```"But let the world rank me in register--
```A master leaver and a fugitive."=
Punctuation is a fruitful source of misunderstanding between an author
and his printer. Very few authors punctuate their manuscript as they
would wish to see it in the print, and fewer yet are apt to be good
natured and satisfied when the printer punctuates for them. William
Shakespeare may have remembered this when he wrote:=
````"Wherefore stand you on nice points?"
`````--_3 Henry VI, iv, 7_.=
````"Stand a comma 'tween their amities."
`````--_Hamlet, V, 2._=
````"My point and period,... ill or well."
`````--_Lear, IV 7._=
````"points that seem impossible."
`````--_Pericles, V, 1._=
{225}
````"Puts the period often from his place."
`````--_Lucrece, line 565._=
```"You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent."
````"No levelled malice infests one comma."
`````-- _Timon, I, 1._=
```"Come we to full points here? And are et ceteras nothing?"=
Possibly a book-worm, or even a bookseller might draw as many similes as
Shakespeare did, from books--as for example:=
```"Show me your image in some antique book."
`````_--Sonnet, 1. ix._=
```"Has a book in his pocket with red letters in it."
`````--_2 Henry VI, ix, 2._=
````"My red dominical--my golden letter!"
`````--_Loves Labours Lost, V, 2._=
referring to the rubricated editions of books so common in the seventh
century, or the golden letters used in the calendar; or again,=
```"To place upon the volume of your deeds
```As in a title-page, your worth of arms."
`````--_Pericles, 77, 3._=
```"This man's brow, like to a title-leaf,
```Foretells the nature of a tragic volume."
`````--_2 Henry IV, i, 1._=
But in the following:=
```"The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear."
`````--_Sonnet, 1. xxvii._=
it is hard to be persuaded that direct allusion is not {226}made to the
English custom (which still obtains, as any body may see for himself by
opening a book printed--wherever published--in England) of placing the
typographer's imprint upon the vacant or extra leaf or leaves--where
the text runs short, at the end of the volume; just as, if an American
publisher, who buys a hundred copies of an English work, may stipulate
to have his imprint put upon the title-page (or, perhaps, print his
own title-page in this country), the last page of the book itself will
invariably reveal whether the actual manufacture was in England or not;
an analogy which implies technical information. An image employed by
Othello, who takes his wife's hand in his, and says,=
```"Here's a young and sweating devil."
`````--_Othello, III. 4._=
is, Mr. Blades thinks, misunderstood. If his wife's palm was the
messenger, as Othello suspected, of her desires to Cassio, there would
be some propriety--from a printer's standpoint--in calling it "a devil,"
for a printer's "devil" is his messenger or errand boy: though another
meaning is not so far fetched in sound to a non-professional.
We have mentioned that the Stationer's Company was a fraternity composed
only of monopolists, each of whom had a monopoly, from the crown, of the
printing of certain books. It was a part of their duty to give notice of
this monopoly upon every impression of the book, precisely as the
notice of copyright entry is obliged by law to be printed to-day upon
copyrighted books. The entry was to be expressed, after the printer's
name, or at least, conspicuously on the {227}title-page, in the formula,
"_cum privilégia ad imprimendum solum;_" and as the formula was to be
incessantly used it was undoubtedly "kept standing" in the composing
room.
It is curious to notice, in the "Taming of the Shrew," Act iv., Scene 4,
the recurrence of this formula in a speech of Biondello:
_Bion._ I can not tell; except they are busied about a counterfeit
assurance; take you assurance of her cum privilegio ad im-primendum
solum to the church.
It is to be noticed that the word "counterfeit" in the above speech,
was a printer's term in those days; and, used in the printer's technical
sense, would be applicable; for Biondello is counseling Lucertio to
marry Bianca out of hand, and without waiting for her father and his
counselor who are discussing the marriage treaty. A "counterfeit" was a
reprint (as we would say now, a "reprint in fac-simile"). *
* Marabren's Parallel List of technical Typographical
Terms--art., "Counterfeit." We take the above from Mr.
Blades' "Shakespeare and Typography." London, 1872.
Again: it might be supposed that a country lad should know the ways
of dogs and birds and beasts and creeping things. But it happens to be
human experience that the country lad is the least likely person to
turn out a naturalist. It is much more probable that some over-worked
shoemaker, in some rare escape from his city garret, should find his
thoughts awakened by watching an ant-hill, and succeed in years in
making himself an entomologist; than that the farmer's boy, who
catches bugs every day to bait his fish-hook, should turn out an
entomolo{228}gist; just as it is not the farmer's daughter, but the
fashionable young lady from town who tramps the fields and tears her
hands for wild-flowers or wets her feet for the pond lilies. But whoever
wrote the plays had found time to learn all the ways of these. Says
Bottom, to Cobweb, the fairy, in "Midsummer Wight's Bream,"
"Monsieur, get your weapons in your hand and kill me a red-hipped
bumblebee on the top of a thistle." In the United States as well as
England, there is no more likely place to find a bumblebee in midsummer
than on a thistle. In "Much Ado about Nothing," Benedict says to
Margaret "Thy wit is as quick as a greyhound's mouth. It catches." The
peculiarity of a greyhound is that, unlike other dogs, it is able to
catch game in its mouth as it runs; other hounds must stop to do this.
In "As You Like It," Celia tells Rosalind that Monsieur Le Beau, who
comes with his mouth full of news, will feed it to them "as pigeons feed
their young," and Rosalind replies, "Then we shall be news crammed."
Pigeons bring food to their young in their crops, and cram it down their
young ones' throats, as no other birds do. In "Twelfth Night" the
clown tells Viola that "fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to
herrings--the husband's the bigger." The pilchard closely resembles the
herring, but is thicker and heavier, with larger scales. In the same
play Maria says of Malvolio, "Here comes the trout which must be caught
with tickling." Expert anglers know that by gently tickling a trout's
sides and belly, it can be so mesmerized as to be taken out of the water
with the hand. In "As you Like It," we have the lines "For look where
Beatrice, like the lapwing, runs close by the ground to hear our
confer{229}ence." The lapwing is a kind of plover which is very swift of
foot and which, when trying to avoid being seen, keeps its head close
to the ground as it runs. Says Lear's fool, "The hedge-sparrow fed
the cuckoo so long that it had its head bit off by its young." The
hedge-sparrow in England is a favorite bird for the cuckoo to impose its
young upon. In "All's Well that Ends Well," Lafeu says of Farolles "I
took this lark for a bunting." The English bunting is a field bird of
the same form and color as the lark, but inferior as a singer. And so
the figures are always accurate, "the ousel-cock so black of hue,"
"the throstle with his note so true," "the wren with little quill,"
"the russet-pated chough, rising and cawing at the guns report." And so
of flowers, as when Perdita speaks of=
`````--daffodils,
````That come before the swallow dares, and take
```The winds of March with beauty--=
the writer knew that in England the daffodil blooms in February and
March, while the swallow never appears until April. In none of the
allusions to nature or natural phenomena in the plays, is there any
such thing as guess work. * Now, what was the necessity for all this
technical, geographical, botanical, and occult learning, in a simple
drama thrown off by an Elizabethan dramatist, earning his living by
catering to an Elizabethan audience? It was not only unnecessary, but
almost fatal to his success. The Elizabethan audience did not want
scientific treatises.
* And see further "The natural History of the Insects
mentioned in Shakespeare," by R. Paterson. London: A. K.
Newman & Co., Leadenhall street, "The natural
History of the Insects mentioned in Shakespeare," by R.
Paterson. London: A. K. Newman & Co., Leadenhall street,
1841.
But {230}nothing--from governmental polity to the stuffing of a
fowl--from processes of the human mind to the management of kitchen
gardens--was too small or rude for a philosopher's (let us say for
Francis Bacon's) vast purposes. How otherwise are they to be accounted
for?
That Shakespeare borrowed Greene's famous "sea-coast" is a point
either way. If he took it supposing that Bohemia had a sea-coast, the
omnipotent knowledge assigned him by his worshipers failed him at least
once. And if he knew (as is now claimed, though on what authority we
know not), that Bohemia once possessed provinces on the Adriatic, he
knew, as usual, what the acute research of three hundred years has only
just developed. And was agriculture taught at this Stratford school,
and politics and the art of war?1 And was there any thing that William
Shakespeare did not know? We are entitled to ask these questions, for
it must be remembered that, before the appearance of the Shakespearean
dramas, there was practically no literature written in the English
tongue. To use the words of Macauley, "A person who did not read Latin
and Greek could read nothing, or next to nothing.... The Italian was the
only modern language which possessed any thing that could be called
a literature." ** One possessing, then, merely "small Latin and less
Greek," could not have written "Shakespeare." Still less could he have
written it out of Gower and Chaucer, and the {231}shelf-full of English
hooks that made up all there was in English letters.
* See "Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?" Three Notelets on
Shakespeare, by Wm. J. Thoms, London. John Russell Smith,
1865.
** Essays. Lord Bacon.
But if the Stratford grammar-school confined its teachings to the pages
of the English bible alone, it worked wonders, for Bishop Wadsworth
goes so far as to declare, that "take the entire range of English
literature--put together our best authors, who have written on subjects
not professedly religious, and we shall not find, I believe, in them
all, printed so much evidence of the Bible being read and used, as in
Shakespeare alone." * Yet William Shakespeare had little opportunity for
self-education, except these two terms at Stratford school; he was a
lad-of-all-work at the Bankside Theater, when a mere child. He was only
fifty-two years old when he died. He was one of several partners in
certain theatrical establishments in London, in the years when he must
have put all this multitudinous learning, he had carried in his head
so long, on paper. He was so active, industrious, and shrewd in
those years, that he alone of the partners was able to retire with a
fortune--to purchase lands and a grant of arms for his father (whence
he himself might become an esquire by descent); and, in the years of
leisure after his retirement, he wrote only three or four epitaphs,
which no other graduate of Stratford school would probably have cared to
claim.
* Shakespeare's use of the Bible. By Charles Wadsworth, p.
345. London. Smith Elder & Co., 1880.
It has only been within the last few years that hardy spirits--like
Nathaniel Holmes--whose education has led them to look judicially
backward from effects to causes--and whose experience had impressed
{232}them with the idea that most effects come in natural procession
from causes somewhere--were courageous enough to seek the solution of
this mystery--not in what is called the "internal evidence" of the plays
themselves, but in the circumstances and surroundings, that is to say,
in the external evidence of their date and production.
The Baconian theory is simply that, so far as the records of the
Elizabethan period are accessible, there was but one man in England, at
the date at which this Shakespearean literature appeared, who could have
produced it. * The history of Bacon's life, his massive acquirements,
his profound scholarship even as a child: his advantages of foreign
travel, his ambitious acquaintance with the court: and, joined to all,
his dire necessities and his successive retirements (the dates of which,
when collated, coincide with the dates at which the plays--tallying in
matter with the circumstantial surroundings of Bacon's life as,
for example, Shylock appeared at about the time when Bacon was most
helplessly in the toils of what he calls "the Lombardo"):--all this need
not be recapitulated here. He was born and bred in the atmosphere of
libraries. While William Shakespeare was poaching on Avon banks, the
little Francis was impressed with the utter inadequacy of Aristotle's
method to grapple with {233}modern needs, and meditating its superseding
with labors of his own.
* Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor
of discovering the author been imposed upon after-
generations, I think we could have found no one of that day
but Bacon to whom to assign this crown. In this case it
would have been resting now on his head by almost common
consent."--(W. H. Furness to Judge Holmes, third edition of
"Authorship of Shakespeare," p. 628).
The gray-haired Queen, who in youth had called him her little Lord
Keeper, will not lift a hand to aid him in his poverty, or to advance
him in the State, regarding him as a man of study rather than of
practice and experience; and so Bacon is known to have remained,
bemoaning (as he himself says in a letter to Burleigh, written in 1592)
"the meanness of my [his] estate; for though I can not accuse myself
that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend,
nor my course to get." * This is the very year, 1592, in which Robert
Greene "discovers that a new poet has arisen who is becoming the only
shake-scene in a county;" and so far forgets himself as to become
"jealous" of "William Shakespeare, who, up to this time, has only been
a "Johannes Factotum," of not much account until he borrows "our
feathers." ** And so, until 1611, Bacon is driven to the Jews. Why
should he not, in his pressing necessity for "lease of quick revenue,"
bethink him of the resources within himself, and seek a cover
whereunder--without embarrassing his hope of future preferment--he may
turn into gold his years of study and travel, by means of a quick pen?
In 1611, when he is suddenly created attorney-general, the Shakespearean
plays cease abruptly, to appear no more for ever. William Shakespeare
closes out his theatrical interest in London, and retires, to
moneylending (as some say), in Stratford. He dies in 1616.
* Speckling, "Letters and Life of Bacon," vol. i, p. 108.
** Ante, p. 125
Lord Bacon reaches his highest pinnacle of greatness, {234}and falls, in
1621. In 1623, while Bacon is again spending his time in the strictest
privacy and retirement, there suddenly appears a folio, "The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare," amended, revised, enlarged, and improved,
including at least seventeen (Mr. Smith says twenty-three) plays which
had never appeared or been heard of in Shakespeare's lifetime.
Few of us--outside the ranks of commentators, like Mr. Grant White, and
others, who give their valuable lives to this study--dream how vast were
the emendations and revisions, enlargements and corrections of the old
Shakespearean plays given to the world in this folio of 1623. Mr. White
says that in the one play of "Love's Labours Lost" there are inserted
newlines in almost every speech.1 Another, "The Merry Wives of Windsor,"
according to Knight, ** has double the number of lines it originally
possessed in 1600. The "Henry V." has nineteen hundred new lines. The
"Titus Andronicus" has an entire scene added, and the "Much Ado about
Nothing" and "The Lear" are so altered and elaborated, with curtailment
here and enlargement there, as to lead Mr. Knight to declare that "none
but the hand of the master could have superadded them." *** But, if
William Shakespeare was the "master," how did his hand reach up out of
the grave under Stratford chancel, where it had rested seven years, to
make these improvements?
* Cited by Holmes, "Authorship of Shakespeare," third
edition, p. 71.
** "Studies of Shakespeare," p. 337.
*** Id.
And if William Shakespeare in his lifetime made those revisions for
Heminges and Condell (who appear on the title-page of this folio of
1623 as editors, and an{235}nounce in the preface that this edition is
printed from the "true original copies") at Stratford (where, according
to his own inventory, he had neither library nor books--nor bookcase,
nor writing table, for that matter), why did he not print them himself,
for his own benefit, instead of performing all this labor of emendation
for somebody else? He could not have been fearful lest he would lose
money by them, for they had been the foundation and source of all his
fortune. Nor had he grown, in his old age, indifferent to gain (let the
ghost of the poor "delinquent for malt delivered" assure us of that!).
He could not have revised them for pure glory: for, in his previous
career, while in London, he had shown no interest in them, permitting
them to be surreptitiously printed by whoever, in the same town with
himself, listed so to do. He had even allowed them to be mixed up with
other people's trash, his name signed to all indifferently, and the
whole made footballs of by the London printers, under his very nose,
without so much as lifting a voice in protest, or to declare which were
his and which were not. * Besides, if he had revised them for the glory
of his own name, why did he not cause them to be printed? Nor can we
suppose that he was employed to revise them, for pay, by Heminges and
Condell, because, if they did so employ him, why did they carry the
expense of the revision for seven long years, until he and his wife
were both in their graves, before reimbursing themselves by printing the
first folio for the market!
* See post, "The New Theory," where it appears that, at the
time Shakespeare was producing certain plays on his stage,
certain others were being printed and circulated, as his,
outside.
Last, and most wonderful {236}of all, in this first folio are included
all these entirely new plays which had never been heard of before! Who
wrote those, and why? The answer to these riddles, the Baconians say,
is that, when again at leisure, Bacon bethought himself of his scattered
progeny, and--whether proposing to publicly own them or not--whether to
secure them for posterity or merely for his own pastime--he devoted that
leisure to a revision of the works by means of which he had bridged
the first long interval in his career. At any rate, when the revision
appeared, it is matter of fact that William Shakespeare was dead and in
his grave, and speculation has nothing to do with that.
Besides the coincidence of the plays appearing during Bacon's first
retirement: ceasing altogether at his first elevation, and appearing in
revised and improved form again after his final downfall, and during his
second privacy, the Baconians cite: I. Contemporary statements,
which include (A), Sir Tobie Matthew's famous postscript: * "The most
prodigious wit of these times is of your name, though he be known by
another" (which Mr. Weiss ** explains, very lamely in our opinion, by
arguing that the _other_ name by which Bacon was known, and to which
Matthew alludes, was "_Viscount St. Albans_); (B), a letter from Bacon
* Bacon was in the habit of sending certain of his lighter
manuscripts to Sir Tobie, and this postscript was appended
to a letter acknowledging the receipt of Bacon's "great and
esteemed favor of the 9th of April."
** "Wit, Humor and--Shakespeare." By John Weiss. Boston.
Roberts Brothers, 1876. Matthew writes this in a letter
acknowledging receipt of a volume sent him by Bacon. If that
volume was a copy of the "First Folio," the postscript would
be intelligible.
him{237}self, to Sir John Davies, who is going to meet the new king
James (with whom Bacon is striving for favor, looking to his own
preferment), in which he commits to Sir John's "faithful care and
discretion" his interests at court, and adds, "So, asking you to be good
to concealed poets, I continue," etc., etc.; * II. Evidence by way of
Innuendo, including another of Matthew's postscripts (the one in which
he writes to Bacon, "I will not return you weight for weight, but
measure for measure," etc.); also, perhaps, the injunctions of secrecy
in Bacon's own letters to Matthew, to "be careful of the writings
submitted to you, that no one see them." There is, besides, in many
of Bacon's preserved letters something suggestive of a "curious
undermeaning, impressing the reader with an idea of more than appears on
the surface." The idea of the stage, as a figure of speech, occurs in a
letter to the Queen: "Far be it from me to stage myself," etc.; and in
one to lady Buckingham, "I do not desire to stage myself but for the
comfort of a private life," etc. "Dramatic poesy," he declares, "is as
history made visible." Writing to Matthew, he refers to a "little work
of my recreation;" and Matthew, in return, banters him on writing many
things "under another name." This is in 1609, and no more "Shakespeare"
plays appear until Othello, in 1621. The Jonson obituary verse--in which
occur the encomiums so rung in our ears by the Shakespeareans (and which
we have--earlier in these pages--seen was all they really had behind
them), which we have thought could be most easily explained on the "_nil
mortuis nisi bonum_" theory--are also
* Holmes, "Authorship of Shakespeare,"
{238}regarded, we believe, by the Baconians, as Innuendo. *
III. The Parallelisms. That is to say, an almost identity of
phraseology, found in both the Baconian and Shakespearean writings. The
best list of these is to be found in Judge Holmes' book, covering some
twenty-five closely-printed pages. ** Of the value of this latter class
of evidence, it is for every reader to judge for himself; but that a
writer of exact science and moral philosophy should plagiarize from
the theater, or the theater from the writer of exact science and moral
philosophy; or (still more improbable) that two contemporary authors,
in the full glare of the public eye, should select each other's works
to habitually and regularly plagiarize upon, are altogether, it seems to
the Baconians, out of the question.
* It is curious to find the Baconians appealing to this
"best evidence" for the other side. But they read it as an
Innuendo. For example, the verses--
"Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage Or
influence, cheer the crooping stage!
Which--since thy flight from hence, hath-mourned like night
And despaired day--but for thy volume's light--"
they say, do not and can not, refer to William Shakespeare
at all. For this was published in 1623, and William
Shakespeare had been dead seven years. He could not "shine
forth" again, except figuratively, in his volume, and this
he already does by the publication of his works, and is
admitted to do in the next line, where it is said that but
for "thy volume's light" the stage would "mourn in night."
The Baconians, who believe that Ben Jonson himself was the
"Heminges and Condell" who edited the first folio, regarded
this whole poem as a sop to Bacon, on Ben Jonson's part.
** Pp. 306-326.
[Ill 0237]
[Ill 0238]
But even the conceiving of so unusual a state of affairs as a political
philosopher and playwright contracting together to mutually plagiarize
from each other's writ{239}ings would hardly account for the coincidence
between the cottage scene (Act IV, Scene 3) in "A Winter's Tale," and
Bacon's "Essay on Gardens," in which he maintained that "there ought to
be gardens for all the months of the year; in which severally things of
beauty may be in their season," which he proceeds to suggest:
{240}Were we assured that the prose in the left-hand column was the
poet's first rough notes for the exquisite poetry in the second, would
there be any internal evidence for doubting it? And when it appears
that "The Essay on Gardens" was not printed until 1625, nine years after
William Shakespeare's death and burial, and two years after an edition
of his alleged plays, rewritten and revised, had appeared (when so
deliberate a "steal" would hardly be profitable), the exoteric evidence
seems at least to command attention.
A coincidence between a passage in "The Advancement of Learning" and in
the play of "Troilus and Cressida," Act II., Scene 2 (which, we shall
see later on, first appeared in print, advertised as the work of a
novice, in 1609, thereafter, within a few months, to be reissued as by
William Shakespeare *--who was not, at the date of that edition, either
a novice or a first appearance), is worth pausing to tabulate:
That the manager of a theater, in dressing up a play for the evening's
audience (and _such_ an audience) should tuck in an allusion to
Aristotle, to "catch the ** {241}ear of the groundlings"
* Post, "The New Theory."
** It is to be noticed that no similarity of style in these opposed
extracts is alleged or relied upon.
--or, finding it already in, should not have
a sufficient acquaintance with Aristotle to scent an impropriety and
take it out--is no less or no more absurd than that a philosopher,
in composing so profound and weighty an essay as the "Advancement of
Learning," should go to a cheap play-house for his reference to the
Greek sage. If Bacon _did_ attend the theater that night to learn the
opinion of Aristotle (whom he had criticised at college at the age of
fifteen) on young blood and philosophy, he was misled, for Aristotle
said not that young men ought not to _hear moral_, but ought not to
_study political_ philosophy. And the error itself is proof positive--it
seems to the Baconians--of an identical source for the two passages.
