down into a man of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and

properties in London, and spent it royally in Stratford, drinking

himself into his grave some seven years before the first collection

of what the world in time was to credit him with, (but improved

and enlarged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes-perean

drama--first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie Ward may have been dazzled

by the open house of the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year

is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we think, more easily

accounted for by interests in tithes and outlying lands in Stratford,

than by the "two plays a year," in and about the days when from four

to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (according to Philip

Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker and padrone of those days, who

kept many actors in his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he

entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), and twenty

pounds a sum commanded only by masters. The prodigality which dazed the

simple Stratford dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something

less than the income named; and such an income, too, would tally with

William Shakespeare's own estimate of his worldly goods in his Will.

But the statement is the nearest and best evidence {076}we have at

hand, and so let it he accepted. And so, running up against this William

Shakespeare, these commentators were obliged to stop. But there were the

dramas, and there was the name "William Shakespeare" tacked to them; it

was William Shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the William

Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the one they wanted, they

straightway began to construct one more suitable. The marvelous silence

of history and local tradition only stimulated them, They must either

confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make

one.

First (for Rowe has only--in his eight honest pages of biographical

notice--narrated certain gossip or facts, on the authority, perhaps,

of Betterton, and does not claim to be an explorer, and Heminges and

Condell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical allusion

whatever) came Edmund Malone. With the nicest and most painstaking care

he sifted every morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories,

chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report--but in vain. The

nearer he came to the Stratford "Shaughraun," the further away he got

from a matchless poet and an all-mastering student. But, like those

that were to come after him, instead of accepting the situation,

and confessing the William Shakespeare who lived at Stratford not

mentionable in the same breath with the producer of the august text

which had inspired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at the

stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the chroniclers who could

so overlook prodigies. Far from concluding that--because he finds

no such name as William Shakespeare in the national

Walhalla--{077}therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes,

rather, that the Walhalla builders do not understand their business. He

says:

"That almost a century should have elapsed from the time of his [William

Shakespeare's] death, without a single attempt having been made to

discover any circumstance which could throw a light on the history

of his life or literary career,... are circumstances which can not be

contemplated without astonishment. *... Sir William Dugdale, born

in 1605, and educated at the school of Coventry, twenty miles from

Stratford-upon-Avon, and whose work, 'The Antiquities of Warwickshire,'

appeared in 1646, only thirty years after the death of our poet, we

might have expected to give some curious memorials of his illustrious

countryman. But he has not given us a single particular of his private

life, contenting himself with a very slight mention of him in his

account of the church and tombs of Stratford-upon-Avon.

* Malone's "Life:" "Plays and Poems," London, 1821, vol.

ii, p. 4.

* Ibid., p. 5.

The next biographical printed notice that I have found is in Fuller's

'Worthies,' folio, 1662; in 'Warwickshire,' page 116--where there is a

short account of our poet, furnishing very little information concerning

him. And again, neither Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 8vo,

1687; Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 1699--add anything to

the meager accounts of Bug-dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was

himself a native of Oxford, and was born but fourteen years after the

death of our author, should not {078}have collected any anecdotes of

Shakespeare, has always appeared to me extraordinary. Though Shakespeare

has no direct title to a place in the 'Athenæ Oxoniensis,' that diligent

antiquary could easily have found a niche for his life as he has done

for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of Davenant afforded him a

very fair opportunity for such an insertion."

The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching among the poets for

one by the name of William Shakespeare, when there was no such name

among the poets; he found him not, because he was not there. He might

with as much propriety have searched for the name of Grimaldi in the

Poets' Corner, or for Homer's on the books of the Worshipful Society of

Patten-makers. To be sure, in writing up Stratford Church, Sir William

Dugdale can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakespeare,

any more than a writer who should set out to make a guide-book of

Westminster Abbey could omit description of the magnificent tomb of John

Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in that of the cicerone of

the Abbey is the merit of the tomb a warrant for the immortality of

the entombed. It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, and

contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans would have us accept--would

have us to swallow, or rather bolt, with our eyes shut--namely, the

spectacle (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the world

has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly unappreciated and

unsuspected, going in and out among his fellows in a crowded city of

some two hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were {079}certain

master spirits whose history we have intact to-day, and whose record

we can possess ourselves of with no difficulty--without making any

impression on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, except

as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, besides, at a little

of every thing), so that in a dozen years he is forgotten as if he had

never been; and--except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village church,

finds his name on a stone--passed beyond the memory of a man in less

than the years of a babe! The blind old Homer at least was known as a

poet where he was known at all; the seven cities which competed for

the tradition of his birth when criticism revealed the merit of his

song--though he might have begged his bread in their streets--at least

did not take him for a tinker! It is not that the Shakespearean dramas

were not recognized as immortal by the generation of their composer

that is the miracle; neither were the songs of Homer. Perhaps, so far as

experience goes, this is rather the rule than the exception. The miracle

is, that in all the world of London and of England nobody knew that

there _was_ any Shakespeare, in the very days when the Drama we hold

so priceless now was being publicly rendered in a play-house, and

printed--as we shall come to consider further on--for the benefit of

non-theater-goers!

But, it is said, the great fire of London intervened and burned up all

the records--that is how we happen to have no records of the immortal

Shakespeare. Then, again, there is the lapse of time--the ordinary wear

and tear of centuries, and the physical changes of the commercial center

of the world. But how {080}about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry

and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about Chaucer? Did the

great fire of London affect his chronicle and his labors? The records of

Horace, and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had more than a

great fire of London to contend with. But they have survived the ruin

of empires and the crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries

and the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and might of the

Shakespearean page, how greater than Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and

Terence! If it all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not a

riddle. It is the simplest of facts--the simple fact that the compilers

of the Shakespearean pages worked anonymously, and concealed their

identity so successfully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and

defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the research of this

nineteenth century.

But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not deterred by his failure to

find a poet of the name of Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that

name there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds--and he has

the credit of being the first to undertake the task--to construct an

immortal bard. And a very pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too!--one

that, with such minor variations as have, from time to time, suggested

themselves to gentlemen of a speculative turn of mind, has been a

standard immortal William all along. For they who seek will find. Had

Mr. Malone searched for the Stratford "shaughraun," who ran off and

became an actor (as capably respectable a profession as any other,

for the man makes the profession, and not the profession the man); who

revis{081}ited his native haunts--on the lookout, not for king's and

cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes--but for clowns and

drunkards and misers to dovetail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that

passed under his adapting pen; * had he searched for the {082}Stratford'

butcher's son, who was the Stratford wag as well, and who never

slaughtered a sheep without making a speech to his admiring

fellow-villagers, here he was at his hand.

* It is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue

and choruses of the "Henry V." and "Henry VIII." are

apologies for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly

of the multitude they catered to. As to the internal

testimony of the authorship of these compositions, any

reader can judge for himself. We have expressed our own

opinion as being that William Shakespeare might be credited

with the characters of Nym and Bar-dolph; especially of the

Corporal, whose part consists of the phrase, "There's the

humor of it," intruded at each convenient interval; and it

is possible that Shakespeare, in fitting up the matter in

hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the

moment. There seems to be reason for believing that this

expression did happen to be a favorite at about that time;

and that Shakespeare was not the only one who rang the

changes on it as a season to stage material. Witness the

following:

Cob. Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as

another, sir!

Cash. Thy rheum, Cob? Thy humor, thy humor! Thou mistak'st.

Cob. Humor? Mack, I think it be so indeed! What is that

humor? Some rare thing, I warrant.

Cash. Marry, I tell thee, Cob, it is a gentlemanlike

monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by

affectation, and fed by folly.

Cob. How must it be fed?

Cash. Oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. Didst thou

never hear that? It's a common phrase, "Feed thy humor."

Every Man in his Humor, iii. 4.

Couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable Chiefly to such

as had the happiness Daily to see how the poor innocent word

Was racked and tortured.

Every Man Out of his Humor.

"Humor" was, it would seem by this, the over-used and abused

word of these times; just as for example "awful" might be

said to be an over-used and abused word during our own

times.

