[Illustration: 9135]
UT what is the summing up on the other side? Merely the following copy
of verses:
TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED, THE AUTHOR, MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND
WHAT HE HATH LEFT US.
```To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name
```Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
```While I confess thy writings to be such
```As neither man nor muse can praise too much.
```'Tis true and all men's suffrage. But these ways
```Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
```For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
```Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
```Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
```The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
```Or crafty malice might pretend this praise
```And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
```These are as some infamous bawd or whore
```Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
```But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
```Above the ill fortune of them, or the need,
```I, therefore, will begin: Soul of the age,
```The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage!
```My Shakespeare rise! I will not lodge thee by
```Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
```A little further to make thee a room.
```Thou art a monument without a tomb,
```And art alive still while thy book doth live
```And we have wits to read and praise to give.
```That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses.
```I mean with great but disproportioned muses.= {130}
```For if I thought my judgment were of years,
```I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
```And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
```Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line;
```And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
```From thence to honor thee I would not seek
```For names: but call forth thundering Æschylus,
```Euripides and Sophocles to us.
```Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
```To life again to hear thy buskin tread
```And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on
```Leave thee alone for the comparison
```Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
```Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
```Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
```To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
```He was not of an age, but for all time!
```And all the muses still were in their prime
```When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
```Our ears; or like a Mercury to charm.
```Nature herself was proud of his designs,
```And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines!
```Which were so richly spun and woven so fit
```As, since she will vouchsafe no other wit,
```The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
```Neat Terence, witty Plautus, how not please,
```But antiquated and deserted lie
```As they were not of nature's family.
```Yet must I not give nature all; thy Art,
```My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part;
```For though the poets matter Nature be,
```His art doth give the fashion; and that he
```Who casts to write a living line must sweat
```(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat
```Upon the muse's anvil; turn the same
```And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,
```Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
```For a good poet's made, as well as born;
```And such wert thou! Look how the father's face {131}
```Lives in his issue, even so the race
```Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
```In his well-turned and true-filled lines:
```In each of which he seems to shake a lance
```As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.
```Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were
```To see thee in our waters yet appear,
```And make t-hose flights upon the banks of Thames
```That did so take Eliza and our James!
```Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
```Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
```Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like
`````night
```And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.=
This is all there is of Jonson's labored verses, of which very few
Shakespeareans care to quote more than isolated passages of a line
or two each. But taking them either as a whole (with their involved
metaphors and most execrable and inapposite pun about Shakespeare's
lines "shaking a lance at Ignorance")--or in spots (whichever spots the
Shakespeareans prefer), what sort of historical proof does this poem
afford? What sort of testimony is this as to a fact? Is it the sort we
accept in our own personal affairs--in our business--in our courts of
justice--in matters in which we have any thing at stake, or any living
interest? Will any insurance company pay its risk on the ship Dolphin,
on being furnished, by the Dolphin's owners, with a thrilling poem by
Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Tup-per, describing the dreadful shipwreck of the
Dolphin, the thunderous tempest in which she went down--the sky-capping
waves, rent sails, creaking cordage, etc., etc.? Will any jury of twelve
men hang a thirteenth man for murder on production, by the State, of
a harrowing copy of verses, dwelling on midnight assassina{132}tion,
stealthy stabs, shrieking victims, inconsolable widows, orphans, and the
like? And shall we require less or more proof, in proportion as the fact
to be proved is nearer or more remote?
However, since the Shakespeareans rest their case on these verses, (for
any one who cares to examine for himself will find the residue of the
so-called "contemporary testimony," which is usually in rhyme, to be
rather criticism--that is to say _eulogy_, for we find very little
of any other sort of literary criticism in those days--as to the
compositions than chronicle as to the man) we can well afford to waive
these questions, and cross-examine Ben Jonson and his verses without
pressing any objection to their competency.
For criticism of the works is what Meres's * opinion that "the sweete
wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare;
witness his "Venus and Adonis," his "Lucrece," his sugared sonnets among
his private friends...." As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best
for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the
English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage....
* "Palladis Tamia."
As Epius Stoio said that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue,
if they would speake Latin, so I say that the Muses would speake with
Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speake English, etc.,
etc., etc., amount to; and so Weever's=
```"Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue,
```I swore Apollo got them, and none other"--=
probably means, if it means any thing, precisely what it says, namely,
that when he read the plays, he swore {133}that they were certainly
Apollo's. And if the comments of Henry Chettle, Sir John Davies, Leonard
Digges, Hugh Holland, and the rest, do not read to the same effect,
they have a meaning beyond what they express. But panegyric is not
history--at least it can not override history.
Between the affirmative theory of the Stratfordian authorship, then,
and the demonstration of its utter impossibility and absurdity, there
actually remains but the single barrier of the Jonsonian testimony,
contained in the copy of verses entitled "To the Memory of my Beloved,
the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us," written
by Mr. Ben Jon-son, and prefixed to the famous folio of 1623. If this
testimony should ever be ruled out as incompetent, there would actually
remain nothing except to lay the Shakespearean hoax away, as gently
as might be, alongside its fellows in the populous limbo of exploded
fallacies.
However, let it not be ruled out merely on the ground that it is
in rhyme. We have no less an authority than Littleton--"auetoritas
philosopho-rum, medieorum et poetarum sunt in causis allegan-dæ
et tenendæ" *--to the effect that the testimony, even of poets, is
sometimes to be received. It is to be ruled out rather by a process
akin to impeachment of the witness--by its appearing that the witness,
elsewhere in the same controversy, testifies to a state of facts exactly
opposite. For the truth is that, whatever Ben Jonson felt moved to
say about his "pal" William Shakespeare, whenever, "as a friend, he
{134}dropped into poetry," he was considerably more careful when he sat
himself down to write "cold prose."
* "Co. Lit.," 264 A.
Just as "Bully Bottom," fearing lest a lion should "fright the ladies,"
and "hang every mother's son" of his troupe, devised a prologue to
explain that the lion was no lion, but only Snug the Joiner, "a man as
other men are," so Master Ben Jonson, however tropical and effusive
as to his contemporary in his prosody, in his prologue in _prose_ was
scrupulous to leave only the truth behind him. Mountains--Ossian piled
on Pelion--of hearsay and lapse of time; oceans of mere opinion and
"gush" would, of course, amount to precisely nothing at all when ranged
alongside of the testimony of one single, competent, contemporary
eye-witness. No wonder the Shakespeareans are eager to subpoena Ben
Jonson's verses. But, all the same, they are marvelously careful _not_
to subpoena his prose.
And yet this prose is extant, and by no means inaccessible. Malien
Jonson died, in 1637, he left behind him certain memoranda which were
published in 1640, and are well-known as "Ben Jonson's Discoveries."
One of these memoranda--for the work is in the disjointed form of a
common-place book of occasional entries--is devoted to the eminent
men of letters in the era spanned by its author's own acquaintance or
familiarity. It runs as follows:
_Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equaled
to their empire. Imperium par imperio. We have had many, and in their
several ages (to take in the former sæculum), Sir Thomas More, the elder
Wiat, Henry, Earl of Surry, Chal-oner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were,
for their times, admirable; and the more because they began eloquence
with us. Sir Nich{135}olas Bacon was singular and almost alone in the
beginning of Elizabeth's time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in
different matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and in whom
all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. The Earl of Essex,
noble and high, and Sir Walter Raleigh not to be contemned, either for
judgment or style. Sir Henry Saville, grave and truly lettered. Sir
Edwin Sandys, excellent in both. Lord Egerton, a grave and great orator,
and best when he was provoked. But his learned and able, but unfortunate
successor, is he that hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in
our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece
or haughty Rome. * In short, within this view, and about this time, were
all the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now things
daily fall; wits grow downward and eloquence grows backward. So that he
may be so named and stand as the mark and -------- of our language_. **
* Judge Holmes ("Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition,
p. 650) italicises these words to point the allusion to
Bacon, and to notice that the passage in "The Discoveries,"
immediately preceding the above, is a direct allusion to
Bacon, while the phrase "insolent Greece and haughty
Rome" occurs in line thirty-nine of the verses eulogistic of
William Shakespeare.