It must not be forgotten, however, that the evidence from these
coincidences is cited not to an Anti-Shakespearean case--which is purely
historical--but as cumulative to the Baconian case alone. And yet,
though the evidence from the "parallelisms" is the least forcible of
any presented by the Baconians, so systematically do they occur that the
ablest Baconian writer (Judge Holmes) claims that he has been able to
reduce them to an ordo, and to know precisely where to expect them, by
reference merely to a history of the life of Lord Bacon, and the date of
the production. "When I got your 'Letters and Life of Bacon," he writes
to Mr. Spedding, "and read that fragment of a masque; having the dates
of all the plays in my mind, I felt quite sure at once in which I should
find that same matter, if it appeared anywhere (as I expected it would)
and went first straight to the 'Midsummer-Night's Dream,' and there came
upon it, in the second {242}act, so palpably and unmistakably that I
think nothing else than a miracle could shake my belief in it."1 The
facts that Lord Bacon expressed himself to the effect that the best way
of teaching history was by means of the drama; that there is a connected
and continuous series of historical plays (covering by reigns the entire
period of the War of the Roses), in the Shakespearean drama from 'King
John,' by way of prelude--in which the legitimate heir to the throne
is set aside, and the nation plunged into civil war--to 'Richard III.'
where the two roses are finally united in one line in Henry VI., and
winding up with the reign of Henry VIII.--wherein, as a grand finale
to the whole, the splendor of the new line is shown in its reunited
vigor"--which (with but one hiatus, the missing reign of Henry VII.) is
one complete cycle of English history: and that, on searching among the
remains of Francis Bacon, a manuscript "History of Henry VII." is
found, which might well be the minutes for a future drama (the opening
paragraph of which seems to be a recapitulation of the last scene of
the Richard III. of the dramas), is certainly startling. Not necessarily
connected with this discovery is the further fact that Mr. Spodding has
found, in the library of Northumberland house, among certain of Bacon's
manuscripts, a slip of paper, upon which is scrawled eight times, in a
clerky hand (not Bacon's), the name "William Shakespeare," together with
the names of certain of the known Shakespearian Historical plays, and of
certain (as Judge Holmes conjectures) other plays not now
* "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, p. 621.
{243}known. * But there is nothing in this discovery more startling than
the numberless other coincidences--if they be nothing more--which Judge
Holmes has massed in his scholarly work.
Henry Chettle, in 1603, in his "England's Mourning Garment (a rhyme),"
wonders that "Melicert does not drop a single sable tear" over the
death of "Our Elizabeth." It might, indeed, seem strange had William
Shakespeare (supposing these lines to apply to him) been the favorite he
is said to have been with Elizabeth. But, while neither Shakespeare
nor Bacon sing mortuary strains, of the two (if these stories about
Elizabeth's love for Shakespeare are true) it is certainly not strange
that Bacon did not; for Bacon, at least, had no cause to idolize his
queen.
Ben Jonson's eulogies of Shakespeare, in verse, nowhere surpass, as we
have seen, his eulogies of Bacon, in prose. He calls Lord Bacon "the
acme of our language," and, as Mr. Thompson suggests, "no pinnacle has
two acmes."
"On every variety of court enfolding," continues that writer, "was Bacon
daily employed, writing in others' names; and, if we do not think worse
of Plato for personating Socrates, or of Cicero for personating Cato,"
neither should ill be thought of Bacon for borrowing a name "to cover
his aim," etc.2 Meanwhile, "this acme of our language 'was poor and a
borrower." In 1605, is published an anonymous pamphlet, called "Ratsei's
Ghost."
* Holmes' "Authorship of Shakespeare," 3d edition, pp. 657-
-682.
*** The Renascence Drama, p. 59.
In it, one Ratsei, a highwayman, is about to be hung, and gives some
parting advice to a strolling player; tells {244}him to go to London,
where he would learn to be frugal and thrifty; to feed upon all men, hut
let none feed on him; make his hand stranger to his pocket, his heart
slow to perform his tongue's promise; and when he felt his purse well
lined, to buy some place of lordship in the country; that, growing weary
of playing, his money may then bring him to dignity and reputation; that
he need care for no man--no, not for them that before made him proud
with speaking their words on the stage.
"If this satirical passage," says Mr. Thompson, "plainly alludes to him
who went to London very meanly, and came, in time, to be exceedingly
wealthy, it confirms Greene's saying, that Shakespeare made his money by
_acting_, not by writing, plays, and by usury." *
As to Miss Bacon's question, "What did William Shakespeare do with
Bacon's manuscripts?" Mr. Thompson ** seems to think that they may
yet be brought to light. They "appear to have been so many times
hypothetically burned, at Stratford, in the Globe theater, the London
fire, by their owners (by purchase) at the play-house, to hinder rivals
from using them," that Mr. Thompson argues that "it is probable they
are still to the fore." Bacon's Will directs certain papers laid away in
boxes, cabinets, and presses, to be collected, sealed up, and put away,
"so as not to have them ready for present publication."
* Id., p. 200.
* Renascence Drama, or History made Visible. By "William
Thompson. Melbourne, 1880.
He was "not ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less pains
and embracement (perhaps), yield more luster and reputation to my name,
than those other which I {245}have in hand." They could bide their time,
and, since William Shakespeare and his fellows do not dispose of them,
the inference is that they were not allowed to retain them.
The Baconian theory, it is to be noticed, is quite indifferent as
to whether William Shakespeare, on first turning up at London, found
employment (as Mr. Grant White asserts) in his "cousin's law-office"
or not: or whether, at any stage in his career, either in Stratford
or London, he was an attorney's clerk, hard 'prentice at the trade of
"noverint." (By which slur Mr. Fullom believes that Nash meant, not that
Shakespeare was a "noverint," but that the young "nove-rints" of the
time were "Shakespeare's;" that is to say, that they scribbled, out of
hand, for the stage.) The Shakespearean problem is neither increased nor
diminished by the proposition; even an attorney's clerk could not have
written all the Shakespearean pages. Should it be necessary, however,
to find a law-student in London who could have managed some of them, why
not allow Francis Bacon his claim among the rest? He has, at least,
this advantage of his rival; that, while it is the general impression
now-a-days that William Shakespeare was not a law-student, as a matter
of fact Francis Bacon _was_. *
* And too good a law student, we think, to have written the
law in the "Merchant of Venice." For, although Lord Bacon
was apt to discover the public feeling, and quick to array
himself on the right side (and spitting at Jews has always
been accounted of Gentiles for righteousness), he must have
seen that Shylock had a standing in court on the merits of
his case.
But Portia begins her extraordinary (according to common law
at least) judgment by deciding for the Jew in that, not
having paid the principal sum, Antonio must suffer in the
foreclosure of the mortgage, as it were, upon his person.
This is against the letter of any known law, which gives an
equity of redemption to the debtor in all such cases. Her
next decision is, that the Jew has his election between the
principal sum and the penalty, and that, with his election,
not the law itself can interfere. This, again, is not law;
for the law abhors a penalty, and even in a foreclosure will
not allow the debtor to be mulcted in more than the face of
his debt, interest, and costs. But now, having decided,
against all law, for the Jew, Portia begins deciding for the
Christian, and the first point she makes is that, when
Shylock takes his pound, he must not take a hair's weight
more or less, nor yet one ounce of blood. This, again, is
clearly not law, since it is an eternal principle of
jurisprudence that, when the law grants any thing it also
grants everything that is necessary to the conversion of
that thing to possession (as, when it grants a farm, it
likewise tacitly grants a right of way to that farm). So, if
Shylock had had any title to his pound of flesh, he would
certainly have had a title to draw as much blood as it was
absolutely necessary to draw in cutting out that pound, and
such portions of flesh over and above a pound as it would be
absolutely necessary to cut out, providing the cutting out
was done by a skillful operator and not a bungler. Astounded
at this turn of the tide, Shylock deliberates, and finally
cries, "Well, give me my principal and let me go!" Portia
thereupon renders her fourth decision, which is the most
astounding of all--namely, that, having once refused a
tender of the money in open court, the Jew is not entitled
to change his mind and take it! Since the days of Moses--
certainly since the days of Littleton--a tender has never
quite destroyed a debt, but only the interest and costs
accruing upon it, after the tender! Such a glaring and high-
handed sacrifice of common law and common sense to stage
effect might have been conceived of by a manager anxious for
the plaudits and pence of a crowded house, scarcely by a
future lord chancellor of England.
{246}As to the bibliography of the Baconian theory, there are two
volumes which will probably always remain its text-books, viz., Judge
Holmes's book, of which the first edition appeared in 1862; and Mr.
Smith's, printed in 1857, which made a convert of {247}Lord Palmerston.
Mr. Wilkes's exceedingly fresh and readable work, "Shakespeare from an
American Point of View," and Mr. King's "Bacon versus Shakespeare; a
Plea for the Defendant," as textbooks on the other side, could hardly
be expected to produce much disorder in Messrs. Holmes and Smith's stern
and compact columns of facts and argument.
Mr. Wilkes * decides off-hand against this Baconian theory at the start,
and then goes on, like his predecessors, to construct a Shakespeare to
suit himself. It is to his praise that he has endeavored to construct
this Shakespeare out of the Shakespearean pages, rather than to have
unreined his fancy. But he makes his own particular Shakespeare,
nevertheless. The Wilkes Shakespeare is a Romanist. We consider this to
William Shakespeare's praise, for to be a good Romanist is to be a good
Christian, and to be one in a Protestant reign is to be a consistent
Christian as well. But this is all the good Mr. Wilkes's Shakespeare is.
Beyond that he is base-born, a man despised of his equals, and a flunkey
and tidewaiter at the knees of an aristocracy to which he can not
attain--an obscene jester, etc., etc.--and this author he calls
Shakespeare. Such a one, whoever he is, is neither Bacon nor Raleigh, at
all events. In 1880, Mr. Thompson, of Melbourne, Australia, published a
volume, "Renascence Drama; or, History made Visible," ** devoted to an
accumulation of fact and argument--rather than to a presentation of the
case already made--in favor of the Baconian theory.
* Shakespeare from an American Point of View. New York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1877.
** Melbourne: Sands & McDougall, Collins street, west,
1880.
Mr. {248}Thompson aims to answer the more refined objections to that
theory, by showing that Bacon's mind and art rather overgrasped than
undergrasped the matter and form of these Shakespearean drama, and
his work is an extremely valuable and charming contribution to the
pro-Baconian view.
In his abounding zeal for "our Shakespeare," Mr. King * gives us much
eulogy, very little argument, and remakes but one or two points, namely,
that a large proportion of the Shakespearean characters are made to bear
Warwickshire names, such as Ford, Page, Evans, Hugh, Oliver, Sly, Marion
Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, Curtis, Burton Heath, Fluellen,
Bar-dolph, and so on; and that certain expressions which have puzzled
commentators, such as "make straight" (meaning "make haste"), "quoth"
(meaning "went"), the use of the word "me" in place of "for me," "old"
for "frequent," etc., are Warwickshire expressions, and current in no
other parts of England. But, as anybody can see, the majority of these
are far from being uncommon names, and are quite as prevalent in New
York, for example, as they are or were in Warwickshire. And if, as
has been suggested, Mr. Manager Shakespeare dressed up his friends'
dialogues for his own stage, and tucked in the clowns and jades, this
usage of Warwick names might well be accounted for.
* Bacon and Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant. By-
Thomas King. Montreal: Lovell Printing and Publishing
Company, 1875.
Four of these names are taken out of "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and
three of them from the induction to the "Taming of the Shrew"--matter in
the composition of which Shakespeare or {249}any other playwright might
have had the largest hand, without entitling himself to any Olympus. And
if, in the dressing up, Shakespeare inserted a clown or a sot here and
there, to make sport, what would be more natural than that he should put
into their mouths the _argot_ he had grown up amid in his boyhood, and
make the drunken turnkey in "Macbeth" to say, with hiccoughs, "If a man
were porter of hell-gate, he should have _old_ turning the key?" For, as
Mr. King can see for himself, the cardinals and kings do not use these
phrases; nor, we may add, are the surnames he particularizes ever
bestowed on them, but only on the low-comedy characters of the plays.
Surely, if William Shakespeare ever were forced "upon the country," as
the lawyers say, as against my Lord Bacon, he would wish his case to the
jury rather without Mr. King's "plea" than with it. As a "plea" on
any side of an historical question, it is, to be sure, nothing, if not
candid; but, as a personal appeal to posterity to, willy-nilly, believe
that certain players and others in the age of Elizabeth knew not guile,
it is touching and beautiful in the extreme. "Who shall, say Heminges
and Condell lied?" * "Could rare Ben Jonson, who is worthy of our love
and respect, have lied?" **
* "Bacon versus Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant."
By-Thomas King. Montreal, and Rouse's Point, New York:
Lovell Printing, etc., Company, 1875, p. 9.
** Ibid., p. 10. Heminges and Condell "profess that 'they
have done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of
so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.'
Yet their utter negligence, shown in their fellow's volume,
is no evidence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of
their care or their intelligence. The publication was not, I
fear, so much an offering of friendship as a pretext to
obtain the copyright.' (Disraeli, "Amenities of Authors--
Shakespeare.")
Did Shakespeare practice a deceit upon his {250}noble and generous
patron? Could _he_ be guilty of a lie?" * And so on. To much the same
effect (the reverence due the name "Shakespeare," the improbability
of Jonson and others telling an untruth, etc.) is an anonymous volume,
"Shakespeare not an Impostor, by an English Critic," ** published in
1857; and finally, in 1877, was published a paper, read before the Royal
Society of Literature, by C. M. Ingleby, M. A., LL.D., a vice-president
*** of the same. Dr. Ingleby is severe upon all anti-Shakespeareans,
whose minds he likens to "Macadam's sieves," which "retain only those
ingredients which are unsuited to the end in view" (whatever that may
mean), and thinks that "the profession of the law has the inevitable
effect of fostering the native tendency of such minds." Unlike the
others, however, Dr. Ingleby does not confine himself to expressions
of his interest in the anti-Shakespeareans "as examples of
wrong-headedness," but attempts an examination of the historical
testimony. In favor of the Shakespearean authorship, he names seven
witnesses, viz., John Harrison, Francis Meres, Robert Greene, Henry
Chettle, Heminges, Condell, and Ben Jonson. John Harrison was the
printer (publisher) who published the "Venus and Adonis" in 1593, and
the "Lucrece" in 1594.
* Ibid., p. 13.
** George Townsend (according to Allibone), London: G.
Routledge & Co., Farringdon street, 1857.
*** "Shakespeare: The Man and the Book." London: Josiah
Adams, Trubner & Co., 1877, Part L, p. 38. "The Authorship
of the Works attributed to Shakespeare."
Each of these was without {251}an author's name on the title-page,
though each was dedicated to Southampton, in an address dedicatory,
signed "William Shakespeare." This is all that the Harrison evidence
amounts to, except that Dr. Ingleby says, "It is to me quite incredible
that Harrison would have done this unless Shakespeare had written the
dedications, or at least had been a party to them." * As to Meres,
anybody can see by reading him that he wrote as a _critic_, and not
as an historian. ** To subpoena Greene as a witness to Shakespeare's
genius, is at least a bold stroke; for, as has been seen, Greene is very
emphatic to the effect that William Shakespeare was a mere "Johannes
Factotum," or Jack-of-all-trades, who trained in stolen plumage, and
the Shakespeareans (Dr. Ingleby alone excepted) have universally exerted
themselves to break the force of this testimony by proving Greene a
drunkard, jealous, etc. *** Greene {252}was a graduate of Cambridge--a
learned man--"one of the fathers," says Lamb, "of the English stage."
* Ibid., p. 42.
** "Palladis Tamia, Wit's Commonwealth," 1598.
*** That Robert Greene was much more than a drunkard and a
pretender, but that, to the contrary, he had many admirers
who were not unaware of the effrontery of his debtor,
Shakespeare, a search among the old literature of the day
would reveal. In a quarto tract, dated 1594, "Greene's
Funeralls, by R. B., Gent.," is a copy of verses, the last
stanza of which runs:
"Greene is the pleasing object of an eye
Greene pleased the eye of all that looked upon him;
Greene is the ground of every painter's dye,
Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him:
Nay, more; the men that so eclipsed his fame,
Purloined his plumes, can they deny that same?"
Hallam believes that the last two lines are directed
principally at William Shakespeare. ("Literature of Europe,"
Part II., ch. vi., p. 32, note.)
A selection of his poems, edited by Lamb, is printed in
Bohn's Standard Library. But by far the most careful account
of Greene's career, as connected with "William Shakespeare,
is to be found in "The School of Shakespeare," by Richard
Simpson, London: Chatto & Windus, 1878, Vol. II., p. 339.
He does not seem to have approved of William Shakespeare's borrowing
his plumes; but the impression that he was a monster of debauchery
and drunkenness is derived wholly from his own posthumous work, "The
Confessions of Robert Greene," etc., London, 1592, which lays the black
paint on so thickly that it should have put the critics on their guard.
Greene was probably no worse than his kind. Henry Chettle edited Greene,
and personally deprecated some of its hard sayings as to Shakespeare, on
account of his (Shakespeare's) being a clever, civil sort of fellow, and
of "his facetious grace in writing;" but more particularly, no doubt,
because "divers of worship" had taken him up, and he (Chettle) did not
wish to appear as approving slander of a reigning favorite. Heminges and
Condell were men of straw, whose names are signed to the preface to the
"first folio," who otherwise bear no testimony one way or the other, but
whose book, as will be demonstrated further on, is an unwilling witness
against its purported author. And Ben Jonson, who brings up the rear of
this precious seven, has been already disposed of. That theory must be
pretty soundly grounded in truth, against which there is nothing but
rhetoric to hurl, and, in our opinion, it would be entirely safe--if not
for the Baconians, for the anti-Shakespeareans, at least--to rest
their case on the arguments for the other side. And we believe the more
{253}thoughtful among Shakespeareans are beginning to recognize it, and
coming to comprehend that, if they are to keep their Shakespeare they
must re-write their "Biographies;" spend less time in proving him to
have been an epitome of the moral virtues--beyond the temptation of deer
stealing, beer drinking, and skylarking, etc.--and devote more attention
to his opportunities for acquiring the lore and technical knowledge
his alleged pages so accurately handle. Especially has Mr. Halliwell
Phillips, in his little book (in which he binds himself to cite no dates
or authorities subsequent to 1616), * impressed us as endeavoring to
meet this emergency. But we find that he has not met it. He has, indeed,
developed many details of curious interest--as that John Shakespeare
was, in April, 1552, fined twelve pence for throwing muck into the
street in front of his house; and that he was several times a candidate
for high bailiff of Stratford (or mayor, as the office was afterward
called) before finally arriving at that dignity in 1568; that July 15,
1613, there was heard at Worcester Assizes a curious lawsuit, brought
by Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's son-in-law, against a neighbor for
slandering his wife (Susannah Shakespeare), which suit appears to have
been "fixed" in some way before coming to trial.
* Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. Brighton. Printed
for the Author's friends, 1881. We should add to our list of
hooks Mr. O. Follet's two able pamphlets on the Baconian
theory. Sandusky, Ohio, 1880.
Mr. Phillips brings much learning to prove that William may have been
"pre-contracted" to Anne Hathaway--that his death may have been from
malarial fever {254}rather than inebriation--which have nothing at
all to do with the question or the practical difficulties cited by the
anti-Shakespeareans, one way or the other. But as to those practical
difficulties, he brings no light and has no word to say.
{255}
PART VI. THE NEW THEORY--THE SONNETS--CONCLUSION.
[Illustration: 9261]
F a matter so indifferent as the number of pebbles in Demosthenes' mouth
when he practiced oratory on the beach, no effort of credulity can be
predicated. But when a proposition is historical and capable of proving
itself, it is, indeed, the skeptic who believes the most. It would be
interesting, for example, to compile a catalogue of the reasons why A,
B, and C, and their friends, doubt the real Shakespeare story, and cling
to the manufactured tradition. A will tell us he believes it because
somebody else (Bacon will do as well as anybody) wrote enough as it
was, and was not the sort of man who would surrender any of the glory
to which he was himself entitled, to another. B, because, when somebody
else wrote poetry (for example, Bacon's "Paraphrase of the Psalms"), his
style was quite another than the style of the dramas. C, because he is
satisfied that William Shakespeare spent some terms at Stratford school,
and was any thing but unkind to his wife. D, because the presumption
is too old to be disturbed; as if we should always go on believing in
William Tell and the man in the moon, because our ancestors believed
in them! And so on, through the alphabet. It is so much easier, for
instance, to believe that miracles should appear by the page, or that
universal wisdom should spring fully {256}armed from the brain of a
Warwickshire clown, than that Francis Bacon, or somebody else, should
write anonymously, or in two hands, or use as a nomme de plume the name
of a living man, instead of inventing one de novo.
Now, say the New Theorists, if at about that time, a living nomme
de plume should happened to be wanted, whose name was more cheaply
purchasable than that of a young "Johannes Factotum," of the
Blackfriars, who, by doing any thing and every thing that was wanted,
and saving every honest penny he turned, actually became able to buy
himself a coat-of-arms (the first luxury he ever appears to have allowed
himself out of his increasing prosperity) * and a county seat?
Four or five years before our historical William Shakespeare had
bethought himself of wandering to London, one James Burbage, father
of Richard, the actor, had built the Blackfriars Theater, a plain,
rough building on the site of the present publishing office of the
"Times."
* We happen on traces of the fact that William
Shakespeare's particular weakness was his "noble descent"
very often, in exploring the annals of these times, and that
his fellow actors by no means spared his weakness. "It was
then a current joke to identify Shakespeare with 'the
Conqueror,' or 'Rufus,' as if his pretensions to descent
from the Norman dukes were known" ("Ben Jonson's Quarrel
with Shakspeare,"
"North British Review," July, 1870). And certain lines in
the "Poetaster" are supposed to be a fling at this weakness
of Shakespeare, as the whole play is believed to be a hit at
Marlow (id.). We shall see how this weakness was fostered by
the new set into which circumstances forced Shakespeare,
later on.
Before its door (for the Blackfriars will answer as well as the Globe)
we may, perhaps, {257}imagine a rustic lad--fresh from Stratford, and
footsore from his long tramp, attracted by the crowd and the lights,
standing idle and agape. Possibly, then, riding up, some gallant threw
young William his horse's bridle, and William Shakespeare had found
employment in London. By attention to business, William, in time, may
have, as Rowe thinks, come to control the horse-holding business,
and take his predecessors into his pay; until they became known as
"Shakespeare's boys," and the young speculator's name penetrated to
the inside of the theater. In course of time he becomes a "_servitour_"
(what we now call a "super," i. e., supernumerary) inside, and
ultimately (according to Rowe, an actor himself, and the nearest in
point of time to William Shakespeare to write his biography) "the
reader" * of the establishment; and naturally, therefore, stage editor
of whatever is offered. He has no royal road to learning at his command,
nor does he want one. The "knack at speech-making," which had delighted
the rustic youth of Stratford, mellowed by the new experiences which
surround him, is all he needs. Not only the plays of Greene and others,
which he now remodeled (and improved, no doubt), but essays of his own,
became popular. The audience (we shall see more of them further on)
called for "Shakespeare's plays," and his name came to possess a market
value.
* In this capacity he read and accepted Ben Jonson's "Every
Man in his Humour," which was the beginning of the intimacy
which ended with their lives.
The dramas we now call "Shakespearean" surely did appear in his
lifetime, and under his name. Were {258}they ever performed at his
theater? Let us glance at the probabilities.
The "theaters" of this day are barely more than inclosures, with a
raised platform for the performers, and straw for the audience to stand
or go to sleep in, as they prefer. Votton, in a letter to Bacon, * says
that the fire that destroyed the Globe theater burned up nothing but
"a little wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks." Sir Philip Sidney,
writing in 1583, ridicules the poverty of the scenic effects and
properties of the day in an often-quoted passage: "You shall have
Asia of the one side and Afrieke of the other, and so many other under
kingdomes that the plaier, when hee comes in, must ever begin with
telling where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now,
you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then you must
believe the stage to be a garden: by-and-by we have news of a shipwreck
in the same place; and we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock.
Upon the back of that comes a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, and
the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave, while, in the
mean time, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers,
and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field!" **
* Smith's "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 74.
** "The Defence of Poesie," edition 1626, p. 592.
And M. Taine has drawn a life-like picture of the audience which
applauded this performance: "The poor could enter as well as the rich;
there were sixpenny, twopenny, even penny seats.... If it rained, and it
often rained in London, the people in {259}the pit, botchers, mercers,
bakers, sailors, apprentices, receive the streaming rain on their
heads... they did not trouble themselves about it. While waiting for the
pieces they... drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then
resort to their lists: they have been known to fall upon the actors, and
turn the theater upside down. At other times they were dissatisfied
and went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding or toss him in a
blanket,... When the beer took effect there was a great upturned barrel
in the pit, a receptacle for general use. The smell arises, and then
comes the cry, 'Burn the juniper!' They burn some in a plate in the
stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there
assembled could scarcely get disgusted at any thing, and can not have
had sensitive noses. In the time of Rabelais there was not much
cleanliness to speak of. Remember that they were hardly out of the
middle age, and that, in the middle age, man lived on a dunghill." Mr.
White assures us further, that pickpockets were apt to be plentiful
among this audience, and when discovered, were borne upon the stage,
pilloried in full view, * and there left, the play going on meanwhile
around them; and, moreover, that the best seats sold were on the stage
itself; where any of the audience, who could pay the price, could sit,
recline, walk, or converse with the actors engaged in the performance,"
while pages brought them rushes to stretch upon, and----
* "Kempe, the actor, in his 'Nine Days' Wonder,' a. d. 1600, compares a
man to 'such an one as we tye to a poast on our stage for all the people
to wonder at when they are taken pilfering.'" ("Shakespeare," by Richard
Grant White, Vol. I., p. 183.) {260}pipes of tobacco with which to
regale themselves. * "Practicable" scenery of any sort, even the rudest,
was utterly unknown, ** and it is thought that the actors relied on
barely more than the written action of the piece for their guidance. In
the plays of this period we come continually on such stage directions as
"Here they two talke and rayle what they list;" "All speak "Here they
all talke," etc., *** which proves that much of the dialogue was trusted
to the inspiration of the moment--to which inspiration the gallants and
pickpockets may not unnaturally have contributed.
* Ibid.
** Whenever we come on a stage direction, therefore, which
supposes "practicable" scenery in a play, we may assert with
confidence, that the same was written in or after 1662, up
to which date there was no such thing as practicable
machinery. In the original edition of "The Tempest," for
instance, there is no intimation, by way of stage direction,
that the first scene occurs on shipboard. In the first
edition of "As You Like It" there is no mention of a forest
in the stage direction. Nor in the early quartos of "Romeo
and Juliet" is there any intimation that Juliet makes love
in a balcony. "What child is there, that, coming to a play,
and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door,
doth believe that it is Thebes?" says Sidney, in his
"Defence of Poesie."--(R. G. White's "Shakespeare's
Scholar," p. 489, note.) Trap-doors, however, were probably
in very early use; at least, we find in a comedy by
Middleton and Dekkar a character called "Trap-door." There
seems, also, to have been pillars that turned about, and a
writer in the times of James I. mentions that "the stage
varied three times in one tragedy."
*** These stage directions are taken from Greene's "Tu
Quoque," a. d. 1614, two years before Shakespeare died, and
long after, according to the commentators, he had ceased
writing for the stage.
The principal burden of entertaining the audience rested with the clown,
who, unembarrassed by any {261}reference to the subject-matter of the
play, popped in and out at will, cracked his jokes, danced and sung
and made himself familiar with the outsiders upon the stage. Before an
audience satisfied with this rudimentary setting, upon a stage crowded
with smirking gallants and flirting maids of honor, we are assured that
Hamlet and Wolsey delivered their soliloquies, Anthony his impassioned
oratory, and Isabella her pious strains; while the clowns and
pot-wrestlers discoursed among themselves of Athens and Troy, and Hecuba
and Althea, of Galen and Paracelus, of "writs of detainer," and "fine
and recovery," and "præmunire," and of the secrets of the pharmacopoeia!
"At this public theater," says Mr. Smith, "to which every one could
obtain access, and the lowest of the people ordinarily resorted... we
are called upon to believe that the wonderful works which we so greatly
admire and feel we can only appreciate by careful private study--that
not only Englishmen like Coleridge confess, in forty years of
admiring study of Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, and German
philosophers, literature, and manners, to have found bursting upon
him with increased power, wisdom, and beauty in every step," * but
foreigners like Schlegel, Jean Paul, and Gervinus, "have fallen down
before in all but heathen adoration"--were performed. In 1880, when we
force a common-school education at state expense upon the people, the
Shakespearean plays are disastrous to managers.
* Bacon and Shakespeare, p. 91.
They "lose money on Shakespeare," and unless "carpentry and
French"--unless ballet and spectacle are liberally resorted to, are
{262}draped down to desolate houses and financial ruin. "Shakespeare" is
"over the heads" of -------- in these days of compulsory education. And
yet we are calmly asked to credit the astounding statement that in and
about the year 1600, in London, these grave, intellectual, and stately
dialogues are taking by storm the rabble of the Bankside, and entrancing
the tradesmen and burghers of the days when to read was quite as rare an
accomplishment as serpent-charming is today--when, if sovereigns wrote
their own names, it was all they could do--and when the government could
not afford to hang a man who could actually write his name. * "And yet,"
to quote Mr. Smith again, "it was from the profit arising from this
wretched place of amusement that Shakespeare realized the far from
inconsiderable fortune with which in a few years he retired to
Stratford-upon-Avon." If not actual intellectual giants, the rabble of
that day must have been the superiors in literary perception of some
very eminent gentlemen who were to come after them, like, for example,
Fuller, Evelyn, Pepys, Dryden, Dennis, Kymer, Hume, Pope, Addison,
Steele, and Jonson, whose comments on our immortal drama we have set
forth in the First Part of this work. ** Only we happen to know they
were not.
* Benefit of clergy was only abolished in England by acts
7 and 8, George IV., c. 28, sec. 3, In 1827, fifty-three
years ago; in the United States it had been disposed of
(though it had never been availed of) by act of Congress,
April 30, 1790.
** Ante, pp. 20-29. {263}
As an alternative to believing that these pearls, over which this
nineteenth century gloats, were cast before the swine of the sixteenth;
the theory we are now considering offers, as less violent an attack upon
common sense, the supposition that what we now possess under the name
of "Shakespeare's plays" were _not_ produced upon the stage of any
play-house in those days, but were _printed_ instead, the name of
William Shakespeare having been attached to them as surety for a certain
circulation. The well-attested fact that William Shakespeare was a
play-writer is not ignored by this supposition; for the new theorists
believe that, although no fragment of the Shakespeare work now survives,
its character can be readily determined. From what knowledge we possess
of the tone and quality of the audiences of those days, it is not
difficult to imagine the rudeness and crudity of the plays.
These were the formative days of audiences, and, therefore, the
formative days of plays. Sir Henry Wotton, in a letter from which we
have just quoted, written to Lord Bacon in 1631, refers to one of these
plays called "The Hog hath lost its Pearl." Says this letter: "Now it is
strange to hear how sharp-witted the city is; for they will needs have
Sir Thomas Swinnerton, the Lord Mayor, be meant by the hog, and the late
Lord Treasurer by the pearl." There is no disputing the fact, at least,
that the plays we call "Shakespeare's" are cast in a mold by themselves,
and have no contemporary exemplar. The student of these days knows the
fact that Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Jonson, or any other who wrote in
periods that are counted "literature," made no fortunes at their
work. That such as this one alluded to by Wotton--and one example
will suffice--were what the town ran to see in those days, mere local
sketches--{264}lampoons on yesterday's events; coarse parables, the
allusions in which could be met and enjoyed by the actors themselves
(were to the popular taste, that is to say), is much easier to conceive
than that the "Hamlet" and the "Lear" were to the popular taste. One
Dr. Ileywood (who, it is to be noted, is sometimes called the "prose
Shakespeare") is understood to have produced some two hundred and twenty
of this sort of sketches alone; and, possibly, this was the sort of
"early essays at dramatic poetry" which Aubrey speaks of: this "the
facetious grace in writing that approves his wit" which Chettle assigns
to William Shakespeare--mere sketches in silhouette of the town's
doings, such as would appeal, as this sort still do in cities, to a
popular and local audience. There is some curious testimony on the
subject, which looks to that effect.
Cartwright, * in his lines on Fletcher, says:=
```"Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies
```I' th' ladies' questions, and the fools' replies,
```Old-fashioned wit, which walked from town to town
```In turned hose, which our fathers called the clown;
```Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call,
```And which made bawdry pass for comical.
```Naturk was all his art: thy vein was free
```As his, but without his scurrility."=
* Poems, 1651, p. 273.
One Leonard Ditrges--who, Farmer says (in his essay on "The Learning of
Shakespeare"), was "a wit of the town" in the days of Shakespeare--wrote
some verses laudatory of William Shakespeare, which (Farmer says again)
"were printed along with a spurious edi{265}tion of Shakespeare" in
1640. In this copy of verses occur such lines as--=
```"Nature only led him, for look thorough
```This whole book, thou shalt find he doth not borrow
```One phrase from Greeks, nor Latins imitate,
```Nor once from vulgar languages translate."=
A startling declaration to find made, even in poetry, concerning
compositions which Judge Holmes has demonstrated are crowded with
classical borrowings, imitations drawn from works untranslated from
their originals at the date when quoted; so that it would be impossible
to say that the quoter found them in English works and took them with no
knowledge of their original source! * "Nature itself was all his art,"
says Fuller, and Denham, again, asserts that "all he [Shakespeare] has
was from old mother witt." ** And Dominie Ward says, to the same effect,
in his diary, "I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural witt,
without any art at all;" *** though, of course, this was, and could have
been, nothing more than matter of report.
* See Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition,
p. 5.
** Farmer, p. 13.
*** "Diary of Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, extending
from 1648 to 1679," p. 183; London, 1839, p. 30.
Shakespeare took his "Taming of the Shrew" from Greene's
"Taming of A Shrew," there being no copyright to prevent.
It is probable that, in the production of these plays, 'William
Shakespeare was not always scrupulous to compose "without blotting out
a line" himself. That he was a reckless borrower, and scissored
unconscionably from Robert Greene and others (so much so that
{266}Greene wrote a whole book in protest), we have Greene's book itself
to testify. From its almost unintelligible pages we can glean some idea
of the turgid English of the day. It was, of course, in the composition
of this popular English that Shakespeare, by surpassing Greene, awakened
the latter's jealousy. Otherwise, there would have been no superiority
in Shakespeare over Greene which Greene could have perceived: or, at
least, no cutting into Greene's profits wherein Greene could have
found cause for jealousy. For, if Greene had continued to earn money
indifferently to whether Shakespeare carried on his trade or not, he
would not have been "jealous." But so fluent and clever a fellow as this
William Shakespeare of Stratford, who could hold, when a mere boy,
his rustic audience with a speech over a calf-sticking, was a dangerous
rival among the hackney stock-playwrights of London, and would easily
have made himself invaluable to his management by dashing off scores of
such local sketches as "The Hog hath lost his Pearl," suggested by the
current events of the day.
But, even if "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Macbeth," and "Julius
Cæsar" could have been produced by machinery, and engrossed currente
calamo, (so that the author's first draft should be the acting copy for
the players), they could have hardly been composed, nowadays, without
a library. And even had William Shakespeare possessed an encyclopaedia
(such as were first invented two hundred years or so after his funeral)
he would not have found it inclusive of all the reference he needed for
those five plays alone. They can not be studied as they are capable
of being {267}studied--as they were found capable of being studied by
Coleridge and Gervinus--without a library. And yet are we to be asked to
believe they were composed without one?--in the days when such a thing
as a dictionary even was unknown! Who ever heard of William Shakespeare
in his library, pulling down volumes, dipping into folios, peering into
manuscripts, his brain in throe and his pen in labor, weaving the warp
and woof of his poetry and his philosophy, at the expense of Greece and
Rome and Egypt; pillaging alike from tomes of Norseman lore and Southern
romance--for the pastime of the rabble that sang bawdy songs and
swallowed beer amid the straw of his pit, and burned juniper and tossed
his journey-actors in blankets?
It is always interesting to read of the habitudes of authors--of
paper-saving Pope scribbling his "Iliad" on the backs of old
correspondence, of Spenser by his fireside in his library at Kilcolman
Castle, of Scott among his dogs, of Gibbon biting at the peaches that
hung on the trees in his garden at Lausanne, of Schiller declaiming by
mountain brook-sides and in forest paths, of Goldsmith in his garrets
and his jails. Even of Chaucer, dead and buried before Shakespeare saw
the light, we read of his studies at Cambridge, his call to the bar,
and his chambers in the Middle Temple. But of William Shakespeare--after
ransacking tradition, gossip, and the record--save and except the
statement of Ben Jonson how he had heard the actor's anecdote about
his never blotting his lines--not a word, not a breath, can be found to
connect him with, or surprise him in any agency or employment as to the
composition of the plays we {268}insist upon calling his--much less to
the possession of a single book! Did William Shakespeare own a library?
Had we found this massive draught upon antiquity in the remains of
an immortal Milton or a mortal Tupper, or in all the range of letters
between, we should not have failed to presume a library. Why should we
believe that William Shakespeare needed none?--that, as his pen ran,
he never paused to lift volume from the shelf to refresh or verify his
marvelously retentive recollection? There was no Astor or Mercantile
Library around the corner from the Globe or the Blackfriars, in those
days. And, as for his own possessions, he leaves in his Will no hint of
book or library, much less of the literature the booksellers had taken
the liberty of christening with his name! Where is the scholar who
glories not in his scholarship? By universal testimony, the highest
pleasure which an author draws from his own completed work, the pride
of the poet in his own poem, is their chiefest payment. The simple
fact--which stands out so prominently in the life of this man that
nobody can gainsay it--that William Shakespeare took neither pride nor
pleasure in any of the works which passed current with the rest of the
world as his, might well make the most casual student of those days
suspicious of a claim that, among his other accomplishments, William
Shakespeare was an author at all.
Just here we are referred to a passage in Fuller's "Worthies:"
"Many were the wit combats," says Fuller, "between Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson;... I beheld them," etc. But Fuller was only eight years old
when Shakespeare died, and possibly spoke from hearsay, as it is hardly
probable that an infant of such {269}tender years was permitted to
spend his nights in "The Mermaid." Besides, these "wit combats" at "The
Mermaid" are now said to be "_wet_ combats," i. e. drinking-bouts, by a
long-adopted misprint.
As a matter of fact, unless we are misled by a typographical error in
the edition before us, * what Fuller {270}did actually say was, not "wit
combats," but "wet combats." But even if they were "wit combats," and
not friendly contests at ale-guzzling, like the early tournament at
"Piping Pebworth" and "Drunken Bidford," the "wit" could not have been
colossal, if we may judge from one example preserved in the Ashmolean
manuscripts at Oxford, as stated by Capell. "Ben" (Jonson) and "Bill"'
(Shakespeare) propose a joint epitaph.
* The History of the Worthies of England. Endeavored by
Thomas Fuller, D.D. Two volumes. (First printed in 1622.) A
new edition, with a few Explanatory Notes by John Nichols,
F. A.S. London, Edinburgh, and Perth. Printed for F. C. & J.
Rivington and others. The reference to William Shakespeare
is at page 414 of volume II., and is as follows:
"WARWICKSHIRE
"WRITERS SINCE THE REFORMATION.
"William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in this
county, in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort to
be compounded. 1. Martial in the warlike sound of his
surname (whence some may conjecture him of a military
extraction), Hasli-vibrans or Shake-speare. 2. Ovid, the
most naturall and witty of Poets; and hence it was that
Queen Elizabeth, coming into a grammar school, made this
extemporary verse--
"Persius a Crab-Staffe, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine Wag.
"3. Plautus who was an exact Commedian, yet never any
Scholar, as one Shakespeare (if alive) would confess
himself. Adde to all these that, though his genius generally
was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could
(when so disposed) be solemn and serious, as appears by his
Tragedies; so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret and
unseen) might afford to smile at his Comedies, they were so
merry; and Democritus scarce forbear to sigh at his
tragedies, they were so mournfull.
"He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, Poeta
non fit sed nascitur, 'One is not made but born a poet.'
Indeed, his learning was very little, so that as Cornish
diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed
and smoothed even as they are taken out of the earth, so
nature itself was all the Art which was used upon him. Many
were the wet-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which two
I beheld like a Spanish great gallion and an English man of
war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with
all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by
the quickness of his wit and invention. He died Anno
Domini... and was buried at Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of
his nativity."
Ben begins:=
````"Here lies Ben Jonson,
````Who was once one--"=
Shakespeare concludes:=
```"That while he lived, was a slow thing,
```And now, being dead, is no-thing."=
This being the sort of literature which William Shakespeare's pen turned
out during his residence in London, he could manage very well without
a library. And it was the most natural thing in the world that,
after retiring to the shade of Stratford, it should have produced,
on occasion, the famous epitaphs on his friends Elias James and
"Thinbeard." At all events, this is a simpler explanation than the
"deterioration of power," for which no one has assigned a sufficient
reason," which Halliwell * was driven to assume in order {271}to account
for this drivel from the pen which had written "Hamlet."
* "Life of Shakespeare," p. 270. London, 1848.
And, moreover, it is a satisfactory explanation of what can not be
explained in any other way (and which no Shakespearean has ever yet
attempted to explain at all), of the fact that William Shakespeare,
making his last Will and Testament at Stratford, in 1515, utterly
ignored the existence of any literary property among his assets, or of
his having used his pen, at any period, in accumulating the competency
of which he died possessed. Had William Shakespeare been the courtly
favorite of two sovereigns (which Mr. Hallam doubts * ), it is curious
that he never was selected to write a Masque. Masques were the standard
holiday diversions of the nobles of the day, to which royalty was so
devoted that it is said the famous Inigo Jones was maintained for
some years in the employment of devising the trappings for them alone
(though, of course, it is no evidence, either way, as to the matter we
have in hand). But if William Shakespeare was the shrewd and prosperous
tradesman that we have record of (and, that he came to London poor and
left it rich, everybody knows), was he not shrewd enough, as well,
to see that his audiences did not require philosophical essays and
historical treatises; that he need not waste his midnight oil to verify
the customs of the early Cyprians, or pause to explore for them the
secrets of nature? We may assert him to be a "great moral teacher"
to-day; but, had he been a "great moral teacher" then, he would have set
his stage to empty houses. He could have earned the same money with much
less trouble to {272}himself.
* "Literature of Europe," vol. iii., p. 77 (note).
The gallants would have resorted to his stage daily (as they would have
gone to the baths if they had been in old Home); and the ha'penny seats
have enjoyed themselves quite as much had he given them the school of
"The Hog hath lost his Pearl," or "The Devil is an Ass," or the tumbles
of a clown. Why should this thrifty manager have ransacked Greek and
Latin and Italian letters, the romance of Italy and the Sagas of the
Horth (or, according to Dr. Farmer, rummaged the cloisters of all
England, to get these at second hand)? Had these all been collected in a
public library, would he have had leisure to sit down and pull them over
for this precious audience of his, these gallants and groundlings--when
his money was quite as safe if he merely reached out and took the
nearest spectacle at hand (as he took his "Taming of the Shrew,"
"Winter's Tale," "sea-coast of Bohemia," and all--from Robert Greene)?
But, if we may be allowed to conceive that it was the _action_ (that is
to say, the "business") of the Shakespearean plays that delighted this
Shakespearean audience (that filled the cockpit, galleries, and boxes,
while poor Ben Jonson's, according to Digges, would hardly bring money
enough to pay for a sea-coal fire), and that certain greater than
the manager used this action thereafter as a dress for the mighty
transcripts caused to be printed under voucher of the popular manager's
name--if we may be allowed to conceive this--however exceptional, it is
at least an accounting for the Shakespearean plays as we possess them
to-day, without doing violence to human experience and the laws of
nature.
Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery are young noblemen
of wealth and leisure, {273}who "pass away the time merely in going to
plays every day." * We have seen that the best seats were on the
stage, and these, of course, the young noblemen occupied. There were no
actresses in those days--the female parts were taken by boys--but titled
ladies and maids of honor were admitted to seats on the stage as well
as the gallants, and a thrifty stage manager might easily make himself
useful to both. If my Lord Southampton was bosom friend to William
Shakespeare (as rumor has it), their intimacy arose probably through
some such service. A noble youth of nineteen, of proverbial gallantry
and sufficient wealth (though, it must be remembered, as among the
fortunes of his day, a comparatively poor man; not able to give away
$25,000 at a time, for instance), was not at so great a loss for a
friend and alter ego in London in 1593 (the date at which the "Venus and
Adonis" is dedicated to him) as to be forced to forget the social gulf
that separated him from an economical commoner (lately a butcher in the
provinces), however popular a stage manager, except for cause; and it
takes considerable credulity to believe that he did forget it (if he
did), through being dazzled by the transcendent literary abilities of
the economical commoner aforesaid.
* "My Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland come not to the
court, the one but very seldom; they pass away the time
merely in going to plays every day."--(Letter from Rowland
White to Sir Robert Sidney, dated October 11, 1599, quoted
by Kenny, "Life and Genius of Shakespeare." London:
Longmans, 1864. p. 34, note.) But it may be noted that
Southampton and Raleigh were opposed to each other in
politics.
For Southampton lived and died without ever being suspected of a
devotion to literature or literary pur{274}suits; and, besides, the
economical commoner had not then written (if he ever did write) the
"Hamlet" and "Lear," and those other evidences of the transcendent
literary ability which could seduce a peer outside his caste. That the
gallants and stage managers of the day understood each other, just
as they perhaps do today, there is reason to believe. Dekker, in his
"Gull's Horn-Book," says that, "after the play was over, poets adjourned
to supper with knights, where they in private unfolded the secret
parts of their dramas to them." By "poets" in this extract is meant, as
appears from the context, the writers of dramas for the stage; such as,
perhaps, William Shakespeare was. But whether these suppers after the
play were devoted to intellectual and philosophical criticism is a
question for each one's experience to aid him in answering. Whether
William Shakespeare was admitted to this noble companionship, or was
only emulous of the honor, we have no means of conjecture, as either
might account for the fact that with his first savings he purchased a
grant of arms for his father, thus obtaining not only an escutcheon, but
one whole generation of ancestry; a transaction which involved, says Dr.
Farmer, the falsehood aud venality of the father, the son and two kings
at arms, and did not escape protest; * for if ever a coat was "cut from
whole cloth," we may be sure that this coat-of-arms was the one.
* A complaint must have been made from some quarter that
this application had no sufficient foundation, for we have,
in the Herald's college, a manuscript which purports to be
"the answer of Garter and Clarencieux, kings of arms, to a
libellous scrowl against certain arms supposed to be
wrongfully given in which the writers state, under the head
"Shakespeare," that "the person to whom it was granted had
borne magistracy, and was justice of peace, at Stratford-
upon-Avon; he married the daughter and heir of Arden, and
was able to maintain that estate." The whole of this
transaction is involved in considerable, and, perhaps, to a
great extent, intentional obscurity; and it still seems
doubtful whether any grant was actually made in the year
1596. In the year 1599, the application must have been
renewed in a somewhat altered form. Under that date, there
exists a draft of another grant, by which John Shakespeare
was further to be allowed to impale the ancient arms of
Arden. In this document a statement was originally inserted
to the effect that "John Shakespeare showed and produced his
ancient coat-of-arms, heretofore assigned to him whilst he
was her Majesty's officer and bailiff of that town." But the
words "showed and produced" were afterward erased, and in
this unsatisfactory manner the matter appears to have
terminated.
It is manifest that the entries we have quoted contain a
number of exaggerations, one even of positive misstatements.
The "parents and antecessors" of John Shakespeare were not
advanced and rewarded by Henry VII.; but the maternal
ancestors, or, more probably, some more distant relatives of
William Shakespeare, appear to have received some favors and
distinctions from that sovereign. The pattern of arms given,
as it is stated, under the hand of Clareneieux (Cooke, who
was then dead), is not found in his records, and we can
place no faith in his allegation. John Shakespeare had been
a justice of the peace, merely ex officio, and not by
commission, as is here insinuated; in all probability he did
not possess "lands and tenements of the value of five
hundred pounds;" and Robert Arden, of Wilmecote, was not a
"gentleman of worship."--(Kenny, "Life and Genius of
Shakespeare," p. 38. London: Longmans, 1854.)
{275}Whoever wrote Hamlet's soliloquy and Antony's oration might well
have written the "Venus and Adonis" and the "Lucrece," and was quite
equal to the bold stroke of describing the former (the most splendidly
sensuous poem in any language--a poem that {276}breathes in every line
the blase and salacious exquisite), as the first heir of the invention
of a busy London manager and whilom rustic Lothario among 'Warwickshire
milkmaids. The question as to the authorship of the one hundred and
fifty-four "Sonnets," which appeared (with the exception of two, printed
in 1598, in a collection of verses called for some un-suggested
reason "The Passionate Pilgrim") in 1609, need not enter into any
anti-Shakespearean theory at all. Except that one Francis Meres, writing
in 1598--eleven years before--had reported William Shakespeare to have
circulated certain "sugared sonnets among his private friends;" * and
that the one hundred and thirty-sixth of the series says the author's
name is "Will" (the common nickname of a poet of those days), ** there
is nothing to connect them with William Shakespeare except his name on
the title-page--in the days when we have seen that printers put whatever
name they pleased or thought most vendable, upon a title-page. (When the
aforesaid "Passionate Pilgrim" was printed in 1598--also as by William
Shakespeare--Dr. Ileywood recognized two of his own compositions
incorporated in it, and promptly claimed them. "No evidence," says
Mr. Grant White, *** in commenting on this performance, "of any public
denial on Shakespeare's part is known to exist. It was not until the
publication of the third edition of the poem, in 1612, that William
Shakespeare's name was removed.")
* Hallam does not think these are the sonnets mentioned by
Meres.--("Literature of Europe," vol. iii., p. 40, note.
** See ante, p. 090, note.
*** "Shakespeare's Works," vol. iii., p. 77.
But what involves the authorship of the sonnets in still {277}deeper
obscurity is the fact that their publisher, Thomas Thorpe, himself
dedicates them to a friend of his own. He addresses his friend as "Mr.
W. H.," and signs the dedication with his own initials "T. T." Perhaps
it was just as the name "Shakespeare" was fastened to the title-page of
"The Passionate Pilgrim," and the plays to which, as we shall notice the
Shakespeareans declare it never belonged, that Mr. Thomas Thorpe calls
his book "Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before imprinted," and makes
in the pages of the Stationers' Company the entry: "20 May, 1609. Tho.
Thorpe. A book called Shake-speare's Sonnets." They appear conjointly
with a long poem entitled "A Lover's Complaint," and two of them (as
we have said) had already been printed in "The Passionate Pilgrim,"
published by Jaggard in 1598. This unhappy dedication has been so
twisted by the commentators to serve their turns, that the only safety
is to print it as it stood in this first edition:
"TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF
THESE. INSUING. SONNETS.
MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE.
AND. THAT. ETERNETIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OUR. EVER. LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTURER. IN.
SETTING
FORTH.
{278}For a dedication composed in the turgid fashion of nearly three
hundred years ago, the above would seem to be peculiarly intelligible.
All publications were ventures in those days. The printer might get His
money back and he might not. But, until he did, he was an adventurer.
So Mr. Thorpe, in setting forth on his adventure, wishes well to his
publication and to some unknown patron whom he desires--as was the
custom--to compliment with wishes of long life and happiness. At least
this would seem to be the reading on the face of it. To be sure, there
is a slight uncertainty as to whether "Mr. W. H." is dedicator or
dedicatee. But the moment the name of Shakespeare appears this little
trouble becomes insignificant--and, as usual, difficulties begin to
crowd and multiply.
The title reads: "Shake-speares Sonnets never before imprinted: at
London, by G. Eld, for T. T. And are to be sold by William Apsley.
1609."
At that name the commentators appear, and swarm like eagles around a
carcass.
Mr. Armitage Brown, who flourished in or about the year 1838, and
appears to have been the first gentleman who ever took the trouble to
read them, has demonstrated * that these sonnets are actually six
poems of different lengths **--each poem having a consistent theme and
argument (and he made this discovery by the simple process of reading
them).
* "Shakespeare's Autographical Poems, being his Sonnets
clearly developed," etc. By Charles Armitage Brown. London:
James Bohn, 1838.
** We find, however, that Coleridge had earlier advanced
the same theory.--Table Talk (Routledge's edition), p. 2071.
Can any body believe that, if these six poems had been the work of the
mighty Shakespeare of the Shakespear{279}eans, they would have waited
until 1838 without a reader? And, most wonderful of all, that this
mighty poet in his own lifetime would allow six of his poems to be torn
up into isolated stanzas by a printer, stirred together and run into
type hap-hazard, and sold as his "Sonnets?" The Shakespeareans tell us
sometimes of their William's utter indifference to fame, but they have
never claimed for him an imperturbability quite so stolid as this. And
while we could not well imagine Mr. Tennyson regarding with complaisance
a publisher who would print his "Maud," "Locksley Hall," "Lady Clara,"
etc., each verse standing by itself, and calling the whole "Mr.
Tennyson's Sonnets," so we fancy even Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe,
had he been their author, would have thought the printers were going a
little too far.
But, all the same, the Shakespeareans, Mr. Armitage Brown among the
rest, are determined that these sonnets shall be Shakespeare's and
nobody else's, and proceed to tell us who "Mr. W. H." (to whom Mr.
Thorpe, at William Shakespeare's request--as if the the man who wrote
the sonnets could not write a dedication of them--dedicated them) is.
Certain of them believe the letters "W. H." to be a transposition of
"H. W.," in which case they might stand for "Henry Wriothesley," Earl of
Southampton. Mr. Boaden and two Mr. Browns * read them, as they stand,
to mean William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (in either case accounting for
William Shakespeare addressing in earl as "Mr."--which may mean "Mister"
or "Mas{280}ter"--on the score of earl and commoner having been the
closest of "chums").
* Shakespeare's Autographical Poems." By Charles Armitage
Brown. London, 1838. "The Sonnets of Shakespeare solved,"
etc. By Henry Brown. London, 1870.
A learned Frenchman, M. Chasles, has conjectured that Thomas Thorpe
wrote the first half of the dedication, including the "Mr. W. H.,"
and William Shakespeare the second half (including, perhaps, though M.
Chasles does not say so, the "T. T.") One equally learned German (Herr
Bernsdorff) suggests that "W. H." means "William Himself," and that the
great Shakespeare meant to dedicate these poems to his own personality
(as George Wither, in 1611, dedicated his satirical poems, "G. W.
wisheth himself all happiness;") and another supposes Shakespeare to
have been in love with a negress, "black but comely," like the lady of
the Canticles. Yet another, that this dark lady typified "Dramatic
art," the Roman Catholic church, etc., etc. Mr. Dowden will have it that
Shakespeare and Spenser, and Mento that Shakespeare and Chapman were
rivals for the lady's favor. And there have been other and even more
puerile speculations put gravely forth by these same learned and
venerable commentators: such as, since the word "Hewes" (in the line, "A
man in Hewes all Hewes in his controlling"), is spelled with a capital
letter, that, therefore, "AY. H." is William Hewes (whoever he might
have been). Wadsworth believes that these sonnets were the repository of
the real emotions of William Shakespeare, as a relief to long simulation
of other people's emotions in his dramas; while Mr. William Thompson *
believes them to be The Sonnett, which Bacon mentions writ{281}ing in
or about 1598, saying: "It happened a little before that time that her
Majesty had a purpose to dine at Twickenham Park, at which time I
had (though I profess not to be a poet) prepared a _sonnet_, directly
tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my lord,
which I remember I also showed to a great person," etc.
* The Renascence Drama, or History made Visible. By William
Thompson, F. R. C. S., F. L. S. Melbourne: Sands & Me-
Dougal, Collins street, West, 1880, p. 113, et seq.
Now, Mr. Thompson believes that this "great person" was William Herbert,
who read them among the friends of the putative author--was, in short,
the "W. H." Mr. Thompson points out that, if these sonnets are not
Bacon's _Sonnet_, the latter has never been found, among Bacon's papers
or elsewhere.
If these are the sonnets distributed by William Shakespeare among his
private friends--of which Meres seems to have known in 1598--there would
be this historical difficulty in connecting them with Lord Herbert,
afterwards Earl of Pembroke, viz: In the Sydney Papers * is preserved
a letter from Rowland White to Sir Robert Sydney, in which the writer
says: "My Lord Herbert hath, with much ado, brought his father to
consent that he may live at London, but not before the next spring."
This letter is dated April 19,1597. "The next spring" would be 1598, the
very year in which Meres speaks of these sonnets as in existence
among William Shakespeare's friends. Of course, they might have been
afterwards collected and dedicated by their author.
* Vol. II., p. 43.
But at the time they were so collected, Lord Herbert was Earl Pembroke,
and was surely not _then_, if he had ever been (which he had
{282}not), plain "Mr. H." In other words, if the sonnets were William
Shakespeare's, he must either have dedicated them to a stranger--a boy
at Oxford--or have waited until that hoy had become of age and an earl,
and then dedicated them to him in either case by a title not his own.
In the absence of explanation., nowadays, we would be obliged to regard
such a dedication an insult rather than a compliment. And men were at
least no less punctilious about titles in the age of Elizabeth than they
are to-day.
It is interesting, in this connection, to note that in 1595, and while
young Lord Herbert was at Oxford, a play, "Edward III.," was entered
in the register of the Stationers' Company. In both this play and in
Sonnett XCIV. occur the line,=
```"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."=
Were there _any_ means of ascertaining in which the line is original
and in which quotation, it might be of aid in solving this question of
authorship. But, unhappily, none are at hand.
Mr. Hiel believes that "W. H." means "William Hathaway," Shakespeare's
brother-in-law, and that "onlie begetter" of these sonnets means
"only collector;" (going into considerable philology to make good
his assertion), and that Hathaway collected his broth-er-in-law's
manuscripts and carried them to Thorpe. Mr. Massey has, for his part,
constructed a tremendous romance out of the sonnets, * in which "W. H."
means {283}William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
* Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before interpreted. London,
1866. Vide, a volume "Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare,
showing that they belong to the Hermetic class of writings,
and explaining their general meaning and purpose." New York:
James Miller, 1866. Printed Anonymous, but written by Judge
E. A. Hitchcock.
But all these commentators alike agree to ignore the fact that William
Shakespeare did not dedicate the sonnets to any body, or, so far as we
know, procure Thomas Thorpe to do so for him. A poem, "The Phoenix and
the Turtle," is sometimes bound up with these, described as "Verses
among the Additional Poems to Love's Martyr; or, Rosalin's Complaint,"
printed in 1601, but nobody knows by what authority, except that
publishers have got into the habit of doing so.
Then, again, anonymous authorship was a fashionable pastime among the
gallants and the gentle of this Elizabethan day, and joint authorship
a familiar feature in Elizabethan letters. It is said that the great
dramas we call Shakespeare's so persistently nowadays, and which began
to appear unheralded at about this time, bear internal traces of courtly
and aristocratic authorship. The diction is stately and sedate. No
peasant-born author could have assumed and sustained so haughty a
contempt for every thing below a baronet (for only at least that grade
of humanity--it is said by those who have carefully examined the drama
in this view *--does any virtuous or praiseworthy attribute appear in
a Shakespearean character: while every thing below is exceedingly comic
and irresistible, but still "base, common, and popular").
* Mr. Wilkes' Shakespeare from an American Point of View.
New York: Appletons, 1876,
If certain noblemen of the court proposed amusing themselves at joint
anonymous authorship, they were certainly right in concluding that the
name of a living {284}man, in their own pay, was a safer disguise
than a pseudonym which would challenge curiosity and speculation. At
least--so say the New Theorists--such has turned out to be the actual
fact. It is the New Theory that, while in employment in the theater,
William Shakespeare was approached by certain gentlemen of the court.
Perhaps their names were Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and
Montgomery, and possibly among them was a needy and ambitious scholar
named Bacon, who, with an eye to preferment, maintained their society by
secret recourse to the Jews or to any thing that would put gold for the
day in his purse. Possibly they desired to be unknown, for the reasons
given by Miss Bacon. In what they asked of him, and what he did for
them, he found, at any rate, his profit. The story goes that the amount
of profit he realized from one of these gentlemen alone was no less
a sum than a thousand pounds. If so--considering the buying power of
pounds in those days--it is not so wonderful that, at this rate, William
Shakespeare retired with a fortune. Even at its most and its best, it is
an infinitely small percentum of the world's wealth that finds its way
into the poet's pocket; poetasters are sometimes luckier than poets.
That William Shakespeare's fortune came faster than the fortune of
his fellows we do know. This was at once the most secure and the most
lucrative use he could have made of his name. For, as we have seen,
owing to the condition of the common law, while he could hardly have
protected himself against any piracy of his name by injunction, he might
have loaned it for value to the printers, or to any one desirous of
employing it, the {285}risk of piracy to be the borrower's. If these
noble gentlemen desired to write political philosophy--as Miss Bacon
believed, or belles lettres for their own pleasure--they had their
opportunity now; and the new theory is not inconsistent, either with the
Delia Bacon theory or with the Baconian theory proper, as elaborated by
Judge Holmes, who recognizes Bacon's pen so constantly throughout the
dramas. The same difficulties which those theories meet would still
confront us if, as Mr. Boucicault and others have suggested, the plays
were offered from lesser sources, and rewritten entirely by William
Shakespeare; for we should still be obliged to ask, How did he dare to
retain in the plays the material which, unintelligible to him, he must
have believed to be unintelligible to his audiences, as calculated to
drive them away, rather than to attract them?
Any one of these schemes of assimilated authorship seems at least to
tally with the evidence from what we know as the "doubtful plays." In
1600, there appeared in London an anonymous publication--a play entitled
"Troilus and Cressida." It was accompanied by a preface addressed, "A
never writer to an ever reader," which, in the turgid fashion of the
day, set forth the merit and attractions of the play itself. Among its
other claims to public favor, this preface asserted the play to be one
"never stal'd with the stage, never claperclawed with the palms of
the vulgar"--which seems (in English) to mean that it had never been
performed in a theater. But, however virgin on its appearance in print,
it seems to have very shortly become "staled with the stage," or, at any
rate, with a stage name, for, a few months later, {286}a second edition
of the play (printed from the same type) appears, minus the preface,
but with the announcement on the title-page that this is the play of
"Troilus and Cressida, as it was enacted by the King's Majesty his
servants at the Globe. _Written by William Shakespeare_." * Now, unless
we can imagine William Shakespeare--while operating his theater--writing
a play _to be published in print_--and announcing it as entitled to
public favor on the ground that it had never been polluted by contact
with so unclean and unholy a place as a theater, it is hard to escape
the conviction that he was not the "never writer"--in other words, that
he was not its author at all--but on its appearance in print, levied
on it for his stage, underlined it, produced it, and--it proving a
success--either himself announced it, or winked at its announcement by
others, as a work of his own.
Again, in 1600, a play wras printed in London entitled "Sir John
Oldcastle" in 1605, one entitled "The London Prodigal" in 1608, one
entitled "The Yorkshire Tragedy" in 1609, one entitled "Pericles, Prince
of Tyre;" and, at about the same time, certain others, viz: "The
Arraignment of Paris;" "Arden of Fever-sham" (a very able work, by the
way); "Edward III.;" "The Birth of Merlin "Fair Em, the Miller's
Daughter;" "Mucedorus;" "The Merry Devil of Edmonton;" "The Comedy of
George a Green;" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen." All the above purported,
and were understood to be, and were sold as being, works of William
Shakespeare, except "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," which was announced
as {287}by Shakespeare and Rowley, and "The Two Noble Kinsmen," as by
Shakespeare and Fletcher.
* Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, pp.
144-147.
Now, it is certainly a fact that William Shakespeare, from his
box-office at the Globe, or from his country-seat at Stratford, never
corroborated the printers by admitting, or contradicted them by denying
his authorship of any of the above enumerated plays. The "Hamlet" had
been previously published in or about 1603, and the "Lucrèce" had made
its appearance in 1594. It is certainly a fact that none of these--from
"Hamlet" to "Fair Em," from "Lucrece" to "The Merry Devil of
Edmonton"--did William Shakespeare ever either deny or claim as progeny
of his. He fathered them all as they came, "and no questions asked."
And, had Mr. Ireland been on hand with his "Vortigern," it might have
gone in with the rest, with no risk of the scrutiny and the scholarship
which exploded it so disastrously in 1796. No plays, bearing the name of
William Shakespeare on their title-page, now appeared from 1609 to 1622.
But in the year 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare's death,
a folio of _thirty-six_ plays is brought out by Heminges and Condell,
entitled "The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare." