[Illustration: 9208]
HE English Renaissance Drama seems naturally to group itself into
two grand divisions: the Elizabethan drama and--Shakespeare. There is
nothing in the first which surprises: which impresses us as too abrupt
a departure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the middle age
mummeries--"miracle plays" and "mysteries"--or as being too refined or
elaborate for the groundlings who swaggered and swilled beer, or the
lords and maids of honor who ogled and flirted in the contemporary barns
called "play-houses" in the days of Elizabeth. But that the proprietor
of one of these barns should have found it to his profit to have
overshot the intelligence of his audience by creating a Hamlet, a Lear,
Brutus, and Macbeth--the action of whose roles are intellectual rather
than scenic--for his players, or an Ophelia, Isabella, or Catharine
for the small boys employed to render his female parts, is an
incongruity--to put it mildly--which arrests our credulity at once.
The utmost that the Shakespeareans propose to do--the utmost they
attempt--is to make out William Shakespeare to have been an Elizabethan
Dramatist. But the Elizabethan Dramatist was a man who catered to the
Elizabethan play-goer. Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, and the rest, were
Elizabethan Dramatists. But {203}their names are only a catalogue
to-day. If we happen to buy a set of their works at a bargain, at some
old book sale, we may put them on our shelves; but we are not equal to
the laborious task of reading them. The Shakespearean Drama is a
thing apart. Its Dramatic form seems only an Incident; perfect as that
Incident is, there is so much more in it that we find appealing to our
hearts and intellects to-day, that we hesitate to ascribe it even to an
Elizabethan Dramatist. The Baconian theory, as elaborated by Holmes,
we understand to be that this element apart from the Dramatic, in these
days is the key-note and explanation of the whole Shakespeare mystery,
and leads to the discovery that "Shakespeare" was only a convenient name
under which the popular ear was sought to be arrested by a Philosopher,
who wrote in cipher, as it were, for a great purpose of his own.
The philosophical system contemplated by Francis Bacon--say the
Baconians--was divided into two grand Divisions, the Didactic and the
Historical. The first--its author (despairing of contemporary fame, or
possibly distrustful of the permanence of the vernacular) locked up in
the universal language of scholars, and left it by his testament to "the
next ages." The other he chose to put into Dramatic form. The spirit,
motive, theme, and purport of two great phenomena of English letters,
synchronizing in date (the philosophical canon of Bacon and the dramatic
canon of "Shakespeare,") are identical, and form together essentially
one great body of philosophy and inductive science, and, therefore,
must have had the one author. "It is a thing, indeed, if practiced
professionally, of low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline,
it {204}is of excellent use--I mean stage playing." he says himself. And
again: "Dramatic poetry is as history made visible." This Historical or
preliminary division of the Philosophy did not need a dead, but a living
language--the language of his race. This he left in English: and when,
at the end, a broken, weak, despised old man--knowing himself only too
well to be the meanest and weakest of his kind; but yet conscious of
having, in a large sense, worked for the good of his fellow-men--he
made no excuse or palliation, but only bespoke for himself and his life
"men's charitable speeches."
But, if there was but one author for these two contemporary works,
why not William Shakespeare as well as Francis Bacon? Why not ask the
question, "Did William Shakespeare write Lord Bacon's works?" * as well
as, "Did Lord Bacon write William Shakespeare's work?" While not within
our scope to demonstrate the identical philosophy of the Novum Organum
and the Shakespearean Drama--(a work to which Miss Bacon devoted her
life--and whose demonstration has been followed by Judge Holmes)--it is
property within that scope to examine, from the outside, the question
whether, as matter of fact, William Shakespeare could have written
either; or whether, from circumstantial evidence merely, Lord Bacon was
thus, and in pursuance of a great purpose, actually the author of the
Dramatic canon of "Shakespeare."
* See this question asked and answered affirmatively in
"North American Review." February, 1881. New York. D.
Appleton & Co.
How, aside from any _opinion_ as to their value, beauty, or eloquence,
there are two characteristics of {205}the Shakespearean works which,
under the calmest and most sternly judicial treatment to which they
could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be beyond gainsay
or neglect. These two characteristics are--1. The encyclopaedic
universality of their information as to matters of fact; and, 2. The
scholarly refinement of the style displayed in them. Their claim to
eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a question of taste;
and we may conceive of whole peoples--as, for example, the Zulus or the
Ashantees--impervious to any admiration for the Shakesperean plays on
that account. But this familiarity with what, at their date, was the
Past of history, and--up to that date--the closed book of past
human discovery and research which we call Learning; is an open and
indisputable fact; and the New-Zealander who shall sit on a broken arch
of London Bridge and muse over the ruins of British civilization, if
he carry his researches back to the Shakespearean literature, will
be obliged to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the
scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the accumulated learning
of the world down to his own actual day. Moreover, this scholar would
not be compelled to this decision only by a careful examination of
the entire Shakespearean opera. He will be forced to so conclude on an
examination of any one, or, at the most, of any given group of single
plays. Let him open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the "Julius
Cæsar." *
* See in this connection "The English of Shakespeare
illustrated in a Philological commentary on his 'Julius
Cæsar.' By G. L. Craik." London. Chapman & Hall. 1857.
Even the artificial Alexander Pope (who, so far from being an
over-estimator of the Shakes{206}pearean works, only, from the heights
of his superior plane, admits them very grudgingly to a rank beside the
works of Waller) was obliged to confess as much. "This Shakespeare,"
says Mr. Pope, "must have been very knowing in the customs, rites, and
manners of antiquity. In 'Coriolanus' and 'Julius Cæsar,' not only the
spirit, but the manner of the Romans is exactly drawn; and still a nicer
distinction is shown between the manners of the Romans in the time of
the former and of the latter. No one is more a master of the poetical
story, or has more frequent allusions to the various parts of it. Mr.
Waller (who has been celebrated for this last particular) has not shown
more learning in this way than Shakespeare," * But, if the New-Zealander
be a philologist, he will scarcely need perusal of more than a
Shakespearean page to arrive at this judgment. Wherever else the verdict
of scholarship may err, the microscope of the philologist cannot err.
Like the skill of the chirographical expert, it is infallible, because,
just as the hand of a writer, however cramped, affected, or disguised,
will unconsciously make its native character of curve or inclination, so
the speech of a man will be molded by his familiarity, be it greater or
less, with the studies, learning, tastes, and conceits of his own day,
and by the models before him. He cannot unconsciously follow models that
are unknown to him, or speak in a language he has never learned.
* Smith, p. 86. {207}
corroboration of history, that they were only the forgeries of a
precocious boy. To just as moral a certainty are the handiwork of the
Elohist and the Jehovist discernible in the Hebrew Scriptures, and just
as absolutely incapable of an alternative explanation are the ear-marks
of the Shakespearean text. Hallam, whose eyes were never opened to the
truth, and who lived and died innocent of any anti-Shakespearean theory
(though he sighed for a "Shakespeare of heaven," turning in disgust
from the "Shakespeare of earth," of whom only he could read in history),
noticing the phases, unintelligible and improper except in the sense of
their primitive roots, which occur so copiously in the plays, proceeds
to say: "In the 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' these are much less frequent
than in his later dramas; but here we find several instances. Thus,
'Things base and vile, holding no _quantity_' (for _value_) rivers that
'have overborne their _continents_' (the _continenti riva_ of-Horace);
'_compact_ of imagination;' 'something of great _constancy_' (for
_consistency_); 'sweet Pyramus _translated_ there;' 'the law of Athens,
which by no means we may _extenuate_,' etc. I have considerable doubts,"
continues Mr. Hallam, "whether any of these expressions would be found
in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth's reign, which was less overrun
with pedantry than that of her successor. Could authority be produced
for Latinisms so forced, it is still not very likely that one who did
not understand their proper meaning would have introduced them into
poetry." *
* "Literature of Europe," Part II, ch. vi, sec. 81. "To be
told that he played a trick to a brother player in a
licentious amour, or that he died in a drunken frolic.. does
not exactly inform us of the man who wrote "Lear." If there
was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one
of heaven, and it is of him that we desire to know
something." Id. Part II, ch. vi, sec. 35, note.
Young Chatterton deceived the most profound scholars of his day, and his
manuscripts stood every test but this; but under it they revealed the
fact, so soon to receive the mournful {208}social speech in those
days, even in the highest walks of life--we happen to have very graphic
accounts of Queen Elizabeth's sayings and retorts courteous (as, e.
g., when she boxed Essex's ears and told him to go and be hanged)--it
requires considerable credulity to assign this classic diction to a
rustic apprentice from Stratford, who, at "about eighteen," begins
his dramatic labors, fresh from the shambles, and with no hiatus for a
college course between.
Add to this the patent fact that the antique allusions in the plays
"have not regard to what we may call 'school classics,' but to authors
seldom perused but by profound scholars" * even to-day: and technical
exploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the Shakespearean
text, can bring evidence only cumulative as to the result already
obtained. But, if we pass from the technical structure to the material
of the plays, we are confronted with the still more amazing discovery
that, not only the lore of the past was at the service of their author,
but that he had no less an access to secrets supposed to be locked in
the very womb of Time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet distant
future, were to immortalize their first _sponsors_.
* Smith, p. 85.
** Though not, perhaps, universally now-a-days. The late
John Elliotson declared that the circulation through the
lungs had certainly been taught seventy years previously by
Servetus, who was burned at the stake in 1553. Dr. Robert
Willis asserts, in his "Life of Harvey," that the facts he
used were familiarly known to most of his predecessors for a
century previous. Izaak Walton states that Harvey got the
idea of circulation from Walter Warner, the mathematician;
and that eminent physician, John Hunter, remarks that
Servetus first, and Realdus Columbus afterward, clearly
announced the circulation of the blood through the lungs;
and Cisalpinus, many years before Harvey, published, in
three different works, all that was wanting in Servetus to
make the circulation complete. Wotton says that Servetus was
the first, as far as he could learn, who had a distinct idea
of this matter. Even the Chinese were impressed with this
truth some four thousand years before Europeans dreamed of
it. Plato affirmed--"the heart being the knot of the veins,
and the fountain from whence the blood arises and briskly
circulates through all the members." This, however, rather
adds to than lessens the strength of the argument drawn from
finding the "discovery" in the plays.
For example, Dr. Harvey does not announce--what is credited to him
*--his discovery of the circulation of {209}the blood in the human
system--until 1619 (his book was not published until 1628), three years
after William Shakespeare's death. But why need Dr. Harvey have resorted
to vivisection to make his "discovery"? He need only have taken down
his "Shakespeare." Is there any thing in Dr. Harvey any more exactly
definite than the following?=
```"I send it through the rivers of your blood,
```Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain,
```And, through the cranks and offices of man:
```The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins,
```From me receive that natural competency
```Whereby they live."
`````-- _Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1_.=
```"... had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick
```(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins").
--_King John, Act III, Scene 3._= {210}
```... As dear to me as are tlie ruddy drops
```That visit my sad heart."
--_Julius Caesar, Act IT, Scene 1._=
Harvey's discovery, however, is said to have been the theory of Galen,
Paracelsus, and Hippocrates (who substituted the _liter_ for the
_heart_), and to have been held also by Rabelais. Neither Galen,
Paracelsus, Hippocrates, nor Rabelais was a text-book at Stratford
grammar-school during the two terms Mr. De Quincy placed William
Shakespeare as a pupil there--but William has them at his fingers' ends.
There are said to be no less than seventy-eight passages in the plays
wherein this fact of the circulation of the blood is distinctly
alluded to; and, as to Galen and Paracelsus, they intrude themselves
unrestrictedly all through the plays, without the slightest pretext or
excuse:=
```"_Parolles_. So I say; both of Galen and Paracelsus.
```_Lafeu_. Of all the learned and authentic fellows."
````--_All's Well that Ends Well, Act II, Scene 3._=
```"_Host of the Garter Inn_. What says my Æsculapius? my Galen?"
````--Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II., Scene 3.=
In King Henry VI. Part II., Act ii, Scene 2, the erudite Bardolph and
Falstaff's classical page make a learned blunder about Althea, whom
the page confounds with Hecuba. And so on. Are we to believe that this
sometime butcher's boy and later stage manager has his head so brimming
full of his old Greeks and philosophers that he can not for a moment
miss their company, and makes his very panders and public-cans prate of
them? Even if it were the commonest {211}thing in the world, nowadays,
in 1881, for our Mr. Boucicault or Mr. Daly to write a play expressly to
catch the taste of the canaille of the Old Bowery (or, for that matter,
of the urbane and critical audiences of Wallack's or the Union Square),
and stuff all the low-comedy parts with recondite and classical allusion
(for this is precisely what William Shakespeare is said to have done for
the unroofed play-house in the mud of the Bankside in London, some three
hundred years ago or less, and to have coined a fortune at)--even, we
say, if it were the simplest thing in the world to imagine this sort of
play writing to-day, would it be a wilder flight of fancy to suggest a
pale student in London in the days of Queen Elizabeth, somewhere among
the garrets of Gray's Inn, writing dialogues into which Galen and
Paracelsus would intrude unbidden--and a stage manager letting them stay
there as doing no harm (or, may be, taking them for names, of dogs or
wenches--at any rate, as good, mouth-filling words, to be paid for at
the lowest market price): * than to conceive a twelfth manager and
proprietor of this home of the Muses, and whilom sticker of calves,
after the day's labor, shunning his cups and the ribald mirth-making of
those sad dogs, his fellow {212}managers, to seek, in the solitude of
his library and Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this same
Galen and Paracelsus?
* Shakespeare married a woman older than himself. Why-should
he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or
record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity?
See Midsummer-Night's Dream," Act I, Scene 1--"O, spite, too
old to be engaged to young!" etc. Again--"Too old, by
Heaven! Let still the woman take an elder than herself."
Again--"Then let thy love be younger than thyself," etc.,
etc. ("Twelfth Night," Act II., Scene 4.)
It is very difficult to suppose that Shakespeare should have
wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might
snub her in private); though it is very easy to imagine his
passing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried
perusal in the green-room."--Chambers's Journal, August 7,
1852,p. 89.
Newton, who was only born in 1642--twenty years after Shakespeare was
laid away in his tomb--surely need not have lain under his appletree in
the orchard at Woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal
the immutable truth of gravitation. He had but to take down his copy of
"Troilus and Cressida" (printed in 1606) to open to the law itself, as
literally stated as he himself could have formulated it:=
```"_Cressida._... But the strong base and building of my love
```Is as the very center of the earth,
```Drawing all things to it."
````--_Troilus and Cressida, Act IV., Scene 2._=
Are we called upon to tax our common sense to fancy our manager, on one
of his evenings at home, after the play at the Globe was over, snugly
in his library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows over their
cups, stumbling upon the laws of the circulation of the blood and of
gravitation, engrossing them "without blotting out a line," and sending
the "copy" to the actors so that they could commit it to memory for the
stage on the following evening?
What a library it was--that library up among the flies (if they had such
things) of the old Globe Theater! What an Elihu Burritt its owner must
have been, to have snatched from his overworked life--from the interval
between the night's performance and the {213}morning's routine--the
hours to labor over Galen and Paracelsus and Plato in the original
Greek! It was miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his forge,
in the nineteenth century--surrounded with libraries, and when books
could be had for the purchasing--could have mastered all the known
languages. But that William Shakespeare, with only two terms at
Stratford school, (or, let us say, twenty years at Stratford School, or
at the University of Oxford--for there is as much evidence that he was
at Oxford as that he was at Stratford school) _without_ books, since
there were no books purchasable, should have known every thing that was
written in books! Surely there never was such a miracle as this!
"He was the prophet of geology," says Fullom, "before it found an
exponent in Werner;"
```"O Heaven! that one might read the book of fate;
```And see the revolution of the times
```Make mountains level, and the continent
```(Weary of solid firmness) melt itself
```Into the sea! and, other times, to see
```The beechy girdle of the ocean
```Too wide for Neptune's hips." **
And yet William Shakespeare had but two terms of Hunt, Jenkins and
Stratford school! And, Mr. Malone believed, had never even gone so far
into the classics as to have read Tacitus! ***
* "History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with New
Facts and Traditions." By W. S. Fullom, London: Saunders,
Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864.
** "King Henry IV.," Part II., Act 3, Scene i.
*** See ante, p. 88.
What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous {214}Stratford school,
"two terms," of which--between his poaching and his beer-bouting--were
all the schooling William Shakespeare ever had, according to all
bis biographies. (We say, all he ever had, because his father was
so illiterate that he signed every thing with a mark, and so did his
mother, and so did the rest of William's family; and the boy William
was too busy at skylarking--according to those who knew him--to have had
much opportunity of private instruction at the parental knee, even had
the parental acquirements been adequate.) Were the theory and practice
of the common law taught there? "Legal phrases flow from his pen,"
says Mr. Grant White, "as a part of his vocabulary and parcel of his
thought.... This conveyancer's jargon ('fine and recovery,' 'tenure,'
'fee simple,' 'fee farm,' etc., etc.) could not have been picked up by
hanging around the courts in London, two hundred and fifty years ago,
when suits as to the title of real property were comparatively rare.
And, besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his early
plays, written in his first Loudon years, as in those produced at a
later period." * And not only in the technique, but in the groundwork of
that mighty and abstruse science, the law of England," is he perfect.
A chief justice of England has declared that "while novelists and
dramatists are constantly making mistakes as to the law of marriage,
of wills, and of inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he
expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor
writ of error." **
* Memoir," p. 47. And see "Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?" By H.
T-------. London: Longmans, Green, Reader A Dyer, 1871.
** "Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements," Lord Campbell, p.
108. And see "Shakespeare a Lawyer," by W. L. Rushton.
London, 1858.
Were medicine and {215}surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill * asserted in
1860 that it has been possible to compare Shakespeare's knowledge with
the most advanced knowledge of the present day. And not only in the
general knowledge of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in
these days "medical jurisprudence," the man that wrote the historical
play of Henry IV. seems to have been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown **
says that in "Frost's case" (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial for
murder, the defense set up that the deceased had committed suicide. A
celebrated physician being on the stand as an expert on this question,
was examined as follows:
Q. What are the general indications of death from violence?
A. My knowledge will not enable me to answer so broad a question.
And yet Mr. Brown points out that "William Shakespeare's knowledge had
enabled him" to answer so "broad a question:"=
```"_Warwick_. See how the blood is settled in his face!
```Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost
```Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless.
****
```But see, his face is black and full of blood;
```His eyeballs further out than when he lived,
```Staring full ghastly, like a strangled man;
```His hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling;=
* "Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare." J. C. Bucknill, M. D.
London, 1860. And see Appendix I.
** The Forum. By David Paul Brown. Philadelphia, 1856.
{216}
```His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped
```And tugged for life, and was by strength subdued. ****
```It can not be but he was murdered here;
```The least of all these signs were probable." * =
All the arts, sciences, and literatures must have been mastered by our
sleepless Shakespeare, either at Stratford school, or in the midst of
his London career, when operating two theaters, reading plays for his
stage, editing them, engrossing the parts for his actors, and acting
himself. (And Mr. Cohn will have it that in these unaccounted-for
times, he had visited Germany with his troupe and performed in all its
principal cities, coining money as he went.) ** Mr. Brown, Dr. Bell, and
others, announce that they believe that these travels of his extended
to Italy, and Mr. Thoms and Mr. Cohn, to some extent, account for
Shakespeare on the continent, by believing that, instead of going at
once to London, when fleeing from Stratford before Sir Thomas Lucy, he
enlisted under Leicester for the Netherlands in 1585, but left the ranks
for the more lucrative career of an actor. But these theories only crowd
still more thickly the brief years in which the great works (which are,
after all, what the world regards in these investigations), appeared.
* 2 Henry VI., Act 3, scene ii.
** "Shakespeare in Germany. By Albert Cohn. London and
Berlin: Asher &Co., 1865. And see Shakespeare's
Autographical Poems, by Charles Armitage Brown. Essays on
Shakespeare, by Karl Elze. London, Macmillan & Co., 1874.
The Suppose Travels of Shakespeare. Three Notelets on
Shakespeare. Thoms: London, 1865.
Either at Stratford school, or in the Blackfriars, or else by pure
{217}intuition, all this exact learning must have "been absorbed.
The classical course conducted by Hunt and Jenkins must have been far
more advanced than is common in our modern colleges, in Columbia or
Harvard, for example. For not only did Rowe and Knight find traces in
"Shakespeare" of the Electra of Sophocles, Colman of Ovid, Farmer of
Horace and Virgil, Steevens of Plautus, and White of Euripides, which
are read today in those universities; but Pope found traces of Dares and
Phrygius, and Malone of Lucretius, Status and Catullus, which are not
ordinarily used as textbooks to-day in our colleges.
The name and character of "Imogen" is derived from an Italian novel not
then--and perhaps not how--translated into English. Tschischwitz finds
in "Hamlet" the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, professor at Wittemberg
in 1583-86. All these are no stumbling-blocks to those who adhere to the
Baconian authorship.
But, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin aside, was English taught at
Stratford school? If it were, it would have been the most wonderful of
all, for, as a matter of fact in those days, and for many long years
thereafter, English was a much snubbed acquirement. The idea of
education was to read, talk, and quote Latin, Greek, and the dead
languages, the child was put to his "accidence." instead of his
horn-book, and scholars scorned to spend much time on their own
vernacular. But even should we concede that it was genius that made the
village boy master of a diction the grandest of which his mother tongue
was capable, there is a greater difficulty beyond, over which {218}the
concession will not lift us. This difficulty has been so succinctly
stated by Mr. Grant White, in his "Essay Toward the Expression of
Shakespeare's Genius," that we can not do better than quote his words.
"It was only in London that those plays could have been written. London
had but just before Shakespeare's day made its metropolitan supremacy
felt as well as acknowledged throughout England. As long as two hundred
years after that time the county of each member of Parliament was
betrayed by his tongue..... Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire
might have produced Shakespeare's mind; but had he lived in any one of
those counties, or in another, like them remote in speech as in locality
from London, and written for his rural neighbors instead of for the
audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music of his poetry
would have been lost in sounds uncouth and barbarous to the general ear,
the edge of his fine utterance would have been turned upon the stony
roughness of his rustic phraseology. His language would have been a
dialect which must needs have been translated to be understood by modern
English ears." * As Mr. White wrote these words, did it not occur to him
that, by his own chronology, ** this Warwickshire rustic came to London
with "Venus and Adonis" in his pocket, and began, almost immediately,
the production of plays, not in the Warwickshire dialect, which he had
grown up in from his birth, but in a diction that needs no translating
"to be understood by modern English ears?"
* Shakespeare's Works, Vol. I., p. cxcvi.
** Id., p. cxxi.
Robert Burns became {219}great in the dialect of his home, which he made
into music through the alembic of his genius. When, later in life, he
essayed to write in metropolitan English, says Principal Shairp, "he was
seldom more than a third-rate--a common clever versifier." * But this
uncouth Warwickshire rustic writes, as his first essay in English
composition, the most elegant verses the age produced, and which
for polish and care surpass his very latest works! Every step in
the received Shakespeare's life appears to have been a miracle: for,
according to them, the boy Shakespeare needed to be taught nothing, but
was born versed in every art, tongue, knowledge, and talent, and did
every thing without tuition or preparation.
And in the long vacation of this precious school how much our worthy
pupil--whose paternal parent was in hiding from his creditors so that
he dare not be seen at church--supplemented its curriculum by feasts of
foreign travel! For it is only the careful student of these plays
who knows or conceives either their wealth of exact reference to the
minutest features of the lands or the localities in which their actions
lie, or the conclusions to be drawn therefrom. There were no guide-books
or itineraries of Venice published until after William Shakespeare had
ceased writing for the stage: and yet, while schoolboy facts--such as
that Venice is built in the sea, or that gondolas take the place
of wheeled vehicles, or that there is a leaning tower at Pisa, or a
coliseum at Verona or Rome--are not referred to (the out-door action in
"Othello" or the "Merchant of Venice" is *
* "English Men of Letters. Robert Burns.
{220}always in a street or open place in that city, canals and gondolas
being never mentioned), the most casual, inadvertant, and trivial
details of Italian matters (such as a mere tourist, however he might
have observed, would scarcely have found of enough interest to mention
to his neighbors on returning home), are familiarly and incidentally
alluded to, making the phenomena of all this familiarity with Italy
quite too prominent to be overlooked. A poet like Samuel Rogers writes
a poem on Italy. All that is massive, venerable, and sublime; all that
touches his heart as pitiful, or appeals to his nature as sensuous and
romantic, goes down in his poem. The scenes Mr. Rogers depicts are those
which crowd most upon the cultivated tourist to-day--the past of history
that must stir the soul to enthusiasm. But here are plays, written
before the days of guide-books (and if there had been any such things,
they would have enlarged upon the same features that Mr. Rogers did),
which are at home in the unobserved details which the fullest Murray
or Baedeker find it unnecessary to mention. Portia sends her servant
Balthazar to fetch "notes and garments" of her learned cousin, Bellario,
and to meet her at the "common ferry which trades to Venice." There are
two characters named "Gobbo" in the play--a frequent Venetian name in
a certain obscure walk, and one which a mere tourist would be most
unlikely to meet with. Othello brings Desdemona from her father's house
to his residence in the "Sagittary." In "Two Gentlemen of Verona,"
Valentine is made to _embark_ at Verona for Milan, and in "Hamlet,"
Baptista is used as the name of a woman. Both of these latter were
sneered at as mistakes for some hundred years, {221}until one learned
German discovers that Baptista is not uncommonly used as a woman's name
in Italy, * and another learned German that, in the sixteenth century,
Milan and Verona were actually connected by canals, ** with which the
surface of Italy was intersected! etc., etc. Dr. Elze was made a careful
collation of these instances (which need not detain us here except by
way of reference), in an essay on the supposed travels of Shakespeare,
wherein he, from the same internal evidence, regards it certain that the
writer (William Shakespeare he calls him), not only visited Italy, but
Scotland, absorbing all he saw with the same microscopical exactness.
And were the modern languages also taught by this myriad-minded Jenkins?
Mr. Grant White says emphatically, No! "Italian and French, we may
be sure, were _not_ taught at Stratford school." *** And yet William
Shakespeare borrowed copiously from Boccaccio, Cinthio, and Belleforest.
Ulrici **** says (quoting Klein) that the author of "Romeo and Juliet"
must have read "Hadriana," a tragedy by an Italian named Groto, and Mr.
Grant White points out that Iago's speech, "Who steals my purse, steals
trash," etc., is a perfect paraphrase of a stanza in Berni's "Orlando
Innamorato," of which poem, says Mr. White, to this day (1864) there is
no English version.
* A Von Beumont. Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 21, 1870.
** Karl Elze on Shakespeare, p. 296. London. Macmillan &
Co. 1874.
*** Memoir. Works, p. xxi.
**** Vol. I, p. 253.
Mr. White furnishes a translation of {222}the stanza of Berni, which is
certainly startingly like.1 And yet Mr. White clings to his Stratford
school, where "Beeston" told Aubrey that William Shakespeare was once a
school-master. Perhaps Mr. White refuses to be converted because he has
discovered that Dr. Farmer discovered that, when, in the "Taming of the
Shrew," Tranio quotes Terence, "he is inaccurate, and gives the passage,
not as it appears in the text of the Latin dramatist, but as it is
misquoted in the Latin grammar of William Lily; a school-book in common
use among our forefathers when William Shakespeare was a boy." ** But
(though somebody has suggested that William might have risen to be "head
boy" at Stratford grammar school; and been, in that capacity, intrusted
with hearing the lessons of the smaller boys, whence the school-master
story may have arisen), the Beestou story has been rejected by all
the commentators with a unanimity of which, we believe, it is the only
instance, in case of a Shakespearean detail. So far as we know,
there has been but one effort to prove that William Shakespeare was a
university man. ***
* Ante, p. 64, note.
** Id. p. xx.
*** "Some Shakespearean and Spenserian MSS.," "American
Whig Review," December, 1851,
But if, instead of going to school, or operating a theater, William had
passed his days as a journeyman printer, he could hardly have been more
at home to the mysteries of that craft. Mr. Blades, a practical printer,
has found in the Works so many terms, technical to and employed in the
exact sense of the composing and press-rooms, that they seriously add to
{223}the enumeration of possible Shakesperean vocations. For example:=
`````"Behold, my Lords,
```Although the print be little, the whole matter
`````And copy of the father,
```The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger."=
Witness, also, the following:=
````"You are but as a form in wax, by him imprinted.
`````--_Midsummer-Night's Dream, I, 1._=
````"His heart, with your print impressed.
`````--_Lovés Labours Lost, II, 1._=
A small type, called nonpareil, was introduced into English printing
houses from Holland about the year 1650, and became admired and
preferred beyond the others in common use. It seems to have become a
favorite type with Shakespeare, who calls many of his lady characters
"Nonpareils." Prospero calls his daughter "a Nonpareil." (Tempest, Act
III, Scene 2d) Olivia, in "Twelfth Night," is the "Nonpareil of Beauty"
(Act I, Scene 5), and in Cymbeline, Posthumous is made to call Imogen
the "Nonpareil of her time" (Act II, Scene 5).
When a certain number of pages of type have been composed they are
placed in an iron frame called a "chase," laid upon an "imposing" stone,
a piece of beveled wood, called a "sidestick," is placed beside the
pages, and small wedges of beveled hard wood, called "coigns," or
"quoins," are tightly driven in, holding the pages firmly in their
places, and making a compact "form." Surely there is an allusion to this
in Pericles III, 1.=
````"By the four opposing coigns
````Which the world together joins."=
{224}Before tlie "form" is taken from the stone to be put on the press,
the quoins are made very tight with a "mallet" to insure its "lifting"
safely.=
```"There is no more conceit in him than there is in a mallet."
`````--_2 Henry IV, 2._=
which process is called "locking-up," and when completed, the form is
said, technically, to be "locked-up," or fast.=
````"fast locked-up in sleep."
`````--_Measure for Measure, IV, 2._=
And to what but the care taken by a printer to make his forms "register"
can we attribute the use of that word in Anthony and Cleopatra, Act IV.