** "Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter: as
they have flowed out of his Daily Readings, or had their
Reflux to his Peculiar Notion of the Time." By Ben Jonson.
"Works," by Peter Whalley, vol. vii., p. 99.
Only fourteen years before, this Ben Jonson had published the verses
which _made_ William Shakespeare. Only fourteen years before he had
asserted--what the world has taken his word for, and never questioned
from that day to this--that his "best beloved" William Shakespeare had
been the "soul of the age"--"not for an age, but for all time"--and his
works "such as neither man nor muse can praise too much!" We have no
means of knowing the precise date at which Ben Jonson's grief for his
dead friend cooled, {136}and his feelings experienced a change. But
he leaves behind him, at his death, this unembellished memoranda, this
catalogue "of all the wits" living in his day, who, in his opinion,
"could honour a language or help study," and in this catalogue he
inserts no such name as William Shakespeare; William Shakespeare,
the name--not only of the "soul" and epitome of all that--only, about
fourteen years ago--he had deemed worth mentioning among men "born about
this time;" but of his late most intimate and bosom friend! Had
the "Discoveries" preserved an absolute silence concerning William
Shakespeare, the passage we have quoted might, perhaps, have been
considered a studied and deliberate slur on his dead friend's memory, on
the part of Jonson, made for reasons best known to Jon-son himself.
But they are not silent. They devote a whole paragraph to William
Shakespeare--but in the proper place; that is to say, not among "the
wits who could honour a language or help study," but among the author's
personal acquaintance. This is all there is of this paragraph as to the
real William Shakespeare:
_I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to
Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatever he penned) he never blotted
out a line. My answer hath been, "would he had blotted out a thousand!"
which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this
but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their
friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine own candour (for
I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as much
as any). He was (indeed) honest and of an open and free nature; had an
excellent phantasie, brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he
flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be
stopped. Sufflaminan{137}dus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit
was in his own power, would that the rule of it had been so too! Many
times he fell into those things could not escape laughter; as when he
said in the person of Cæsar--one speaking to him--"Cæsar, thou dost me
wrong;" he replied, "Cæsar never did wrong, but with just cause," and
such like; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his
virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than pardoned._ *
That is every word which a man who "loved him" could say of William
Shakespeare!--that he was a skilled and careful penman, "never blotting
out a line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to be checked;
that, in playing the part of Cæsar on the stage, somebody interpolated
the speech, "Cæsar, thou dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response;
** and that he (Jonson) wished he (Shakespeare) had blotted out a
thousand of his lines. Blot out a thousand Shakespearean lines!--a
thousand of the priceless lines of the peerless book we call
"Shakespeare!"
* "Works," cited ante, vol. vii., p. 91.
** Possibly this may have occurred in playing the very
version of the "Cæsar" we now possess, though there are, of
course, no such lines to be found there.
Fancy the storm which would follow such a vandal proposition to-day! Ben
Jonson does not specify _which_ thousand he would have expurgated, but
would be satisfied with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of
the writings of his "soul of the age," the man "not of an age, but for
all time!" And yet it is on the uncorroborated word of this man Jonson
that we build monuments to the Stratford lad, and make pilgrimages to
his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel about the spelling of
his name! If there is not a {138}strong smack of patronage in this
prose allusion to Shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect
its flavor. Very possibly the fact was that, so far from having been an
admirer of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson saw through his pretensions,
and only through policy sang his praises against the stomach of his
sense. For Ben Jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of the day (we
have history as authority for that), was poor and a borrower, over
head and ears in debt to Shakespeare; he was a stock actor on the rich
managers boards, and could not take the bread out of his own mouth. But
the poor scholar, and still poorer actor, could yet indulge himself, and
take his covert fling at the rich charlatan:=
```"Though need make many poets, and some such
```As art and nature have not bettered much,
```Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage
```As he dare serve the ill customs of the age:
```Or purchase your delight at such a rate
```As for it, he himself must justly hate.
```To make a child now swaddled, to proceed
```Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed--
```Past threescore years, or with three rusty swords
```And help of some few foot and half foot words--
```Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
```And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars!
```He [_that is, Ben himself_] rather prays you will be pleased to see
```One such to-day, as other plays should be;
`````[_that is, one he wrote himself _]
```Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,
```Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please."=
Ben says this himself--in the prologue to his "Every Man in his Humour."
Again, in the "Induction" to his "Bartholomew {139}Fair," he has this
fling at "The Tempest:"
"If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it,"
he says, "nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in
his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like
drolleries." *
* "The Tempest" of that day in William Shakespeare's hands,
then, was a "drollery." See some curious evidence going to
prove that, while the titles of the plays always remain the
same, the plays themselves may have been different at
different times. 'post VI, "The New Theory." Dr. Carl Elze
(Essays on Shakespeare. London. Macmillans. 1874), thinks
that Jonson meant a hit at Shakespeare when he says, in
Volpone, "all our English authors will steal."
But that Jonson never himself believed, or expressed himself as
believing, that William Shakespeare was a poet (except in this rhymed
panegyric which Heminges and Condell prefixed to the first folio), there
is still further and perhaps stronger proof. Three years after William
Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson paid a visit to William Drummond of
Hawthornden, and spent with him the greater part of the month of April,
1019 (or, as some fix it, the month of January, in that year). Drummond
was a poet himself, and, it is said, his poetical reputation was what
had attracted Jonson to make the visit. At any rate, he did visit him,
and Drummond kept notes of Jonson's conversation. These notes are in
the form of entries or items, grouped under Drummond's own headings or
titles, such as: "his acquaintance and behavior with poets living with
him."
Daniel was at jealousies with him.
Drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of him.
That Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses.
{140}That Sir John Roe loved him; and when they, too, were ushered by my
Lord Sullblk from a mask, Roe wrott a moral Epistle to him which
began: _That next to Playes, the Court and the State were the best. God
threateneth Kings, Kings Lords, (as) Lords do us._
He beat Marston and took his pistol from him.
Sir W. Alexander was not half kinde unto him, and neglected him, because
a friend to Drayton.
That Sir R. Aiton loved him dearly.
Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the satyres of
Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall.
That Markam (who added his Arcadia) was not of the number of the
Faithfull, (i. e), Poets, and but a base fellow.
That such were Day and Middleton.
That Chapman and Fletcher were loved by him.
Overbury was first his friend, then turn'd his mortall enimie. etc.,
etc.
There are, in all, between two and three hundred entries of a similar
character. Now, in one of these entries, Jonson is represented as saying
that he "esteemeth Done the first poet in the world in some things;"
but there is nothing put in Jonson's month, in the whole category, about
the "Star of Poets," save that, in another place, is the following item:
"That Shakspeer wanted arte," and, further on, the following:
"Shakespeare wrote a play, brought in a number of men saying they had
suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, when there is no see neer by some 100
miles." *
* Works of Ben Jonson. By William Gifford. Edited by Lt.
Col. Francis Cunningham. Vol. III., p. 470. London. I. C.
Hotten, 74 & 75 Picadilly.
These notes were first printed by Mr. David Laing, who discovered them
among the manuscripts of Sir {141}Robert Sibbald, a well-known antiquary
and physician of Edinburgh. They were preserved in the form of a copy
in Sibbald's handwriting. Sibbald was a friend of the Bishop Sage, who
edited Drummond's works in 1711. These notes were believed by Sir Walter
Scott to be genuine, and, by his advice, were printed first in the
"Archaeological Scotica," in or about 1723. At any rate, they were never
printed by Sibbald himself, nor used by him in any way which suggested
a motive for forgery, and, internally, they agree with Ben Jonson's
own "Discoveries," especially as to his (Jonson's) estimate of William
Shakespeare.
And yet Ben Johnson was the beneficiary and friend of William
Shakespeare--the "immortal Shakespeare"--whom Ben "honours _this side_
idolatry," but whom we are not fearful of passing the bounds of idolatry
in worshiping to-day. Ben Johnson was an overworked rhymester, and made
his rhymes do double and treble duty. The first couplet of the prologue
just cited=
```" Though need make many poets, and some such
```As art and nature have not bettered much"--=
needs only a little hammering over to become the=
```"While I confess thy writings to be such
```As neither man nor muse can praise too much"--=
of the mortuary verses which--as we say--made Shakespeare Shakespeare.
When the rich manager's alleged works were to be collected, the poor
scholar, who had borrowed money of him in his lifetime, was called
upon for a tribute. But the poor scholar for{142}bore to draw on the
storehouse of his wits, though willing: to hammer over some of his old
verses for the occasion. He once assured posterity, in rhyme, that they
must not "give nature all," but remember his gentle Shakespeare's art,
how he would "sweat and strike the second heat upon the muse's anvil"
(in other words, bring by long toil the firstlings of his genius to
artificial perfection). And yet he deliberately tells Drummond,
long years after, and puts it down in black and white over his own.
signature, that this same Shakespeare "wanted art," and that the great
trouble with him was that he talked too much. Is it possible that the
ideal Shakespeare, the mighty miracle-working demigod, is only the
accidental creation of a man who was poking fun at a shadow? Let us not
proceed to such a violent surmise, but return to a serious consideration
of Mr. Ben Jonson's unimpassioned prose.
If the paragraph from the "Discoveries" last above quoted--which
estimates William Shakespeare precisely as history estimates him,
namely, as a clever fellow, and a player in one of the earliest theaters
in London--is not to be regarded as a confession that Ben Jonson's
verses were written (or rewritten) more out of generosity to his
late friend's memory--rather in the exuberance of a poetic license of
apotheosis--than with a literal adherence to truth;* then it must be
conceded that the result is such a facing both ways as {143}hangs any
Jonsonian testimony in perfect equilibrium as to the Shakespearean
controversy, and entitles Ben Jonson himself, as a witness for anybody
or to any thing, to simply step down and out.
* A confession, say the Baconians, that Jonson, as long as
Bacon lived, was eager to serve him by shouldering on his
incognito--in poetry--while he was under no compunction to
do so in his own posthumous remains. See post V, The
Baconian Theory.
For, admitting that his poetry is just as good as his prose--and
probably the Shakespeareans would care to assert no more than that--it
is a legal maxim that a witness who swears for both sides swears for
neither; and a rule of common law no less than of common sense that his
evidence must be ruled out, since no jury can be called upon to believe
and disbelieve one and the same witness at the same time. And so we
are relieved from accounting for the "Jonson testimony," as did Lord
Palmerston, by saying: "O, those fellows always hang together; or, its
just possible Jonson may have been deceived like the rest;" * or by
asking ourselves if a score of rhymes by Ben Johnson, a fellow craftsman
(not sworn to, of course, and not nearly as tropical or ecstatic as
they might have been, and yet been quite justifiable under the rule nil
nisi)--are to outweigh all historic certainty? If Jonson had written
a life, or memoir, or "recollections," or "table-talk," of William
Shakespeare, it might have been different. But he only gives us a
few cheap lines of poetical eulogy; and fact is one thing, and
poetry--unless there is an exception in this instance--is conceded to be
altogether another.
* Frazer's Magazine, November, 1865, p. 666.
But since numberless good people are suspicious of rules of law as
applied to evidence, regarding them as over-nice, finical, and as framed
rather to keep out truth than to let it in, let-us waive the legal
maxim, {144}and admit the Jonsonian testimony to be one single,
consistent block of contemporary evidence. But, no sooner do we do
this, than we find ourselves straightway floundering in a slough
of absurdities for greater, it seems to us, than any we have yet
encountered. To illustrate: It is necessary to the Shakespearean theory
that in the days of Elizabeth and James there should have been not
only a _man_, but a genius, a wit, and a poet, of the name of William
Shakespeare; and that all these--man, genius, wit, and poet--should have
been one and the same individual. Taking all the Jonsonian testimony,
prose and poetry, together, such an individual there was, and his name
was William Shakespeare, as required. But--still following Jonson's
authority--at the same period and in the same town of London there was a
certain gentleman named Bacon, who was "learned and able," and who had,
moreover, "filled up all numbers--and" in the same days "performed that
which may be compared either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome." We
have, then, not only a "wit and poet" named Shakespeare, but a "wit and
poet" named Bacon; and, since Jonson is nowhere too modest to admit that
he himself was a "wit and poet," we have, therefore, actually not one
but three of a kind, at each other's elbows in London, in the golden
age of English literature. We have already seen that, of this
trio, two--Bacon and Shakespeare, if we are to believe the
Shakespeareans--were personally unknown to each other. It is worth our
while to pause right here, and see what this statement involves.
They are all three--Bacon, Jonson, and Shakespeare--dwelling in the same
town at the same mo{145}ment; are, all three, writers and wits, earning
their living by their pens. Ben Jonson is the mutual friend. He is of
service to both--he translates Bacon's English into Latin for him, * and
writes plays for William Shakespeare's stage, and, as we have seen, he
ultimately becomes the Boswell of both, and runs from one to the other
in rapture.
* Jonson assisted Dr. Hackett, afterward Bishop of
Litchfield and Coventry, in translating the essays of Lord
Bacon into Latin. (Whalley, "Life of Ben Jonson," Vol. I. of
works, cited ante.) Jonson was at this time "on terms of
intimacy with Lord Bacon."--(W. H. Smith, "Bacon and
Shakespeare," p. 29.)
His admiration for Bacon, on the one hand (according to his prose),
amounts to a passion; his admiration for Shakespeare, on the other hand
(according to his poetry), amounts to a passion, he declares (in prose)
that Bacon "hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our
tongue, which may be compared and preferred either to _insolent Greece
or haughty Rome_." He declares (in poetry) of Shakespeare that he may be
left alone--=
````"....for comparison
```Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Borne
```Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come."=
And yet he never, while going from one to the other, mentions
Shakespeare to Bacon or Bacon to Shakespeare; never "introduces" them or
brings them together; never gives his soul's idol Bacon any "order" to
his soul's idol Shakespeare's theater, that this absolutely inimitable
Bacon (who has surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome) may witness
the masterpieces of this absolutely inimitable Shakespeare{146}(who has
likewise surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome); this Boswell of
a Jonson, go-between of two men of repute and public character, travels
from one to the other, sings the praises of each to the world outside
(using the same figures of speech for each), and, in the presence of
each, preserves so impenetrable a silence as to the other, that of the
two public characters themselves each is absolutely ignorant of the
other's existence! And yet they ought to have been close friends, for
they borrowed each other's verses, and loaned each other paragraphs to
any extent. Persons there have been who asserted, as we shall see,
on merely the internal evidence of their writings, that Bacon and
"Shakespeare" were one and the same man, and that what appeared to be
"parallelisms" and coincidences in Bacon and "Shakespeare" were thus to
be accounted for. But, admitting their separate identity, it is certain
either that the natural philosopher borrowed his exact facts from the
comedies of the playwright, or that the playwright borrowed the speeches
for his comedies from the natural philosopher; either of which looks
very much like, at least, a speaking acquaintance. For, as we shall see
further on, * some of these "parallelisms" are not coincidences, but
something very like _identities_.
* Post, part V, The Baconian Theory.
It will not lighten this new difficulty to rule out the prose and leave
in the poetry, for we can not annihilate Francis Bacon nor yet William
Shakespeare from their places in history. If, however, the Jonsonian
poetry _were_ wiped out, the Jonsonian prose would receive, at least, a
negative corroboration, as follows: {147}At the same time that Bacon and
Shakespeare are living, unknown to each other respectively, in London,
there also dwell there three other gentlemen--Sir Walter Raleigh,
Edmund Spenser, and Sir Tobie Matthew. We, therefore, actually have
four well-known gentlemen of the day in London, gentlemen of elegant
tastes--poets, men about town, critics--who, if the town were being
convulsed by the production at a theater of by far the most brilliant
miracles of genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in
the nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as to the
circumstance. We do not add to this list Southampton, Essex, Rutland,
Montgomery, and the rest, because these latter have left no memorandum
or chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript behind them. But
the first four have left just precisely such memoranda of their times as
are of assistance to us here. Bacon, in his "Apothegms," Spenser in
his poems, * and Raleigh and Matthew in their re{148}mains--especially
Matthew--who, like Bacon, kept a diary, who wrote letters and
postscripts, and was as fond of playing at Boswell to his favorites as
Jonson himself--appear to have stumbled on no trace of such a character
as "Shakespeare" in all their sauntering about London.
* Spenser's well-known lines in "Colin Clout's come Home
again," written in 1591, are:
And there, though last not least, is Ætion,
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth--life himself--heroically sound."
"Æton" is generally assumed by commentators to stand in the
verse for "Shakespeare." But it is difficult to imagine how
this can possibly be more than mere speculation, since
Spenser certainly left no annotation explanatory of the
passage, and it does not identify itself as a reference to
Shakespeare. In "The Tears of the Muses," line 205, there is
an allusion which on a first glance appears so pat, that the
Bard of Avon has long been called "our pleasant Willy" on
the strength of it. It runs:
"And ho, the man whom Nature's self had made, To mock
herself and truth to imitate
With kindly counter under mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late:
With whom all joy and jolly merriment Is also deaded, and in
dolour dreut."
But, since Spenser died some seventeen years before
Shakespeare, and if--as must be supposed from their
flippancy--these lines point to the enforced or voluntary
retirement or silence of some writer, rather than to his
death--they appear more nearly to refer to Sidney than to
Shakespeare. And this now appears to be conceded. (See
Morley's "English Men of Letters: Spenser," by Dean Church.
American edition, Harpers, New York, 1879, p. 106.) Besides,
"The Tears of the Muses" was written in 1580, when
Shakespeare was a lad of sixteen, holding horses at the
theater door. "Will," or "WiB," appears to have been the
ordinary nickname of a poet in those days.--R. Gr. White's
"Shakespeare," vol. i., p. 57, note.
Especially on one occasion does Sir Tobie devote himself to a
subject-matter wherein, if there had been any "Shakespeare" within his
ken, he could very properly--and would, we think, very naturally--have
mentioned him. In the "Address to the Reader," prefixed to one of
his works, * he says, speaking of his own date, "We have also rare
compositions made among us which look so many fair ways at once that I
doubt it will go near to pose any other nations of Europe to muster out
in any age four men who, in so many respects, should be able to excel
{149}four such us we are able to show--Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis Bacon. For they were all a kind of
monsters in their various ways," etc.
* "A Collection of Letters made by Sir Tobie Matthew, with
a Character of the Most Excellent Lady Lucy, Countess of
Carlisle. To which are added Many Letters of his Several
Persons of Honour, who were contemporary with him." Loudon,
1660.
Besides, these four--or, dismissing Spenser, who was a poet
exclusively--then three, Bacon, Raleigh, and Tobie Matthew--however else
dissimilar, were any thing but blockheads or anchorites. They were men
of the court and of the world. They mingled among their fellow-men, and
(by a coincidence which is very useful to us here) none of them were
silent as to what they met and saw during their careers. They both live
and move in the very town and in the very days when this rare poetry
which Emerson says "the greatest minds value most" was appearing. But,
if William Shakespeare was the author of it all, how is it possible
to escape the conviction that not one of them all--not Bacon, a man
of letters himself, a student of antique not only, but of living and
contemporary literature, and overfond of writing down his impressions
for the benefit of posterity (even if wanting in the dramatic or poetic
perception, the scholarship of the plays could not have escaped him;
and had these plays been the delight and town talk of all London, as Mr.
Grant White says they were, some morsel of them must have reached his
ear or eye)--not Raleigh, courtier, gallant, man-about-town, "curled
darling," and every thing of that sort (who probably was not afraid to
go to a theater for fear of injuring his morals)--not Tobie Matthew, who
was all this latter with less of responsibility and mental balance--ever
so much as heard his (Shakespeare's) name mentioned? That not one of
these ever heard of a name that was in every{150}body's mouth--of a
living man so famous that, as we shall presently consider, booksellers
were using his name to make their wares sell, that his plays were
fill-ins: the most fashionable theater in London from cockpit to the
dome; whose popularity was so exalted that the great Queen Elizabeth
herself stepped down from the throne and walked across his stage to do
him honor, to whom in after days, her successor King was to write an
autograph letter (for these must all be considered in the argument,
though, as we have seen, the King James story is only one of the
"yarns," * cooked for occasion by commentators, or the growth of
rumor--in orthodox procession from "might have been" to "was"--and so,
doubtless, is the other) is a trifle incredible to a mind not already
adjusted to swallow any and every fable in this connection rather than
accept the truth of history! To be sure, it is not absolutely impossible
that these three men should have been cognizant of William Shakespeare's
existence without mentioning him in their favors to posterity.
* The story of Elizabeth's order for "Falstaff in Love,"
resulting in the production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor"
(which would prove that, whatever else she was, Elizabeth
was no Anthony Comstock), is, to our mind, another sample of
the same procession. Hazlitt (Lit. of Europe, Part iii.,
chap. 6, sec. iii., note,) is especially incredulous as to
the King James letter. The truth is that Shakespeare, far
from being flattered by James, was actually in disgrace, and
not so much as to be mentioned in that monarch's hearing,
from having permitted a representation of the sacred person
of royalty on his stage, as is authenticated by the well-
known lines of Davies:
"Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport, etc., etc."
But, under all the circumstances, it is vastly improbable. At any rate,
we fancy it would not be easy to conceive of {151}three Englishmen in
London to-day, in 1881--let us say Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and
Mr. Swinburne--without collusion, writing down a list of their most
illustrious contemporaries, and not one of them mentioning Mr. Tennyson!
Or, assuming that Tennyson is the admitted first of poets of the
Victorian age (as Mr. Ben Jonson and all the commentators at his heels,
down to our own Mr. Grant White, tell us that "William Shakespeare" was
the admitted first of poets of his contemporary Elizabethan age),
it would not be the easiest thing in the world to conceive three
chroniclers--Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne-sitting
themselves down to an enumeration, not of their illustrious
contemporaries in general, but of their contemporaneous men of letters
only, and, by a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first of
poets of their day! Either, then, it seems to us we are to infer
that three such men as Raleigh, Bacon, (who, Emerson says, "took the
inventory of the human understanding, for his time,") and his satellite
Matthew, had never so much as heard that there was any Shakespeare, in
an age which we moderns worship as the age of Shakespeare, or that there
was no "Shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "William Shakespeare"
was the name of an actor and manager in the Globe and Blackfriars
play-houses, of a man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors
and co-managers in those establishments, to enumeration among the
illustrious ornaments of an illustrious age, the stars of the golden age
of English!
Of course, it can be well urged that all this is mere negative evidence;
that not only three but three million of men might be found who had
never mentioned {152}or ever heard of Shakespeare, without affecting the
controversy either way. But, under the circumstances, in view of what
the Shakespearean plays _are_, and of what their author must have
been, and of when and where these three men--Bacon, Raleigh, and
Matthew--lived and flourished, the chronicles left by these three
men--Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew--constitute, at the very least, a
"negative pregnant" not to be omitted in any review of our controversy
that can lay the faintest claim to exhaustiveness or sincerity; and,
moreover, a negative pregnant which--if we admitted all the Ben Jonson
testimony, in prose and poetry, as evidence on the one side--could not
be excluded as evidence on the other. In which event it is fairest to
the Shakespeareans to rule Ben out altogether. **
* And we might add to these Sir John Davies, Selden, Sir
John Beaumont, Henry Vaughn, Lord Clarendon and others.
** It is fair to note that another "negative pregnant"
arises here, to which the Shakespeareans are as fairly
entitled as the other side to theirs. Sir Tobie Matthew died
in 1655. He survived Shakespeare thirty-nine years, Bacon
twenty-nine years, and Raleigh thirty-seven years! Left in
possession of the secret of the Baconian authorship, how
could such a one as Matthew let the secret die with him?
Although we do not meet with it among the arguments of the
Shakespeareans, this strikes us as about the strongest they
could present, except that the answer might be that at the
date of Matthew's death, 1655, the Shakespearean plays were
not held in much repute, or that Matthew might have reserved
his unbosoming of the secret too long; but it is only one
fact among a thousand.
Besides, Ben is what the Scotchmen call "a famous witness" (if the
commentators, who enlarge on Shakespeare's bounty and loans to him, can
be relied upon), as being under heavy pecuniary obligation to the
stage manager, and so his testimony is to be scrutinized with the
{153}greatest care, though he certainly did not allow his obligations
to over-master him when writing the "Discoveries." But, in any event, it
would be easier to believe that Ben Jonson once contradicted himself for
the sake of a rhyme, and to "do the handsome thing" by the memory of an
old friend and unpaid creditor, than to swallow the incredible results
of a literal version of his prose and poetry, read by the light of the
Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew remains. And the conclusion of the matter,
it seems to us, must be: either that the poetry was the result of his
obligations to William Shakespeare and to William Shakespeare's memory,
or that, having sworn on both sides, Mr. Ben Jonson stands simply dehors
the case--a witness for neither.
It is not, then--it is very far from being--because we know so little
of the man Shakespeare that we disbelieve in his authorship of the great
works ascribed to him. It is because we know so much. No sooner did men
open their histories, turn up the records and explore the traditions and
trace the gossip of' the Elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in
the face. Long before any "Baconian theory" arose to account for these
anomalies: at the instant these plays began to be valued for any thing
else than their theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the
man to his verse" began to be troublesome. "To be told that he played
a trick on a brother actor in a licentious amour, or that he died of a
drunken frolic, does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote 'Lear,'"
cried Mr. Hallam. *
* "I laud," says Hallam, "the labors of Mr. Collier, Mr.
Hunter, and other collectors of such crumbs, though I am not
sure that we should not venerate Shakespeare as much if they
had left him undisturbed in his obscurity.... If there was a
Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of
heaven, and it is of him we desire to know something."
"Every accession of in {154}formation we obtain respecting the man
Shakespeare renders it more and more difficult to detect in him
the poet," cries Mr. William Henry Smith. * "I am one of the many,"
testifies Mr. Furness, "who have never been able to bring the life of
William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary
space of each other; are there any other two things in the world more
incongruous?" **
* "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 886.
** In a letter to Judge Holmes, printed at p. 628, third
edition, of the latter's "Authorship of Shakespeare."
It was necessary, therefore, in order to preserve a belief in the
Shakespearean authorship, either that William Shakespeare should be
historically known as a man of great mental power, a close student of
deep insight into nature and morals--a poet, philosopher, and all the
rest--or else that, by a failure of the records, history should be
silent altogether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time have
made it impossible to recover any details whatever as to his tastes,
manners, and habits of life. In such a case, of course, there would
remain no evidence on the subject other than that of the plays
themselves, which would, of course, prove him precisely the
myriad-minded genius required. In other words, it was only necessary to
so cloud over _the facts_ as to make the "Shakespearean miracle" to be,
_not_ that William Shakespeare had written the works, but--that
history should be so silent concerning a "Shakespeare!" So long as the
Shakespeareans could cry, "Behold a mys{155}terious dispensation
of Providence--that, of the two mightiest poets the world has ever
held--Homer and William Shakespeare--we know absolutely nothing!"--so
long as they could assign this silence to the havoc of a great deluge
or a great fire, just so long the name "William Shakespeare" was as good
and satisfactory a name as any other, and nobody could propose a better.
But they can cry so no longer. It is not because we know so _little_,
but because we know _so much_ about the Stratford boy, that we decline
to accept him as the master we not only admire and love, but in whose
pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery anticipated. As a matter
of fact, through the accident of his having been a part-proprietor in
one of the earliest English play-houses, we know pretty accurately what
manner of man he was. We know almost every thing about him, in short,
except--what we _do_ know about Homer--that the words now attributed
to him were _his_. Homer, at least, we can trace to his "Iliad" and his
"Odyssey," as he sang them in fragments from town to town. But neither
to his own pen nor his own lips, and only problematically (as we
shall see further on) to his own stage, can we trace the plays so long
assigned to William Shakespeare. Let the works be placed in our hands
for the first time anonymously; given the chronicles of the age of
Elizabeth and James in which to search for an author of these works,
would any thing we found in either lead us to pronounce William
Shakespeare their author? And has any thing happened _since_ to induce
us to set aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of
faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion to blindly and
obediently believe that William Shakes{156}peare was not the man he was,
lest we should be "disrespectful to our birthright?"
Nothing whatever has happened since, except the labors of the
commentators. By the most painfully elaborate explorations on the wrong
track, by ingenious postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers
illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering carefully clear
of the records, they have evolved a butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a
divinity student, a a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker--but, after all,
a Shakespeare. That the error, in the commencement, was the result of
carelessness, there can be no doubt. But that, little by little--each
commentator, either in rivalry for a new fact, and jealous to be one
item ahead of his competitor (even if obliged to invent it out of hand),
or being too indolent to examine for himself, or too subservient to
authority to rebel--it grew to vast proportions, we have only to look at
the huge "biographies" of the last half century to be assured. It will
not detain us long, as an example of these, to briefly glance at
the labors of one of the most intrepid of the ilk to identify the
traditional poet with the traditional man. In 1839, Thomas De Quincy
contributed to the "Encyclopædia Britannica" its article "Shakespeare."
That about the story of the prankish Stratford lad, who loved, and wooed
and won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smoky-raftered cottage
in Stratford town and the snug little thatch at Shottery trudged every
sunset to do his courting, there lingers the glamour of youth, and love,
and poetry, no patron of the "Encyclopædia" would probably have doubted.
But that a staid and solemn work, designed for exact reference, should
have printed {157}so whimsical a fancy sketch as Mr. De Quincy supplied
to it, and that it should have been allowed to remain there, must
certainly command surprise. There can surely be complaint as to
the variety of the performance. Mr. De Quincy very ably and gravely
speculates as to the size of the dowry old Hathaway gave his daughter;
as to whether old John Shakespeare mortgaged his homestead to keep
up appearances; and whether that gentleman received the patronage of
Stratford corporation when (as there is no direct authority for saying
they did not) they had occasion to present a pair of gloves to some
favored nobleman (and this portion of the composition winds up with a
history of gloves and glove-making which can not fail to interest and
instruct the reader). And his speculations as to whether the messengers
who sped to Worcester for the "marriage-lines" did or did not ride in
such hot haste, in view of an expected but premature Susannah, that they
gave vicious orthographies of the names "Shakspeare" and "Hathaway" to
the aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially pretty reading.
But--with facilities in 1839 for writing a history of the Stratford lad,
which the Stratford lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors,
two hundred years and more before Mr. De Quincy, seem never to have
possessed--Mr. De Quincy quite surpasses himself in setting us exactly
right as to William Shakespeare. And, first, as to the birthday. There
has always been a sort of feeling among Englishmen that their greatest
poet ought to have had no less a birthday than the day dedicated to
their patron saint. The Stratford parish records certifying to the
christening of William Shakespeare on the 26th day of April, {158}1564
(which Mr. De Quincy forgets was "old style," and so, in any event,
twelve days before the corresponding date in the present or "new
style"), and the anniversary of St. George being fixed for celebration
on the 23d of April, it had come to be unanimously resolved by the
commentators that, in Warwickshire, it was the custom to christen
infants on the third day after birth, and that, therefore, William
Shakespeare was born on the anniversary of St. George, April 23, 1564.
To baptise a three-days-old baby, in an English April, a period five
days earlier than, in the mild latitude of Palestine, the Israelites
thought it necessary to circumcise their infants, seems a very
un-English proceeding. So Mr. De Quincy, who would rather perish than
mislead, thinks, after all, the birth might have been a day earlier.
"After all," he says, "William _might_ have been born on the 22d.
Only one argument," he gravely proceeds, "has sometimes struck us for
supposing that the 22d might be the day, and not the 23d, which is, that
Shakespeare's sole granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was married on the 22d
of April, ten years exactly from the poet's death, and the reason
for choosing this day might have had a reference to her illustrious
grandfather's birthday, which, there is good reason for thinking, would
be celebrated as a festival in the family for generations!" But even Mr.
De Quincy appears to concede that, in writing history, we must draw the
line somewhere; for he immediately adds, "Still this choice may have
been an accident" (so many things, that is to say, are likely to
be considered in fixing a marriage-day, besides one's grandfather's
birthday!), "or governed merely by reason of convenience. And, {159}on
the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the old belief that
Shakespeare was born and died on the 23d of April. We can not do wrong
if we drink to his memory both on the 22d and 23d." *
* Mr. De Quincy's own estimate of this performance we take
from a preface to the article itself, in the American
edition of his collected works (Boston: Shepard & Gill,
1873), vol. xv., p. 11: "No paper ever cost me so much
labor; parts of it have been recomposed three times over."
And again, "William Shakespeare's article cost me more
intense labor than any I ever wrote in my life and, I
believe, if you will examine it, you will not complain of
want of novelty." We should say not.
Mr. De Quincy's proposition to drink twice instead of once ought
to forever secure his popularity among Englishmen; but it remains,
nevertheless, remarkable that a ponderous encyclopaedia should admit
this sort of work among its articles on sugar, snakes, Sardinia,
soap, Savonarola, and its other references in S! Like his fellow
Shakespeareans, Mr. De Quincy makes no use of Aubrey, or the old clerk,
or the Rev. Richard Davies, or any one else who, having lived at dates
inconveniently contiguous to the real William Shakespeare, were awkward
customers about whom it was best to say nothing. He cannot claim never
to have heard of Aubrey, because he quotes him as saying that William
Shakespeare was "a handsome, well-shaped man." But this is the only
allusion he makes to Aubrey or to any body else who lived within
eyesight or ear-shot of the William Shakespeare who (we admit), if a
well-conducted person, _ought_ reasonably to have been the man Mr. De
Quincy and his ilk turn him out, and not the man his neighbors, or any
body who happened to be born within a hundred years {160}of him, knew
him. As to the difficulties Coleridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Richter,
Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Gervinius, Hallam, Holmes, William Henry
Smith, Furness, and Delia Bacon find so insurmountable--namely, as to
where the material of the plays came from--Mr. De Quincy skips over
these with his airy two terms at the little grammar-school on Stratford
High Street! (The identical desk which William occupied during this
period of attendance at that institution of learning was promptly
supplied by the Stratford guides, upon hearing Mr. De Quincy's
discovery.) "Old Aubrey," two hundred years nearer his subject, was
careful to give his school-master's story "for what it was worth,"
admitting that his authority for the statement that William Shakespeare
was a school-master was only a rumor, founded on the statement of one
"Beeston;" but who was "Beeston?" Some of our modern commentators have
conjectured that possibly William, being a sort of model or head boy,
was trusted to hear some of the little boys' lessons, which gave rise
to the "school-master" story. But Mr. De Quincy allows no demurrer nor
doubt to his assertions in the Encyclopædia Britannica. And for these
"two terms" (of course), no further authority than himself being
necessary, he vouchsafes none. Such dry things as references are
gracefully compensated for by favoring the reader in search for
Shakespearean data with two dissertations upon the loveliness of female
virtue, one of which covers fourteen pages octavo. * His cue has had
prolific fol{161}lowing.
* Of Sheppard & Gill's reprint (pp. 41, 69-83). But if Mr.
De Quincy could have lived until November, 1879, even he
might have been taught something. The Rev. John Bayley, in
an article on "The Religion of Shakespeare," in the "Sunday
Magazine" (New York: Frank Leslie, November, 1879, p. 518),
says of William Shakespeare,"
"During the last years of his life it is stated that he and
his family attended the parish church where the Rev. Richard
Byfield, an eminent Puritan minister, and father of the
distinguished commentator on the Epistle to the Colossians,
commenced his ministry, a. d. 1606." Of course, the reverend
contributor to the "Sunday Magazine" does not in-form us
where this fact "is stated," but concludes from the fact (he
is sure it is a fact) that Shakespeare was "during the last
years of his life the constant hearer of this eminent and
energetic preacher of the gospel," and that "we may
reasonably hope for the best of consequences." So simple a
process has Shakespeare-making become!
Now-a-days our "biographies" of William Shakespeare are huge tomes
of Elizabethan and other antiquarian lore, commentary, conjecture,
argumentation; that stupefy us, as it were, by mere bulk and show of
research, into accepting the whole rather than plunge into so vast and
shoreless a sea of apparent labor, and, therefore, alleged learning. For
such is the indolence of man, that the bulkier the book the less likely
is it to be read or refuted. And so, in view of the great eye-filling
books labeled "biographies" of William Shakespeare--volumes commensurate
with the idea of a life which might, in time at least, have compassed
the mighty works--one need not doubt that "William Shakespeare" was the
name of the marvelous man who wrote the plays.
But, when one left the fiction of Mr. De Quincy and his ilk, and was
forced to confront the William Shakespeare who wrote the Lucy lampoon
and the epitaph on Elias James, who stuck calves and stole {162}deer,
the difficulty only recurred with redoubled emphasis.
It is not, of course, because William stuck the calves and stole the
deer, because he wrote the lampoon or the epitaph, nor because he
was son (or apprentice, as some lay), to a butcher or a glover, a
tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to have been unequal
to the Shakespearean authorship. There never yet was cradle too lowly
to be the cradle of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. George
Stephenson was a colliery-stoker, Turner was the son of a barber, and
Faraday the son of a horseshoer. Coleridge was a charity-lad, and the
number of tanners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose names
history could not be written, is something amazing. We may trace the
genius of Turner from the first impulse of his pencil to its latest
masterpiece, but we can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum
or described the Edison phonograph. He knew and practiced what he was
_taught_ (albeit he taught himself), and died quite contented to leave
his own works behind him. Robert Burns was fully as unlettered and as
rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove the mighty miracle of
genius. His history, up to a certain point, is the very duplicate of
the history of William Shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy of
Stratford village. Both were obscure, schoolless, and grammarless. But,
in the case of Robert Burns, this heaven-born genius did not set him
straightway on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the past,
and forecast the future, or guide his untaught pen to write of Troy
and Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit
civiliza{163}tions and manners of nations born and buried and passed
into history a thousand years before he had been begotten, the very
names of which were not dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his
philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details of forgotten polities
and commercial customs, such as, for instance, the exceptional usage of
a certain trade in Mitylene, the anomalous status of a Moorish mercenary
in command of a Venetian army, of a savage queen of Britain led
captive by Rome, or a thane of Scotland under one of its primitive
kings--matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or
dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treatises or statutes, rather
than for historians to treat of or schools to teach! In the case of
Robert Burns we are content not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us
be content if the genius of Bobert Burns could glorify the goodwives'
fables of his wonted firesides and set in aureole the homeliest cipher
in his vicinage, until a field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a
Venus! It were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this fire from
heaven, at once and on the instant invest a letterless peasant-lad with
all the lore and law which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped
books and buried and forgotten--with all the learning that the past
had gathered into great tomes and piled away in libraries. And yet, if
Bobert Burns had sung of the Punic wars or the return of the Heraclides,
some Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight would doubtless--with history
staring him in the face--have arisen to put his index-finger upon the
sources of his authority. Judging by the record in the case of William
Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty {164}over which a
Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight can not easily clamber.
If William Shakespeare was a born genius, a true son of nature, his soul
overflowing with a sense of the beauty of life and of love, Land of
all around him, we might expect to find his poems brimful of the sweet,
downcast eyes of his Anne, of sunny Stratford fields, of Shottery and
the lordly oaks of Charlecote--to find him, "Fancy's child," warbling
"his native Wood-notes wild," indeed! But of Troy, Tyre, and
Epidamnium, of Priam and Cressid and Cleopatra, of the propulsion of
blood from the vital heart, and of the eternal mysteries of physics, who
dreams that "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child" could sing in the
very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns and times, or within the
mathematical exactitude of sciences that had not yet been treated of
in books? Or, again, John Bunyan is a case in point. John Bunyan was as
squalid and irredeemable a tinker as ever flourished in the days when
"a tinker was rogue by statute." * And yet he, according to Macaulay,
produced the second of the two books of which England should be
proudest. ** What was the miracle in the case of John Bunyan? He
produced a book which, "while it obtains admiration from the most
fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire
it.... This is the highest miracle of art, that things which{165}are not
should be as though they were; that the imaginations of one mind should
become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the
tinker has wrought."
* Cockayne vs. Hopkins, 2 Lev., 214.
** "Though there were many clever men in England during the
latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two
minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very
eminent degree. One of these minds produced the 'Paradise
Lost,' and the other the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"
But this great praise was not abstracted from Macaulay by wealth
of antique learning, universal accuracy of information, or vivid
portraiture of forgotten civilizations. There was no trace of Bun-yan's
perfect familiarity with Plato and Euripides, with Galen, Paracelsus,
Plautus, Seneca, and the long line of authors down to Boccaccio,
Rabelais, Saxo-Grammaticus, and the rest! The critic did not find in
Bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the sonorous speech of
the ancients, or the elegant and punctilious Norman of the court. "The
Bunyan vocabulary," says Macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the common
people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical
theological terms, which would puzzle the rudest peasant." In short, we
need not pause, marvelous as are the pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress,"
to ask of John Bunyan, as indeed we must ask of William Shakespeare, the
question, "how knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" Peerless
as the result all is, there is nothing in the writings of John Bunyan
which can not be accounted for by natural (that is to say, by what we
have been obliged by the course of human experience to accept as not
impossible) causes. "The years of Bunyan's boyhood were those during
which the Puritan spirit was in the highest vigor over all England....
It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a
powerful imagination and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should
have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his
sports {166}were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and bis
sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him.... He
enters the Parliamentary army, and, to the last, he loves to draw
his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns,
trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own
banner.... His 'Greatheart,' his 'Captain Boanerges,5 and his 'Captain
Credence' are evidently portraits of which the originals were among
those martial saints* who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.... He
had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power
of the Cavaliers... to oppress the Dissenters.... he was flung into
Bedford jail, with pen and paper for company, etc., etc. Here are the
school and the experience, and the result is writings which show a keen
mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate
knowledge of the English bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual
experience." ** Moreover, here is a scholar like Macaulay striving
to account for the extraordinary phenomenon of a "Pilgrim's Progress"
written by a village tinker. But in the case of the at least equally
extraordinary phenomenon of the Shakespearean drama, the creation of a
village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born to the Shakespeareans
who deems it necessary or profitable to try his hand at any such
investigation. "Where did he get his material?"
"Oh, he picked it up around Stratford, somehow!"
"But his learning?"
"Oh, he found it lying around the theater somewhere!"
* "Bunyan," in "Encyclopaedia Britannica," by Macaulay.
** Ibid.
{167}Probably there were encyclopaedias to be fished ont of the mad
of the bank-side in those days, of which we can find no mention in the
chroniclers! And so, although scarcely a commentator on the glowing
text has not paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of this
material, leading him on to vaster and more magnificent treasuries
at every step, so far as we are able to discover, not one of them has
attempted to trace the intellectual experience of the man who wrought it
all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. Not one of them has
paused to ask the Scriptural question, "How knoweth this man letters,
having never learned?" For, it can not be too incessantly reiterated,
the question is not, "Was Shakespeare a poet?" but, "Had he access to
the material from which the plays are composed?" Admit him to have been
the greatest poet, the most frenzied genius in the world; where did
he get--not the poetry, but--the classical, philosophical, chemical,
historical, astronomical, geological, etc., etc., information--the facts
that crowd these pages?
And let us not be credited, in these pages, with a malignant rejection
of every tradition or anecdote that works to William Shakespeare's
renown, and a corresponding retention of every tradition or anecdote to
his disparagement. For example, if it is asked, Why reject the story of
King James's autograph letter, and retain the story of the trespass on
Sir Thomas Lucy's deer? the answer must be: first; because, while there
is nothing improbable in the latter, there is much of improbability
in the former. King James was a king, and kings rarely write autograph
letters to subjects. The Lord Chamberlain may give a sort of permission
{168}to a haberdasher to call himself haberdasher to Queen Victoria;
but it would be vastly improbable that Queen Victoria should write an
autograph letter to the haberdasher to that effect. Second, because
the poaching story (to use a legal test) appears to be so old that the
memory of man runneth not to a time when it was not believed; whereas
the King James story first appeared in the year 1710, in a biographical
notice affixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one Bernard
Lintot. Mr. Lintot gave no authority for the statement whatever, except
to say that it rested on the word of "a credible person then living."
But everybody can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which rival
biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, struggle to get hold of
a new fact for their columns, and nobody will wonder that, after Mr.
Lintot, no "biographer" omitted to mention it. As a matter of fact, the
letter from King James and the letter from Queen Elizabeth, produced by
young Ireland, are equally genuine correspondence. But the stories
of the latter class, while not beyond question, are at least not
improbable, considering the record of the youth Shakespeare at
Stratford, while those of the first are certainly improbable on their
face, and can be in almost every case traced to their exact source.
So the story of his holding horses, while by no means authentic, (Mr
White says it was not heard of until the middle of the last century),
is by no means improbable, seeing that the lad ran away to London----and
Rowe and the old sexton both agree that he began--as self-made men
do--at the bottom. The story of Queen Elizabeth's crossing the stage and
dropping her glove, which Shakespeare picked up and pre{169}sented with
an impromptu, Mr. White himself smiles at, with the remark that "the
anecdote is plainly one made to meet the craving for personal details of
Shakespeare's life," * and he treats it as he does the "Florio" in
the British Museum, supposed to have belonged to William Shakespeare,
because that name is written----after his mode--on a fly-leaf; with a
pleasant wish that he were able to believe in it. *
Far from being of the class that kings delight to honor, it is simply
impossible to turn one's researches into any channel that leads into
the vicinity of Stratford without noticing the fact that the Shakespeare
family left, in the neighborhoods where it flourished, one unmistakable
trace familiar in all cases of vulgar and illiterate families; namely,
the fact that they never knew or cared, or made an effort to know,
of what vowels or consonants their own name was composed, or even to
preserve the skeleton of its pronunciation. They answered--or made their
marks--indifferently to "Saxpir" or "Chaksper;" or to any other of the
thirty forms given by Mr. Grant White, ** or the fifty-five forms which
another gentleman of elegant leisure has been able to collect. ***
* Shakespeare's Works. Boston, 1865. Vol. L, p. 80, in, and
see a note to the same volume, pp. 96-7, as to Ratzei's
ghost, surmised to be an allusion to Shakespeare.
* Ib., p. 128.
** Shakespeare's Scholar, pp. 478-480.
*** George Russel French, Shakespeareana Geologicana. p.
348. {170}
In the records of the town council of Stratford, of which John
Shakespeare was no unimportant part, the name is written in fourteen
different forms, which may be tabulated as follows:----
~ 4 times written Shackesper.
3 times written Shackespere.
4 times written Shacksper.
2 times written Shackspere.
13 times written Shakespere.
1 time written Shaksper.
5 times written Shakspere.
~~
17 times written Shakspeyr.
4 times written Shakysper.
9 times written Shakyspere.
69 times written Shaxpeare.
8 times written Shaxper.
18 times written Shaxpere.
9 times written Shaxspeare.
~~~
In the marriage bond of November 28, 1582, it is twice written, each
time Shagspere. On the grave of Susanna, it is Shakespere; and on the
other graves of the family, Shakespeare, except that under the bust it
is Shakspeare. That is to say, just as many orthographies as there are
tombstones and inscriptions. Any lawyer's clerk who has had occasion to
search for evidence among the uneducated classes, knows how certainly a
lower or higher grade of intelligence will manifest itself primarily
in an ignorance of or indifference to one's own name or a corresponding
zeal for one's own identity, and anxiety that it shall be accurately
"taken down." Whether this infallible rule obtained in the days of the
Shakespeares or not, or whether a family, that was so utterly stolid
as not to know if their patronymic was spelled with a "c," a "k," or an
"x," could have appreciated and bestowed upon their child a classical
education (not to ring the changes upon politics, philosophy, etc.,
right here), is for the reader to judge for himself.
Mr. W. H. Smith maintains that Shakespeare, like the rest of his family,
was unable to write, and had learned, by practice only, to make the
signature which he was assured was his name. Mr. Smith founds his theory
on the fact that, in the Will the word "seale" (in the formula, "witness
my seale," etc.) is erased, {171}and the word "hand" substituted. In
a letter to Mr. Shedding, * Mr. Smith claims that this erasure and
substitution prove that the draughtsman who prepared the Shakespeare
Will, knowing that the testator could not write, did not suppose that he
would sign his name, and so prepared it for the superimposition of his
seal. "I know," says Mr. Smith, "that you will ingeniously observe that
that might have been his belief, but that the fact could better have
been proved if '_hand_' had been erased and '_seale_' inserted. But
Shakespeare, being proud of his writing, and, as this would probably be
his last opportunity, insisted on exhibiting his 'hand.'" According to
Mr. Smith, therefore, Ben Jonson's speech about "never blotting out a
line," was redundant. But, whether able to write, or, like his ancestors
and descendants, signing with a mark, he clearly cared no more than they
how people spelled his name. A Mr. George Wise, of Philadelphia, has
been able to compile a chart exhibiting one thousand nine hundred and
six ways of spelling the Stratford boy's name; ** A commentary on
the efforts of Mr. Halliwell and others, to establish the canonical
orthography, which might well reduce them to despair. The fact is, that
there can no more be a canonical spelling of the name Shakespeare than
there can be a canonical face of the boy William. The orthography of
Shakespeare, as now accepted, and the face now accepted as belonging to
William of that name, are both modern inventions.
* See third edition Holmes' "Authorship of Shakespeare," p.
627.
** Philadelphia, 1858. See Essays on Shakespeare, Carl
Elze; translated by Schmitz (London, Macmillan's 1874), note
to p. 371.
Even the {172}"best of that family" (according to the old clerk),
William, when called to sign his own last will and testament (obliged by
law to sign each of the three sheets upon which it was engrossed) three
times, spelled his name a different way each time. His daughter Judith
lived and died without being able to spell or write it at all; Milton,
Spenser, Sidney, even Gower and Chaucer (whom even our own Artemus
Ward pronounced "no speller"), had but one way of writing their own
names--and never dreamed of one thousand nine hundred and six. The name
is now supposed to have been simply "Jacques-Pierre" (James Peter),
which had been mispronounced--as Englishmen mispronounce French--for
unnumbered generations. *
This is the present mispronunciation of Jacques prevalent in
Warwickshire. And, such being the true origin of the name, it is,
of course, natural to find it as we do, written in two words
"Shake-speare," in those days. It is not William Shakespeare's fault
that he sprang from an illiterate family, but that--after growing so
rich as to be able to enjoy an income of $25,000 a year, he should never
send his children--especially his daughter Judith--to school, so that
the poor girl, on being married, on the 11th day of February, 1616,
should be obliged to sign her marriage bond with a mark, shows, we
think, that he was not that immortal he would have been had he written
the topmost literature {173}of the world--the Shakespearean Drama! But,
still, this most unsatisfactory person--this man who answers, like Mr.
Carroll's skipper, to "hi, or to any loud cry"--=
```"To what-you-may-call-um or what-is-his-name
```But especially thing-um-a-jig,"=
or to whatever the nearest actor or scene-shifter may happen to hit
on when he wants the poor little "supernumerary," and "Joannes
Factotum"--actually lived to clamber astride of the most immortal
birthright of bis own or of any century, and has clung thereon like
another old man of the sea on Sinbad's shoulders, and been carried down
through these three hundred years, and is being carried yet, down or
up, to an undeterminate immortality of fame that is the true estate of
somebody else! For, not only has the world not yet gotten its eyes half
open, but it contumaciously refuses, to open them to the facts in the
case, and prefers to hug as tightly as it ever did this stupendous
hoax--("_Shakespearean_" indeed, in that it has outlasted and outlived
all the other hoaxes put together--the witchcraft hoax, the Chatterton
hoax, the Ossian hoax, the moon hoax, and all the rest of them); that
has carried all sorts of parasite hoaxes, like Ireland's, Collier's,
and Cunningham's upon its back, until their little day has been
accomplished, and they have dropped off, just as, one of these days,
the present hoax must drop off, and breathe its last, without a single
mourner to stand by the coffin, and confess himself its disciple.
{174}