But he was searching, not for a butcher's son, but for a poet--for a

courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,=

````The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

````The glass of fashion and the mold of form,

````The observed of all observers"--=

for "an amazing genius which could pervade all nature at a glance,

and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared to be

unknown;" * and his instinct should have assured him that.--however the

works which such a genius had left behind him might travel under the

name of the butcher's boy--it was not the pen of the butcher-boy that

had written them; that the composer of pages "from which, were all

the arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered," ** was {083}no

"jack-of-all-trades," and could not have lived and publicly presented

his compositions nightly, year in and year out, in the glare of a

metropolis crowded with courtiers, play-goers, and students--in the age

and days of Bacon and Raleigh and Elizabeth--unknown save to a handful

of his pot-fellows, and faded out of the world, unknown and unnoticed,

fading from the memory of men, without the passing of an item in their

mouths!

* Whalley.

** Ibid. A curious instance of this familiarity--to be

found in the Shakespearean dramas--with the least noticed

facts of science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped

the critics, we might allude to here: In one of Jules

Verne's realistic stories wherein he springs his romantic

catastrophes upon scientific phenomena--"Michael Strogoff"--

he makes Michael fall among enemies who sentence him to be

blinded. The blinding is to be accomplished with a heated

iron, but Michael sees his mother at his side, and, tears

suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is neutralized, and

fails to destroy the sight. So, in "King John," Act IV.,

Scene 1, Arthur says to Hubert:

The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,

Approaching near these eyes would drink my tears And quench

his fiery indignation.

This may be mere coincidence, but the dramas are crowded

with such coincidences, and for that, if for that only, are

marvelous. In either case, according to the Shakespereans,

we have only to go on, for the rest of time, in discovering

new truths in nature and facts in science, only to find that

the Stratford butcher's boy knew all about them three

hundred years ago--was familiar with all that we have yet to

learn, and that to his unlettered genius our wisdom was to

be sheer foolishness.

Most wonderful of all, this utter ignoring of William Shakespeare among

the poets, if unjust, provoked no remonstrance from the immediate family

or any kin of the Stratford lad. Either the Shakespeares, Ardens,

and Hathaways were wonderfully destitute of family pride, or else the

obscurity accorded their connection was perfectly just and proper. No

voice of kin or affinity of William Shakespeare (at least we may say

this with confidence) ever claimed immortality for him; although it can

not be said that they had no opportunity, had they wished to do so, for

William Shakespeare's granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was alive until 1670;

his sister, Joan Hart, till 1646; and his daughters, Susannah Hall and

Judith Queeny, until 1662. So that Dugdale, at least, if not Wood and

the rest of them, would not have had to go far to confirm any

rumors they might have stumbled upon as to the {084}acquirements and

accomplishments of the man Shakespeare; but it seems that not even the

partiality of his own kin, nor family fame, nor pride of ancestry, ever

conceived the idea of palming off their progenitor upon futurity as

a giant of any build. If there is any exception to this statement, it

would appear to be as follows:

I. It is recorded by Oldys that, one of his (Shakespeare's) "younger

brothers, who lived to a great age, when questioned, in his last days,

about William, said he could remember nothing of his performance but

seeing him 'act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to

personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak

and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and

carried to a table at which he was seated among some company, and one

of them sang a song.'" Mr. Fullom has demonstrated from the Shakespeare

family records, that Oldys must have been mistaken as to any brother of

William Shakespeare's having furnished this reminiscence; but, admitting

it as the statement of a surviving brother, it stands for what it is,

and it certainly is not the record or tradition of one whose popular

memory in men's minds was that of an immortal prodigy. *

* We take this quotation from Mr. Grant White's article on

Shakespeare in Appleton's "American Cyclopoedia." Mr.

White's admirable contributions to our Shakespearean

literature entitle his opinion to great weight in any mooted

question as to William Shakespeare; and we must confess

that, in some portions, his paper we have just mentioned

almost suggests him as agreeing with us as to his subject.

Mr. White says, in another place: "Young lawyers and poets

produced plays rapidly. Each theatrical company not only

'kept a poet,' but had three or four, in its pay. At the

time of his leaving Stratford the drama was rising rapidly

in favor with all classes in London, where actors were made

much of in a certain way. And where there was a constant

demand for new plays, ill-provided younger sons of the

gentry, and others who had been bred at the universities and

the inns-of-court, sought to mend their fortunes by

supplying this demand." And again: "We are tolerably well

informed by contemporary writers as to the performances of

the eminent actors of that time, but of Shakespeare's we

read nothing." Mr. White admits, a few lines below the

sentence just quoted, that Shakespeare's position in the

stock at the Blackfriars was "general utility." We should

rather call it, from the evidence, "first old man."

{085}II. An epitaph was placed over the remains of Susannah Hall,

presumably by one of the family, which read:=

```"Witty above her sex, but that's not all:

```Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.

```Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this

```Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss."=

Whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant that either William

Shakespeare or Mistress Hall, or both, were "witty above their sex" or

"wise to salvation," cannot, at this date, be determined: but it would

seem that this is all the immediate family of William Shakespeare have

ever contributed to our knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him

was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contemporaries.

But Mr. Malone--and, being the first investigator, he would, doubtless,

have been followed, as he has been, whatever the result of his

inquiries--Mr. Malone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to

whose {086}pages he had recourse, not only assumed all he could not find

authority for, but undertook to tell us the precise dates at which his

Stratford lad composed the plays themselves. Among other achievements

he constructed an admirable "chronology" of the Shakespearean plays;

which--with such fanciful variations as have been made to it from time

to time since--is an authority with the Sliakespeareans even to this

day. To be sure, Mr. Malone did not rely entirely upon external evidence

for this apochrypha. He often appeals to the text, as when, for example,

he settles the date at which the "Merchant of Venice" was composed--as

1594, because Portia says:=

```"Even as a flourish when true subjects bow

```To a new crowned monarch,"=

referring of course, says Mr. Malone, (and this guesswork he not only

called "commentary," but has actually succeeded in making all his

successor "commentators" accept him as final) to the coronation of Henry

IV., of France! Again, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" he finds the

words, (Act I, scene iii) "Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores."

"This shows," says Mr. Malone, "that this comedy must have been written

after Sir Walter Raleigh's return from Guinia, in 1696. And so on."

We will not rehearse the scope and burden of Mr. Malone's painstaking

and wonderful labors, but, from one instance of the credulity which,

once it has overmastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate

reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and silly search, we can

judge of the calm historical value of his "discoveries." In 1808, Mr.

Malone published {087}a pamphlet--"An Account of the Incidents from

which the Title and Part of the Story of 'The Tempest' were derived, and

the Date ascertained." *

* By Edmond Malone. London: printed by C. & R. Baldwin,

Newbridge street, 1808.

The "Tempest" is the most purely fanciful and poetical of

the Shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to

show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it;

that it is all real: the "Magic Island," a real island; the

magician Prospero, a real portrait; the "monster," a real,

living curiosity, which happened to be on exhibition in

England in the days when the play either was written or

about to be written, (it makes no difference to these

gentlemen which) and the storm at sea--as if the brain which

conceived the play could not have conceived--what is not,

now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon thing in the world--

a storm at sea!--a real historical hurricane!

In 1839, the Reverend Joseph Hunter, following in the Malone

footsteps, published "A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin.

Date, etc., of Shakespeare's Tempest," in which the Magic

Island is the island of Lampedusa: first, because it is

uninhabited; secondly, because it is small; thirdly, because

it lies on the route between Naples and the coast of Africa,

so that had a prince been traveling from one to the other,

and wrecked on an island between, he could have been

conveniently wrecked on this one without going out of his

course; fourthly, because it bore the reputation (Mr. Hunter

does not say with whom) of being haunted; fifthly, because

there was a cell upon it, which Pros-pero might have found

most opportune for his ghostly residence; and sixthly, that

the island of Malta gets fire-wood from it. This last fact

being strongest in the way of proof, because we are told

that Prospero impressed Ferdinand into his service and kept

him piling logs of wood.

But it was reserved for Mr. Edward Dowden, in 1881, to

locate the island beyond the necessity of further

conjecture, and to give us accurate sailing directions for

reaching it. "Prospero's Island," he tells us, "was imagined

by Shakespeare as within two days' quick sail of Naples,"

for "Ariel is promised his freedom after two days" (Act I,

scene ii). "Why two days? The time of the entire action of

the Tempest is only three hours. What was to be the

employment of Ariel during two days? To make the winds and

seas favorable during the voyage." (Dowden's Shakespeare's

Mind and Art. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1881. p. 373.)

It seems that Mr. Malone finds reference to a hurricane that once

dispersed a certain fleet of a certain nobleman, one Sir George Somers,

in July, 1609, on a passage, with provisions, for the Virginia Colony;

the above nobleman, and a Sir Thomas Gates, having been wrecked on the

island of Bermuda. This discovery is warranty enough for Mr. Malone, and

he goes on gravely to argue that William Shakespeare not only wrote his

"Tempest" to commemorate this particular {088}tempest--and, as will

be seen by an examination of the premises, the relation between the

occurrence and the play is confined merely to the word "tempest" and

goes no further--but that he (Shakespeare) did not place the scene

of his shipwreck on the Bermudas, "because he could spread a greater

glamour over the whole by not alluding to so well-known islands as the

Bermudas." Mr. Malone further remarks naively that, "without having read

Tacitus, he (Shakespeare) well knew that 'omne ignotum pro magnifico

est'!" Without pausing to wonder how Mr. Malone knew that Shakespeare

of Stratford had never read Tacitus--(a slander, by the way, on the

omniscient Shakespeare, too--the man who studied Plautus in Greek

manuscript, the author of "Julius Cæsar"--that he had not read a simple

Latin historian!)--or to dwell on the most marvelous coincidence between

the wreck of Sir George Somers and that of Prince Ferdinand {089}(the

coincidence, according to Malone, being, that one was wrecked on the

Bermuda and the other wasn't); or ask if a storm at sea was so rare an

occurrence as to be easily identified; or to note that "the tempest"

in the play of that name is an episode which covers only about a dozen

lines of text, and which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of

the argument--without pausing for this, or to remark that Mil Malone

might have taken to himself the 'omne ignotum pro magnifico est' of

Tacitus more appositely than heap-plied it either to Sir George Somers

or the Bermudas, had he reflected as generously as he took it for

granted--it is as well to take our leave of Mr. Malone and his labors at

this point, with a compliment to their zeal and impressment which must

be withheld from their results. *

* DeQuincy accepts this "origin" "with great alacrity."

And the world would doubtless be as well off could we also here take

leave of the rest of the Shakespeare-makers. But we are not allowed

to do so. From the time of Malone onward, the Shakespeare-making,

Shakespeare-mending, and Shakespeare-cobbling have gone on without

relaxation. Each fresh rencontre with an emergency in the Shakespearean

text has necessitated at least one and often several new Shakes-peares.

And they have been prepared and forthcoming as fast as wanted. Was it

found that the bard had, of all his worldly goods, left the wife of his

bosom no recognition save the devise of a ramshackle old bedstead? A

score of gentlemen hurried to the front to prove that, by law, history,

logic, custom, and every {090}thing else, in those days a "second-best

bed" was really the most priceless of possessions; of fabulous value,

and a fortune in itself; and that in no other way could her immortal

husband have so testified his tender regard and appreciation of Mrs.

Shakespeare--the sweet Ann Hathaway of old, who had thrown herself away

on a scapegrace butcher's son! The fact (as it appears, on inspection of

the instrument itself, to be) that Mrs. Shakespeare was not even alluded

to in the first draft of the testament--her name and the complimentary

devise of the precious husband's precious "second-best bed" having been

written in as "a poet's after-thought," and not appearing in the first

draft at all--does not affect their statements in the least! They have

even gone so far as to ascertain that William was no truant lord

to willingly desert his lonesome lady. According to the very latest

authority we are able to cite, the fault of the separation was wholly

her own. We are assured by a very recent explorer that Mrs. Shakespeare

"did not accompany her husband to London, objecting to the noise and

turmoil of that city." *

* "Shakespeare and his Contemporaries." By William Tegg, F.

R. H. S. London: William Tegg & Co., 1879. Chapter I.,

"Sketch of the Life of Shakespeare," p. 4. As every

circumstance connected with William Shakespeare and

Stratford is of interest in the connection, we may as well

note that, according to Mr. Grant White, when William

Shakespeare first went to London, he went into the office of

a cousin of his, who was an attorney in that city. Like Mr.

Tegg, Mr. White gives himself as an authority for this item.

See his "Shakespeare" in Johnston's Encyclopaedia.

Unless it be assumed, therefore, that investigation is reliable in

proportion to the distance from its subject at which it works, it

would seem to {091}appear that, even if the William Shakespeare we

have portrayed were our own creation, the creation is actually a nearer

resemblance to the William Shakespeare known to those nearest to him in

residence and time; than the inspired genius of the Shakespeareans, who,

from Malone downward, have rejected every shred of fact they found at

hand, and weaved, instead, their warp and woof of fiction (and that

it is charming and absorbing fiction, we are eager to admit) around a

vision of their own.

Nor have the Shakespeareans rested their labors here. Having created a

Shakespeare to fit the plays, it was necessary to proceed to create a

face to fit the Shakespeare, and a cranial development wherein might

lodge and whence might spring the magic of the works he ought to have

written. This may, very fairly, be called "the young ladies' argument."

* "Look on his portrait," say the Shakespeareans; "look at that

magnificent head!"--and they point to the Chandos portrait--"is not that

the head of a genius?"

* So the young ladies of New York were of opinion that

Stokes should not be hanged for the murder of Fisk, "because

he was so awfully good-looking." {092}inspiration--the ideal

of the artist, who conceives, in every case, his own

"Shakespeare;" and if we were called upon for proof that

"Shakespeare" is quite as much of an ideal to the most of us

as a "Hamlet," or a "Lear," we could cite, perhaps, nothing

more convincing than the latitude which is allowed to

artists with any of the three--"Shakespeare,"

"Was there ever such a head?" We should say, yes, there might have been

such another head created, even admitting the Chandos portrait to be the

very counterfeit head of William Shakespeare. But it does not appear,

on taking the trouble to look into the matter, either that the Chandos

picture is a portrait, or that--with one exception--any other of the

pictures, casts, masks, busts, or statues of William Shakespeare are any

thing but works of art, embodying the individual "Hamlet," or "Lear,"

and the elaborate criticism to which a new "portrait" of either of them

is subjected--criticism, which, in the case of a portrait of William

Shakespeare, in no case pretends to be historical, but is always

romantic, or sentimental, or picturesque: as to the proper pose of a

poet, or the correct attitude for a man receiving efflatus directly

from the gods; never as to the stage manager of the Blackfriars, or the

husband of Anne Hathaway, or the son of John Shakespeare, of Stratford.

It appears that, as a matter of fact, there never was but one picture of

the Elizabethan Manager which ever enjoyed any thing in the semblance of

a certification to its authenticity; and that certification was in the

very unsatisfactory form of rhyme, in the shape of a set of verses said

to have been written by Ben Jonson (and, as we propose to show, are

quite as likely to have been placed under the particular picture without

Jonson's authority as with it); while, that they were written to fit the

particular picture in question (for they are in the form of a sort of

apostrophe to some picture or portrait, and will be hereafter quoted),

there seems to be no information sufficient to form a belief either way.

If they were written for that particular picture, and if that particular

picture is a speaking likeness, then the phrenological, or at least the

physiognomical, {093}argument must droop away and die; for the person

represented has as stupefied, stultified, and insignificant a human

countenance as was ever put upon an engraver's surface; and, as a matter

of fact, no Shakespearean has yet been found to admit it as the image of

his dream. But, of course, this is mere matter of personal opinion, and

entitled to no weight whatever in the discussion. The question is--Is

there any authentic portrait of William Shakespeare, as there is of

Elizabeth, Bacon, Raleigh, Southampton, and other more or less prominent

characters of the age in which William Shakespeare is known to have

lived and died? Let us do the best we can toward investigating this

question.

We have before us a volume, "An Enquiry into the Authenticity of Various

Pictures and Prints, which, from the Decease of the Poet to our own

Times, have been offered to the Public as Portraits of Shakespeare.

Containing a Careful Examination of the Evidence on which they claim to

be received; by which the Pretended Portraits have been rejected, the

Genuine confirmed and established," etc., etc. By James Boaden, Esq. *

We must content ourselves with a simple review of Mr. Boaden's labors.

He was a friend and disciple of Malone's, and a Shakespearean; a

believer in the poet; and he writes under the shadow of the mighty

name--the shadow out from under which we of this age have stepped, and

so become able to inspect, not only the facts of history uncurtained by

that shadow, but the shadow itself.

* London. Printed for Robert Triphook, 23 Old Bond Street,

1824.

But we will take every {094}one of Mr. Boaden's statements for granted,

nevertheless, and draw our opinions, when we venture on any, from the

portraits which he has given in his book. At least Mr. Boaden is not a

"Baconian," and not a "Raleigh man," and, whenever he finds it necessary

to speak of Shakespeare's history, he follows Malone's own version. For

convenience, we will change Mr. Boaden's numeration of the "portraits,"

preserving the designation, however, which he assigns them.

No. 1. William Shakespeare dies in Stratford in 1616. In 1623, appears,

on the title-page of Heminges and Condell's first folio of the plays,

the portrait by Martin Droeshout. It is an engraving, and, Mr. Boaden

believes, a good engraving, of some original picture from which it must

have been taken; "for," he says, "there were good engravers in those

days; for Chapman's 'Homer' was published in that year, with a very tine

engraving of Chapman."

Under this engraving is printed a copy of Jonson's lines, as follows:

TO THE READER.

````This figure that thou here seest put,

```It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;

```Wherein the graver had a strife *

````With nature to outdo the life:

````O, could he but have drawn his wit

````As well in brasse as he hath hit

````His face: the print would then surpasse

````All that was ever done in brasse.

````But, since he can not, reader, look,

````Not on his picture, but his booke.=

* Look, when a painter would surpasse the life,

His art's with nature's handiwork at strife.

Venus and Adonis.

{095}In this picture the head of the subject is represented as rising

out of an horizontal plain of collar appalling to behold. The hair is

straight, combed down the sides of the face and bunched over the ears;

the forehead is disproportionately high; the top of the head bald; the

face has the wooden expression familiar in the Scotchmen and Indians

used as signs by tobacconists' shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare

that would be but a sorry advertisement for the humblest establishment

in that trade; and which we would be quite as unlikely to look for in

the Stratford scapegrace as in the immortal bard of the Shakespeareans.

It is of this picture that Boaden quotes somebody's remark that "it is

lucky these metrical commendations are not required to be delivered on

oath." And Steevens says, on the supposition that Ben Jonson, and not

the engraver, put the copy of verses on the title-page beneath the

effigy: "Ben Jonson might know little about art, care less about the

resemblance, and, never having compared the engraving from the picture,

have rested satisfied with the recollection that the original was a

faithful resemblance; and that, no doubt, the engraver had achieved all

that his art could perform." No. 2. The edition of the plays of 1690 is

accompanied with what is known as "Marshall's picture;" which so closely

follows, as to face, forehead, hair, beard, and collar, the engraving

above described, as to suggest that it was a copy either of that

engraving, or of the unknown picture from which that was taken. But, if

a copy, it is certainly, from a pictorial point of view, an improvement.

It looks much more like a man. The simpleton stare around the eyes is

toned down, and the wooden aspect is modified into some{096}thing like

life. Marshall has taken liberties with the dress of No. 1, throwing

in a sort of tunic over the left shoulder, hitching on an arm with a

gauntleted hand grasping a sprig of laurel, etc., etc.

No. 3. The Felton Head.--"In the catalogue of the fourth exhibition

and sale by private contract," says Boaden, (page 81),"at the European

Museum, King Street, St. James Square, 1792." this picture was announced

to the public in the following words:

"No. 359--a curious portrait of Shakespeare, painted in 1597."

On the 31st of May, 1792, a Mr. Felton bought it for five guineas, and,

on requiring its credentials, received the following letter:

To Mr. S. Felton, Drayton, Shropshire--Sir: The head of Shakespeare

was purchased out of an old house, known by the sign of "The Boar," in

Eastcheap, London, where Shakespeare and his friends used to resort; and

report says was painted by a player of that time, but whose name I have

not been able to learn.

This letter was signed "J. Wilson," who was the conductor of the

European Museum. This "J. Wilson" appears to have been the original

Barnum. Although Prince Hal and Falstaff are said in the play to have

affected "The Boar's head in Eastcheap," it does not appear, except

from Mr. "J. Wilson," that "Shakespeare and his friends" ever resorted

thither. There was an old inn in Eastcheap, but it was not called "The

Boar's Head." There _was_ an inn by that name, however, in Blackfriars,

near the theater, from which the manager might have borrowed it. Then,

again, Mr. "J. Wilson" seemed to have forgotten the great fire in London

in 1666, which, "in a few hours, {097}in a strong east wind, left the

whole of Eastcheap a mass of smoking ruins, and the wretched inhabitants

could think of saving nothing but their lives." Mr. Wilson subsequently

amended his story so as to read that "it was found between four and five

years ago at a broker's shop at the Minories by a man of fashion, whose

name must be concealed," etc., etc. Mr. Steevens, who scouted the other

pictures as spurious, accepted this picture, for a time, as the original

of the engravings we have called No. 1 and No. 2; but finally, the whole

thing exploded and was forgotten.

No. 4. The Bust in Stratford Church.--This was carved by nobody knows

whom, from nobody knows what, nobody knows when; for the statement that

it was cut by "Gerard Johnson," an Amsterdam "tomb-maker," is invariably

accepted, but can be traced to no historical source. Says Boaden (page

81), "The performance is not too good for a native sculptor." In 1623

Leonard Digges alludes to it in a few verses well known. It seems

to have been originally colored, but there is no testimony as to the

original colors. In 1748, one hundred and twenty-five years after

Digges, John Hall, a Stratford artist, "restored" it, painting the eyes

a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. This was "a good enough"

Shakespeare for all practical purposes for the next half-hundred years

or so. But in 1793 came Mr. Malone. He caused the bust--in deference,

probably, to a purer taste and a sense of churchly propriety--to be

covered completely with a thick coat of white paint. *

* While these pages are going through the press (April,

1879), however, we find a statement that within a year or

two (and since the writer of these pages visited it) one

Simon Colling has applied a bath to the bust--removing

Malone's whitewash, and revealing the identical auburn hair

and hazel eyes which tradition had asserted to be

underneath.

{098}From this bust, Mr. Boaden says, a Mr. Bullock once took a cast,

which is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of the plays,

in which case it is entitled "Cast of the head of William Shakespeare,

taken after death," which may or may not--for Mr. Boaden can not tell us

who this "Mr. Bullock" was--be the German "Death Mask" noticed further

on, (at any rate the statement "taken after death"--"William Shakespeare

being unquestionably dead at the time--is literally true.)

The bust represents its subject as possessing a magnificent head,

admirably proportioned, with no protruding "bumps." The face is

represented as breaking into a smile. According to this effigy,

Shakespeare must have had an extraordinarily long upper lip, the

distance between the base of the nose and the mouth being remarkably out

of proportion with the other facial developments; there seems to be a

little difficulty, too, about the chin, which is pulled out into what

appears to be a sort of extra nose; but, nevertheless, the Stratford

bust represents a fine, soldierly-looking man, with a fierce military

mustache cocked up at the ends, and a goatee. If Ben Jonson--knowing

his friend William Shakespeare to have been the martial and altogether

elegant-looking gentleman the Stratford bust represents him--authorized

the verses we have already quoted to be placed under the "Droe-shout

engraving," it was a deliberate libel on his part, and as gross as

it was deliberate, and only perhaps to {099}be explained by Jonson's

alleged secret enmity to, or jealousy of, William Shakespeare, his rival

playwright, which we shall be called to examine at length further on. *

* Post Part III. The Jonsonian testimony.

No. 5. "The Chandos Portrait." This picture, so termed because once the

property of the Duke of Chandos, is the best known of all the so-called

portraits--being, in fact, the one from which the popular idea of

Shakespeare is derived; therefore, when a man is said to resemble

Shakespeare, it is meant to be conveyed that he bears a likeness to the

Chandos picture. Mr. Malone announced that it was painted in 1607,

but never gave any other authority than his own ipse dixit for the

statement, not even taking the trouble to refer, like Mr. J. Wilson, to

"a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed." Mr. Boaden lays (page

42) that he once saw it, and compared it "with what had been termed a

fine copy, I think by Piamberg, and found it utterly unlike."

"Indeed," he continues, "I never saw any thing that resembled it." He

also says (pages 41-42) that "the copies by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr.

Humphrey were not only unlike the original, but were unlike each other,

one being smiling and the other grave." That is to say, that not only

have the romancers constructed "biographies," but the artists have kept

up with them; and we may, every one of us, select our own Shakespeare

to-day--poet or potman, scholar or clown, tall or short, fair or dark;

we may each suit our own tastes with a Shakespeare to our liking.

Mr. Boaden continues (page 49): "It" (the Chandos) "was very probably

painted by Burbage," {100}the great tragedian, who is known to have

handled the pencil; it is said to have been the property of Joseph

Taylor, our poet's Hamlet, who, dying about 1653, at the advanced age of

seventy, left the picture by will to Davenant. At the death of Davenant

in 1663, it was bought by Betterton, the actor, and when he died Mr.

Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, gave Mrs. Barry, the actress, forty

guineas for it. From Mr. Keck it passed to Mr. Nichol, of Southgate,

whose daughter married the Marquis of Caernarvon.

Steevens, whom Boaden quotes (page 43), declined to be convinced by this

genealogy, and said, "Gossip rumor had given out that Davenant was more

than Shakespeare's godson. * What folly, therefore, to suppose that he

should possess a genuine portrait of the poet, when his lawful daughters

had not one! Mrs. Barry was an actress of acknowledged gallantry; as she

received forty guineas for the picture, something more animated might

have been included though not specified in the bargain," etc.,

etc. Steevens was fond of calling this picture "the Davenantico

Bet{101}tertono-Barryan-Keckian-Hicolsian-Chandosian portrait."

* There is a story that once, on the occasion of one of

Shakespeare's visits to Stratford, a villager, meeting young

Davenant in the street, asked him where he was going. "To

the inn, to see my godfather Shakespeare," said the lad.

"Beware how you take the name of God in vain, my lad," said

the other. The allusions to William's gallantries are

numerous. On the Stratford parish records there is entry of

the birth of one "Thomas Green, _alias_ Shakespeare." The

tale of the interrupted amour, at the theater, of "Richard

the Third" and "William the Conqueror," as is apt to be the

case, is about the most widely familiar of the Shakespearean

stories, and unnecessary to be repeated here. But Davenant

was proud to claim the dishonor of his mother, and

Shakespeare for his father, to his dying day.

"There are," says Boaden (page 53), "a few circumstances relating to the

picture of which some notice should be taken in this examination. There

is, it seems, a tradition that, no original picture of Shakespeare

existing, Sir Thomas Clarges caused a" (i. e., this) "portrait to be

painted from a young man who had the good fortune to resemble him"

(i. e., Shakespeare. Query: How did Sir Thomas know that the young

man resembled Shakespeare?). Mr. Malone traced this story to "The

Gentleman's Magazine" for August, 1759, and called on the writer for his

authority; but the writer, whoever he was, never gave it, any more than

Malone gave his authority for announcing its date to be 1607; but Malone

himself says that "most reports of this kind are an adumbration of

some fact, and indication of something in kind or degree similar or

analogous."

No. 6. This is a portrait, so called, by Zuccharo, which need not detain

us, since Mr. Boaden himself demonstrates very clearly that it was not

in any event painted from life, and, not improbably, did not originally

claim to have been intended for Shakespeare at all.

Mr. Boaden's No. 7 is the "Cornelius Jansen picture," and to this Mr.

Boaden pins his earnest faith. He says this "is now in the collection of

the Duke of Somerset;" but he appears to make no attempt to connect it

with William Shakespeare except as follows: Cornelius Jansen is said

to have painted the daughter of Southampton--ergo, he might have been

Southampton's family painter, and Southampton might have been desirous

to possess a portrait of his friend Shakespeare done by his own

painter--ergo, Jansen might {102}have had William Shakespeare for a

sitter! This is all the authority for the authenticity. But that it

is--judging from the engraving in Mr. Boaden's book--a magnificent

picture, we think there can be no question.

On the supposition that the Chandos is an authentic likeness of

Shakespeare, this Jansen certainly bears a strong Shakespearean

resemblance. In it the hair is curling, as in the Chandos, not straight,

as in the Droeshout and the Marshall engravings. The mustache, which

is cut tight to the face without being shaved, as in the Droeshout, and

strong and heavy, as in the bust, is lighter than the Chandos, while

the beard is fuller. There is nothing of the tremendous upper lip

represented in the bust.

Mr. Boaden (page 195) describes it as an eye-witness, he having had

access to it for the purposes of the book before us. He says: "It is

an early picture by Cornelius Jansen, tenderly and beautifully painted.

Time seems to have treated it with infinite kindness, for it is quite

pure, and exhibits its original surface.... The portrait is on panel,

and attention will be required to prevent a splitting of the oak, in two

places, if my eyes have not deceived me."

As for Earlom, who copied the picture, Boaden says: "He had lessened the

amplitude of the forehead; he had altered the form of the skull; he

had falsified the character of the mouth; and, though his engraving was

still beautiful, and the most agreeable exhibition of the poet, I found

it would be absolutely necessary to draw the head again, as if he had

never exercised his talent upon it" (page 195). Mr. Boaden specifies

further the picture laid to have once decorated the pair of bellows

belonging to Queen Elizabeth's {103}own private apartments, besides

still one other, both of which he rejects as spurious.

Thus, it has taken an army of novelists, painters, engravers, and

essayists to erect simple William Shakespeare of Stratford into the god

he ought to have been; and, on the best examination we are enabled to

make, and according to the Shakespeareans themselves, there is only

one picture of William Shakespeare extant which has the even assumed

advantage of having been pronounced a likeness by any one who ever saw

William Shakespeare himself in his (William Shakespeare's) lifetime.

Even if--as Mr. Steevens surmises--this eye witness never saw the

engraving, but only the original portrait from which it was copied, the

Droeshout still enjoys an authentication possessed by no other

so-called likeness, and, if rejected--as it infallibly is by all devout

Shakespeareans--there remains nothing of certitude, nothing even of

the certitude of conjecture, as to the features of the Stratford boy,

whoever he was, and whatever his works. One further effort was, however,

made, so lately as 1849, to clinch this "young lady's argument," by yet

one more genuine discovery. This time it was a "Becker 'death mask!'"

A plaster mask of an anonymous dead face is found in a rubbish-shop in

Mayence, in 1849. Regarded as a mask of William Shakespeare, it bears

a certain resemblance to the Stratford bust; and, regarded as a mask of

Count Bismarck (for example), it would be found to bear a very

strong resemblance to Count Bismarck. (We write from an inspection

of photographs only, never having seen the mask.) Having always been

annoyed that a creature so immortal {104}as they had created their

Shakespeare left no death-mask, the Shakespeareans at once adopt this

anonymous mask as taken from the face of the two-days defunct William

Shakespeare, who died in 1616. _Credat Judams!_ Either William

Shakespeare, at his death, was known to be an immortal bard or he

was not. If he was, how could the sole likeness moulded of departed

greatness be smuggled away from the land that was pious to claim him as

its most distinguished son and nobody miss it, or raise the hue and

cry? If he was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask from the

family who cared enough about the dead man's memory to go to the expense

of it? But, at any rate, in 1849 it falls into the hands of jealous

believers. They search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, and for the date

of their hero's death, and they find both. Had they made up their minds

to find a scrap of Shakespearean cuticle, we may be sure it would have

been there. Professor Owen, of the British Museum, declared that, if

the fact of the mask having originally come from England could be

established, there was "hardly any sum of money which the Museum would

not pay for the mask itself." But the missing testimony has not been

supplied, though doubtless it is incubating. For now and then we see a

newspaper paragraph to the effect that old paintings have turned up (in

pawn-shops invariably) which "resemble the death-mask," thus accustoming

us to the title, which, in time, we shall doubtless come to accept--as

we have come to accept Shakespeare himself--from mere force of habit.

The last of these discoveries is in Australia, farther off than even

Mayence, "said to resemble the {105}Becker death-mask." * The Stratford

portrait of Shakespeare claims no authority further than a resemblance

to the accepted ideal, and the terra-cotta bust in the possession of the

Garrick club was "found to order," and represents a man who, it

would seem, bore not even a resemblance to the accepted Shakespearean

features.

* See the "Academy," London, May 31, 1879, p. 475, We

understand that the mask is at present in possession of the

British Museum.

We should, perhaps, mention that Mr. Boaden surmises that the Droeshout

picture is a portrait of William Shakespeare the actor, in the character

of "Old Ivnowell," and that the Stratford bust was caused to be executed

by Dr. Hall, a son-in-law of its subject, and was the work of one Thomas

Stanton, who followed a cast taken after death. But, as Mr. Boaden

admits, this is his surmise only. However insuperable, therefore, in

the run of cases, the "young ladies argument" to prove from the pictures

that William Shakespeare was not author of the plays is quite weak

enough; but, as an argument to prove that he was such author, it is

weakness and impotence itself.

It now becomes necessary to ask the ordinary question which a court

would be obliged to ask concerning any exhibit produced before it,

and claimed as authentic or authoritative: namely, Where did the plays

called Shakespeare's come from? how did they get into print? who,

if anybody, delivered the "copy" to the printer, and vouched for its

authorship? It is manifest that we have no business here with any

question of criticism, or as to an authenticity between different

editions of the {106}same play; but the plays were written to be played;

how did they come to be published so that millions of readers, who never

entered a playhouse where they were performed, read and still read them?

In order to arrive at any supposition as to these considerations which

would be of value to our purpose in these papers, it will be necessary

to glance at the state of literary property in the days between 1585 and

1606. How, in those days, there was absolutely no legal protection for

an author's manuscript. Once it had strayed beyond the writer's hand it

was practically "publici juris"--any body's property. The first law of

copyright enacted in England was the act of Anne, of April 10, 1710,

more than one hundred years after the last date at which commentators

claim the production of a Shakespearean play. Even the first

authoritative pronunciation of a competent tribunal as to literary

property at common law (which preceded, of course, all literary property

definable by statute) was not made until 1769, fifty-nine years later.

But the Court of Star Chamber (of obscure origin, but known to have been

of powerful jurisdiction in the time of Henry VII.) was in the height

of its ancient omnipotence in those years. And of the various matters

of which it took cognizance, one of the earliest was the publishing,

printing, and even the keeping and reading of books. Under date of June

23,1585--the year that many commentators assign as that in which William

Shakespeare first turned up in London--this Star Chamber, which had

already issued many such, issued a decree that none should "print

any book, work, or copy, against the form or meaning of any restraint

contained in any statute of laws of this realm," except, {107}etc.,

etc. Twenty-nine years before--in 1556--Philip and Mary had erected

ninety-seven booksellers into a body called "The Stationers' Company,"

who were to monopolize the printing of books, if they so chose. They

had given them power and authority--and their second charter, in 1558,

confirmed them in it--to print such books as they obtained, either from

authors' manuscripts or translations, and to see very carefully that

nobody else printed them. Their power was absolute--they had their

"privilegium ad imprimendum solum," and in the pursuit of any body who

interfered with it they were empowered to "break locks, search, seize,"

and, in short, to suppress any printed matter they did not choose

to license, wherever they pleased. This the Worshipful Company of

Stationers did not fail to do; they pursued, and the Star Chamber

convicted. The disgraceful record of infamous and inhuman prosecutions

and punishments for reading, keeping, selling, or making books might

well detain us here, did our scope permit. * Whatever literature

accomplished in those days it accomplished by stealth, in defiance

of the implacable and omnipotent Star Chamber and its bloodhound, the

Stationers' Company, who ran in its victims.

It can not, we think, be doubted, by a student of those times, * that

whatever literary property existed {108}at common law then existed

in the shape of a license to print a work under permission of the

Stationers' Company; that no estate or property obtained in anything

except the types, ink, paper, in the license to use them all together to

make a book, and in the resulting volume; and that what we understand

by "copyright" to-day--namely, an author's or a proprietor's right to

demand a royalty or percentage, or to exercise other control over the

work when once printed and published--was altogether unconceived and

unclaimed.

* See "Omitted Chapters of the History of England," by

Andrew Basset, 1864

** "The person who first resolved on printing a book, and

entered his design on that register, became thereby the

legal proprietor of that work, and had the sole right of

printing it."--Carte, quoted in "Reasons for a Further

Amendment of the Act 54, George III., c. 15," London, 1817.

John Camden Hotten, "Seven Letters, Etc., on Literary

Property," London, Hotten, 1871, describes the modern

Stationers' Company as entrusted with "a vested interest

over somebody else's property, a prescriptive right to

interfere with the future work of other people's hands."

We are aware that this statement as to the condition of authors' rights

in the days of Elizabeth will not pass unchallenged; but a review of

the reported cases, as well as the extant records of the Stationers'

Company, will, we think, support our conclusion.

The first reported case of piracy was in 1735, when the Master of the

Rolls enjoined publication of "The whole Duty of Man" (Morgan's "Law of

Literature," vol. ii., p. 672).

Whatever compensation the author of a work was able to obtain, he

doubtless obtained beforehand, by sale of his manuscript, and dreamed

not of setting up a tangible property as against any one who had

obtained the Stationers' Company's license to print it. The Stationers'

Company, at the outset of their career, opened a record, in which it

entered the name of every book it licensed--the date, and the name of

the person authorized to print it. * It was not until 1644, twenty-eight

years after William Shakespeare's death (so far as we can ever know)

that John Milton, in his "Are-opagitica"--the greatest state paper in

the republic {109}of letters, the declaration of independence, and the

bill of rights of the liberty of literature--asserted * ** for the first

time "the right of every man" to "his several copy, which God forbid

should be gainsayd."

* For the text of the "Areopagitica" and copious notes as

to the history of the days which called it out, see edition

of J. VV. Hale's, Clarendon Press Series, Macmillan & Co.,

Oxford, 1874.

** In a pamphlet, "The Prayse of the Red Herring" cited by

Farmer, in his "Learning of Shakespeare," page 45.

Once in their hands, printers did what they pleased with a manuscript;

abridged it if they found it too long, and lengthened it if they found

it too short. Thomas Nashe says, that, in a play of his, called "The

Isle of Dogs," four acts, without his consent "or the least guesse of

his drifte or scope," were added by the printers. * The printers also

assigned the authorship of the work to any name they thought would help

sell the book, and dedicated it to whom they pleased. (Just as the first

printer of the sonnets we call Shakespeare's, dedicated them to "W. H.,"

which two initials have supplied the Shakespeareans with an excuse for

at least as many dozen octavo volumes of conjecture as to who "W.

H." was.) Sometimes the author thus despotically assigned to the work

rebelled. Dr. Heywood recognized two of his own compositions in a

collection of verses called "The Passionate Pilgrim," printed by one

Jaggard, in 1599, upon the title-page to which, this Jaggard had placed

the name of William Shakespeare as author. Hey-wood publicly claimed

his own, but William Shakespeare never denied or affirmed; his

name, however, was removed by the printer from the title-page of

the {110}third edition of the book, in 1612. * But, as a rule, the

Stationers' Company were too powerful, and the author too poor, to bring

the trick to exposure.

* Shakespeare, by R. G. White. Vol. 1., page lxxvii.

It was under these circumstances, and in times like these, that the

Shakespearean plays began to appear in print. Where did they come from?

They were written to be played. According to all accounts they were very

valuable to the theater which produced them. Every personal and selfish

interest of the proprietors, whether of the theater or of the manuscript

plays, dictated that they should be kept in secret--least of all that

they should be printed and made accessible to the public outside of the

theater, who otherwise, to see them, must become patrons of the house

where they were performed. That the author or authors of the plays could

have made them of more profit by selling them to the printers than to

the players is doubtful; that they personally entered them--or such

of them as were entered--on the books of the Stationers' Company, is

certainly not the fact; the only persons to whose interest it was to

print them were the printers themselves, and, in all probability, it

was the printers who did cause them to be printed. But where did these

printers procure the "copy" from which to set up the plays they printed?

The question will never be answered. The manuscripts might have been

procured by bribing individual actors, each of whom could have easily

furnished a copy of his individual part, and so the whole be made up for

the press. The fact that the plays never were printed without more or

less of the stage directions or "business" included, lends probability

to this theory: {111}but, as to whether a play made up in this fashion

would have resulted in any thing like what we possess to-day, we have

considered further on. Mr. Grant White admits, * as must everybody

who examines into the matter, that whatever the printers printed was

unauthorized and surreptitious. But, having admitted this much, Mr.

White is too ardent a Shakespearean not to make some effort to throw a

guise of authenticity around the text he has so lovingly followed. In

the article we have just quoted from in our foot-note, he says, "It is

not improbable that, in case of great and injurious misrepresentation of

the text of a play by" this surreptitious method of publication, "fair

copies were furnished by the theatrical people at the author's request

in self-defence." Perhaps these plays might have found their way into

print just as the comedy of "Play" found its way into print in 1868, **

or the play of "Mary Warner," *** at about the same date. At any rate

the editors of the first folio speak of the "stolne and surreptitious

copies" which had preceded them.

* "Such of his plays as were published during his lifetime

seem to have been given to the press entirely without his

agency; indeed, his interest was against their

publication.... It was the interest of all concerned,

whether as proprietors, or only as actors, or, like himself,

as both, that the theaters should have the entire benefit of

whatever favor they enjoyed with the public. But the

publishers, or stationers, as they were then called, eagerly

sought copies of them for publication, and obtained them

surreptitiously: sometimes, it would seem, by corrupting

persons connected with the theater, and sometimes, as the

text which they printed shows, by sending short-hand writers

to the performance."

** Palmer v. DeWitt, 47 New York R. 532.

*** Crowe v. Aiken. 2 Bissel R. 208.

{112}The first and second editions of "Hamlet," says Mr. White, "in 1603

and 1604, might have been the result of such maneuvers on the part

of the printers and the stenographers, or those who had access to the

manuscripts of the author. However this may be, twenty of Shakespeare's

plays were published by various stationers during his lifetime; they are

known as the quartos, from the form in which they are printed. They are

most of them full of errors.... Some of them seem to have been put in

type from stage copies, or, not improbably, from an aggregation of the

separate parts which were in the hands of the various actors." In other

words, Shakespeare's works were so imperfectly printed, against

his will, during his lifetime, that he himself authorized _other

imperfect_--Mr. White says they were imperfect--versions to be likewise

printed!

Mr. White might have looked nearer home to more purpose. Nobody knows,

nobody can know better than he, that what is called the "accepted" or

"received" text of Shakespeare (if there is, to speak minutely, any such

to-day) has been arrived at and made up piecemeal, and in the course of

time, by the commentators selecting from the folios, and other original

editions, such "readings" as the judgment of scholarship or the taste of

criticism has, on the whole, adopted; and any body who cares to take the

trouble to examine these original editions can see as much for himself.

To suppose that this text, as it stands to-day, is the text as its

author or authors wrote it, is, it seems to us, to suppose at least

ten thousand coincidences, every one of which is, to say the least,

improbable.

Before proceeding any further, let us recapitulate {113}the three

historical certainties to which we have arrived. First, that the state

of the law was favorable, (indeed, it would be impossible to conceive

of a state more favorable), to literary imposture or incognito. Second,

that nobody stands on record as claiming to know the authorship of these

plays, except the printers, who were able to sell them by using the name

of the manager of a popular theater; and, therefore, whose interest

it was to affix that name to them; and, Third, that there was never

a period in which it was so reasonably an author's interest to be

anonymous, or preserve his incognito, as these very years covered by the

lifetime of William Shakespeare; when, between the Stationers' Company

and the Star Chamber, it was a fortunate author, printer or reader, who

escaped hanging, disemboweling, and quartering, with only the loss of

ears or liberty.

Who wrote these plays? London was full of playwrights, contemporary with

William Shakespeare, many of them his friends and familiars; possibly,

all of them submitting their manuscripts to his editorial eye. We have

their works extant to-day.

Ben Jonson was a poet and a pedant; Greene, a university-bred man. And

we may go through the list and verify the records of them all, and

find in each some quality or training from which to reasonably expect

fruitage. But nobody has ever ventured to hazard so wild a theory as

that any of them wrote the anonymous immortal plays to which the best

of their own acknowledged masterpieces are mere rubbish. But a butcher's

boy, lately from Stratford, happens to be manager of a contemporary

theater. He, there{114}fore, must be the writer, and there can not be

the slightest doubt of it. The story that this boy ever stole deer

is rejected as resting on insufficient evidence. But no evidence is

required to prove his authorship of the topmost works in the history or

the literature of England. We have seen the monopoly that overruled the

press. We have seen that the Stationers' Company insisted upon recording

the name and ownership of every printed thing; and their record-books

are still extant, and bear no trace of any such claimant as William

Shakespeare. We have weighed the surmises of the Shakespeareans as to

these times, and seen their probable value; and have found it just as

impossible to connect the immortal fragments we call the Shakespearean

plays to-day with William Shakespeare, of Stratford, as we have already

found it to imagine him as having access to the material, the sealed

records, and the hidden muniments employed in their construction. Is

there any more evidence to be examined?

But were these plays, so printed _outside_, the same plays as those

acted _inside_ the theater? When we recall the style of audiences that

assembled in those days (M. Taine says the spectators caroused and sang

songs while the plays progressed; that they drank great draughts of

beer; and, if they drank too much, burned juniper instead of retiring;

anon, they would break upon the stage, toss in a blanket such performers

as pleased them not, tear up the properties, etc., etc.)--when we recall

this, it is not the easiest thing in the world to imagine this audience

so very highly delighted, for instance, with Wolsey's long soliloquy

(which the actor of to-day delivers in a dignified, low, and

unimpassioned monotone, without gesture), or {115}Hamlet's philosophical

monologues, or Isabella's pious strains. _Some_ plays were highly

popular inside those theaters. Were these the ones? Mr. Grant White has

all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, when he insists

that the theater most jealously guarded the manuscripts of the plays

that were making its fortune; and that it would have been suicide in it

to have circulated them outside, in print. But may not the echo of the

popularity of certain plays called "Hamlet," "King John," "Macbeth,"

etc., have induced others, outside the theater, to have circulated

plays, christened with these names (or with and under the popular name

of Shakespeare), for gain among the "unco guid" who would not, or the

impecunious who could not, enter the theater door? There is no need of

opening up so hopeless a speculation--a speculation pure and simple,

that can never, in the nature of things, be confronted by data either

way. But the fact does remain that these marvelous plays appeared in

print contemporaneously with the professional career of an actor named

William Shakespeare, and in the same town where he acted; that, if they

were his, it would have been to his interest to have kept them out of

print; and that their appearance in print he most certainly did not

authorize; and who can claim that one guess is not as good as another,

where history is silent, and tradition askew, and the truth buried

under the dust of centuries, overtopped yy the rubbish of conjecture? We

repeat, we have no warrant to intrude upon the domain of criticism. The

Shakespearean text, as we possess it to-day, is too priceless, whatever

its source, to be rudely touched. But, so far as is revealed by the

record of its appearance {116}among printed literature, there is no

evidence, internal or external, as to William Shakespeare's production

of it, and as to its origin we are as hopelessly in the dark as ever.

Dubious as is the chronicle of those days as to other matters, it is

singularly clear as to what was printed and what was not. For those were

the sort of days when men whose names were not written in the books of

the Stationers' Company printed at the peril of clipped ears and slit

noses, or worse; and those books are still extant. But, by the fatality

which seems to follow and pervade the name of William Shakespeare, this

record, like every other, national or local, yields nothing to the probe

but disappointment and silence as to the man of Stratford and the actor

of Blackfriars.

We will, presently, consider as to whether the same intellect composed

the "Hamlet" at one sitting, and at another, located Bohemia on

the sea-coast; and whether, on inspection, it might not be strongly

suggested that the two conceptions indicated geniuses of quite different

orders and not one and the same person; that one showed the hand-marks

of a poet and the other the hand-marks of the stage-manager, etc. If the

limits of this work permitted, we believe the same hand-marks might be

collected from the treatment of the text of every play. For instance,

the "Comedy of Errors" is supposed to occur during the days when Ephesus

was ruled by a duke, and follows--as we have already shown--the

unities of the Menæchmi of Plautus. But the ignoramus who doctored the

paraphrase for the Blackfriars stage found it convenient, to bring on

his stage effect, to introduce a Christian monastery into Ephesus at

about that time, {117}with a lady abbess who could refuse admission

to the duke himself, so inviolable and sacred was the sanctuary of

consecrated Christian walls! The monastery was as convenient to bringing

all the befogged and befooled and sadly mixed up personages of the

comedy face to face at the moment, as was the seashore and the bear,

in "A Winter's Tale," to account for the princess Perdita among the

shepherds, and so in they all go. These, and the like brummagem and

ruses de convenances, are simple enough to understand, and detract in

no degree whatever from the value of the plays: they can be retired or

retained at pleasure, and no harm done, if we only remember to whom and

to what they are assignable. But, if we forget that, and insist that the

very same pen which wrote the dialogue wrote the setting--wrote

every entrance, exit, and direction to the scene-shifters and

stage-carpenters, and, therefore, that every dot and comma, every call

and cue, every "gag" and localism, is as sacred as holy writ, no wonder

the scholars of the text are puzzled!

For example, we find that Mr. Wilkes, and Mr. Harper, in the "American

Catholic Review" for January, 1879--who otherwise believe the author

of the Shakespearean plays to have been a roman catholic--are almost

persuaded that he must have been a protestant, because he finds occasion

to make mention of an "evening mass." But let us assure Messrs.

Wilkes and Harper that they need neither abandon nor adopt a theory on

rencontre with so trivial a phenomenon. If William Shakespeare felt the

need of an "evening mass" at any time, we may be fairly sure, from our

experience of that worthy, that he put one in. He had bolted too many

camels {118}in his day to hesitate at such a gnat as that! The creator

of a convent in old Ephesus and of a sea-coast to Bohemia was not one to

stick at a trifling "evening mass!"

The gentlemen above mentioned, believe the author of the plays to have

been a romanist, not because the reverend Richard Davies, writing soon

after 1685, distinctly says "he died a Papist," (for any statement made

anywhere within a hundred years of William Shakespeare's lifetime is

"mere gossip," and it is only the biographies we write now-a-days that

are to be relied upon), but mainly because the liturgy and priesthood

of that church are invariably treated with respect in the plays, while

dissenting parsons are poked fun at without stint. Doubtless, in the

modern drama the same rule will be perceived to obtain. The imperious

liturgy and priesthood of the roman or of the stately anglican church

appear to be beyond the attempts of travesty; while the snivel and

preach of mere puritanism has always been too tempting an opportunity

for "Aminadab Sleek" and his type--to be resisted, and such a fact would

justify very little conclusion either way. Besides, there is no call to

insist that the stage, in epitomizing life into the compass of an hour,

shall preserve every detail; nothing less than a Chinese theater could

answer a demand like that. There is a dramatic license even broader than

the license accorded to poetry, and we would doubtless find the drama a

sad bore if there were not. William Shakespeare, during his managerial

career, appears to have understood this as well as any body; nor have

the liberties he took with facts and chronology befogged any body,

except the {119}daily lessening throng of investigators, who believe him

to be the original of the masterpieces he cut into play-hooks for his

stage.

But did William Shakespeare ever try his hand at verse-making? There is

considerable rumor to the effect that, during the leisure of his later

life, no less than in the lampooning efforts of his vagrom youth, he

did turn his pen to rhymes. And the future may yet bring forth a

Shakespearean honest enough to collect these verses--as they follow

here--and to entitle them--=

````THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS

`````OF

```WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

````EPITAPH ON ELIAS JAMES. *

```When God was pleased, the world unwilling yet,

```Elias James to nature paid his debt,

```And here reposeth; as he liv'd he dyde;

```The saying in him strongly verified--

```Such life, such death; then, the known truth to tell,

```He lived a godly lyfe, and dyde as well.=

```EPITAPH ON SIR THOMAS STANLEY. **

```Ask who lyes here, but do not weepe:

```He is not dead, he doth but sleepe;

```This stony register is for his bones,

```His fame is more perpetual than these stones,

```And his own goodness, with himself being gone,

```Shall live when earthly monument is none.=

* On the authority of "a MS. volume of poems by Herrick and

others, said to be in the handwriting of Charles I., in the

Bodleian Library.

** On the authority of Sir William Dugdale ("Visitation

Book"), who says, "The following verses were made by William

Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian." This appears to be

our author's longest and most ambitious work.

{120}

```Not monumental stone preserves our fame

```Nor skye aspyring pyramids our name;

```The memory of him for whom this stands

```Shall outlive marble and defacer's hands,

```"When all to Time's consumption shall be given;

```Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven.=

```EPITAPH OX TOM-A-COMBE, OTHERWISE THIXBEARD. *

```Thin in beard and thick in purse,

```Never man beloved worse;

```He went to the grave with many a curse,

```The Devil and he had both one nurse.=

````WHOM I HAVE DRUNKEN WITH. **

```Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,

```Haunted Hillsborough and hungry Grafton;

```With dancing Exhall, Papist Wixford,

```Beggarly Bloom and drunken Bidford.=

````DAVID AND GOLIATH. ***

```Goliath comes with sword and spear,

````And David with a sling;

```Although Goliath rage and swear

````Down David doth him bring.=

ON JOHN COMBE, A COVETOUS RICH MAN, MR. WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE WRIGHT THIS

ATT HIS REQUEST WHILE HEE WAS YETT LIVEING FOR HIS EPITAPHE. ****=

```Ten in the hundred lies here engraved;

```' Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved;

```If any one asks, "Who lies in this tomb?"

```"Hoi hoi" quoth the Devil, "'tis my John a Combe."----

* On the authority of Peck, "Memoirs of Milton," 4to, 1740

** On the authority of John Jordan. There is a strong

poetic license here--according to the well-known legend,

William had really only drunk with Bidford; the quantrain is

probably the work of Jordan and not Shakespeare.

*** On the authority of Stratford local tradition.

**** Aslimolean MS., cited by Halliwell. The pun is on the

Warwickshire pronunciation, "Ho! ho!" quoth the Devil, "'tis

my John has come!" See Aubrey's version:

"Ten in the hundred the Devil allows,

But Coombs will have twelve he swears and vows," etc.

{121}----BUT BEING DEAD, AND MAKING THE POOR HIS HEIRES, HEE AFTER

WRIGHTES THIS FOR HIS EPITAPHE. *

```Howere he lived judge not,

```John Combe shall never be forgott

```While poor hathe memmorye, for he did gather

```To make the poor his issue, be their father,

```As record of his tilth and seedes,

```Did crown him in his later needes.

`````_Finis. W. Shak_.=

LAMPOON ON SIR THOMAS LUCY. **

```Sir Thomas was too covetous,

````To covet so much deer,

```When horns enough upon his head

````Most plainly do appear.

```Had not his worship one deer left?

````What then? He had a wife.

```Took pains enough to find him horns

````Should last him all his life.

* Ashmolean MS. same as preceding. Both the above are given

by Mr. Grant White. Shakespeare, vol. I, p. ci.

** This is given to us by Mr. S. W. Fullom (History of

William Shakespeare, Player and Poet; with New Facts and

Traditions. London: Saunders, Oatley & Co., 1864, p. 133,)

with the following note: "The manner in which this fragment

was recovered is not different from that to which we owe so

many local ballads, known only to the common people. About

1690, Joshua Barnes, the Greek Professor at Cambridge, was

in an inn at Stratford, when he heard an old woman singing

these stanzas, and, discerning the association with

Shakespeare, offered her ten guineas to repeat the whole

ballad. This, however, she was unable to do, having

forgotten the remaining portion." Mr. Fullom says these

verses "reveal the Shakespearean touch," and alludes to a

scandal touching Lady Lucy's infidelity to her husband.

The following additional verses were furnished by John

Jordan, who altered the above stanza into the same meter,

and asserted the whole to be Shakespeare, as unearthed and

restored by himself:

He's a haughty, proud, insolent knight of the shire

At home nobody loves, yet there's many that fear;

If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it--

Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.

To the Sessions he went, and did lowdly complain

His park had been robbed and his deere they were slain;

This Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miseall it--

Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.

He sayd It was a ryot, his men had been beat,

His venison was stol'n and clandestinely eat:

So Lucy is lowsie as some volke miscall it--

Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.

So haughty was he when the fact was confessed

He sayd 'twas a wrong that could not be redressed;

So Luey is lowsie, as some volke miseall it--

Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.

Though luces a dozen he wear on his coat,

His name it shall lowsie for Luey be wrote;

For Luey is lowsie, as some volke miseall it--

We'll sing lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it.

If a juvenile frolic he can not forgive,

We'll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live;

And Luey the lowsie a libel may call it--

We'll sing lowsie Lucy whatever befall it.

Mr. Collier (Shakespeare, R. G. White, Ed. 1854, p. cciii), gives the

following four verses as by William Shakespeare:

ON THE KING.

Crown have their compass, length of days their date,

Triumphs their tomb, Felicity her fate;

Of naught but earth can earth make us partaker,

But knowledge makes a king most like his maker.

But gives no other authority for it than "a coeval manuscript."

The world has, very regrettingly, come to look with such suspicion

on Mr. Jollier's discoveries, that this relic, until confirmed, will

hardly be accepted as genuine.

{123}ANOTHER VERSION OF THE LAMPOON. *

```A Parliament member, a justice of peace,

```At home a poor scarecrow, at London an asse;

```If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,

```Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it.

```He thinks himself greate,

````Yet an asse is his state:

```We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.

```If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it,

```Sing, O lowsie Lucy, whate'er befalle it.=

Some lampoon was affixed by young William to Sir Thomas Lucy's park

gate, and enraged the baronet to such a degree that--according to

Capell--he directed a lawyer at Warwick to commence a prosecution

against the lad. The Lucy note, however, makes no mention of the lawyer,

only stating that young Shakespeare deemed it prudent to quit Stratford,

"at least for a time." The long ballad of six stanzas (which we give in

the foot-note) was written by John Jordan, a harmless rustic who lived

at Stratford in the days of Malone and Ireland, i. e. in the last years

of the eighteenth century, and went about claiming to have inherited

the mantle of Shakespeare. The "Piping Pebworth" verses, and perhaps the

whole story was written by him.

* According to Capell, Oldys, and Grant White. (See Mr.

White's Shakespeare, Vol. I. p. xxxviii.) Oldys leaves out

the "O" in the fourth and eighth lines. Mr. Fullom (cited

above) declares this version to be spurious. (See note 3, p.

121.)

At any rate, he seems to have succeeded in obtaining immortality by

mixing his own efforts so successfully with the Shakespearean

{124}remains as to make them all one in the local traditions. The above,

with the=

````INSCRIPTION FOR HIS OWN TOMB.

```Good frend, for Jesvs' sake forbeare,

````To digg ye dust encloased here.

```Blesse be ye man yt spares thes stones,

````And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.=

(which was originally placed on the stone over William Shakespeare's

vault in the chancel of Trinity Church, Stratford--was recut in the new

stone which was found necessary fifty years ago, and now appears

with the verbal contractions as given above) are all the literary

compositions which, according to the local traditions of Stratford, his

home, where he was born, lived, and died--where alone, for a century or

more after his death his reputation was cherished--William Shakespeare

ever produced. There is nothing: in them inconsistent with the record of

the man himself; and, so far as we know, have never been rejected by

the Shakespeareans themselves. It certainly would not be honest, in our

present appeal to history, to insert in this edition--we may fairly call

it "The Stratford Edition"--of Master Shakespeare's poetry, all that

he edited for the stage; or, worse yet, borrowed and dressed up,

and--according to Robert Greene--passed for his own.

We are very far from desiring even to do justice to poor Robert Greene,

if in so doing we shall detract a hair's weight from the merits of

William Shakespeare. But it is not impossible to say a good word even

for Greene. Although his language is not within such bounds of propriety

as the Shakespeareans could wish, {125}modern research has amply proved

that he told the truth, and that William Shakespeare borrowed, or rather

seized upon and adopted, without compensation, the work by which Greene

earned his bread. For Greene's language, Chettle, Greene's editor, makes

haste, sometime afterward, when William Shakespeare had been taken up by

"divers of worship" to apologize, as far as an editor can apologize for

an author. We shall see, further on, how William Shakespeare was shrewd

enough to make himself useful to these "divers of worship," and in those

days, and for a century after, no slavery was so abject as the slavery

of letters to patronage. So, of course, Chettle hastened to make his

peace with them too. But the truth remains, nevertheless, that poor

Greene told only the truth. It is fashionable with the Shakespeareans to

sneer at Greene, because he was "jealous" of Shakespeare. He appears to

have had reason to be jealous! But no name is bad enough to bestow on

him. Mr. Grant White says: "Robert Greene, writing from the fitting

deathbed of a groveling debauchee, warns three of his literary

companions to shun intercourse with," etc., "certain actors, Shakespeare

among the rest." If Robert Greene died from over-debauch, it is no more

than Shakespeare himself died of, according to the entry in the diary of

the Rev. John Ward. "It is not impossible," says Mr. White, "even that

this piece of gossiping tradition is true." Mr. White is right to call

it "gossiping tradition," for it is piece and parcel of all the

other mention of William Shakespeare of Stratford. If it were not for

"gossiping tradition," we had never heard, and Mr. White had never

written, of that personage. But {126}Mr. White makes no reservation of

"gossiping tradition" in the case of Robert Greene. Greene dies "on the

fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee," because he was jealous of

William Shakespeare, and was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself

as to call that "jack of all trades" an "upstart crowe, beautified with

our feathers," etc. It seems that poor Robert Greene's dying words--if

they were his dying words--were his ante-mortem legacy of warning and

prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. But they have not been

heeded. His "upstart crowe" has not only kept all his borrowed feathers,

but is arrayed each passing day with somebody's richer and brighter

plumage. If Robert Greene could speak from the dust, he doubtless could

tell us--as Jonson and the rest might have told us in their lifetimes,

if they only would--whose all this plumage really was and is. But

all are dust and ashes together now--dust and ashes three centuries

old--and, as Miss Bacon said, "Who loses any thing that does not find"

the secret of that dust? However, not a Shakespearean stops to waste a

sigh over the memory of poor Robert Greene, * who saw his bread snatched

from his mouth by a scissorer of other men's brains, and who was too

human to see

* "Robert Greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetry

or rhetoric than his fellows (Nash, Peele, and William

Shakespeare), was, from his miscellaneous and discursive

reading, a very useful man in his coterie." Dr. Latham

speaks of his book as "A Groats Worth of Rest, purchased

with a Million of Repentance," which certainly makes better

sense than "a groat's worth of wit," etc., as usually

written. Which is right? Greene died in 1592.

{127}and hold his peace; but over the drunken grave of the Stratford

pretender--who was vanquished in his cups at Bidford and Pebworth, and

lay all night under the thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the

last--they weep as for one cut off untimely, as Dame Quickly over the

lazared and lecherous clay of Sir John Falstaff: "Nay, sure, he's in

Arthur's bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur's bosom.'A made a finer

end, and went away an it had been any Christom child." But let us not

assume the appearance of unkindness to William Shakespeare. He lived a

merry life; and, so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his own

wife, poor Robert Greene, and perhaps the delinquent for malt delivered.

He loved his own, but that is no wrong. And, we must not forget that,

so far as the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save by his

silence, the works a too flattering posterity has assigned him.

The appeal to history not only declines to set aside, but affirms, with

costs, the verdict rendered upon the evidence. And the sum is briefly

this: If William Shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle; every

thing else being equal, the presumption is against a miracle; but,

here, every thing else is not equal, for all the facts of history

are reconcilable with history and irreconcilable with the miracle; if

history is history, then miracle there was none--in other words, if

there were one miracle, then there must have been two. If there had

lived no such man as William Shakespeare, that "William Shakespeare"

would be as good a name as any other to designate the authorship of the

Shakespearean page, who will consider it worth while to {128}question?

But to credit the historical man with the living page demands, in our

estimation, either a willful credulity, or an innocence that is almost

physical blindness!

{129}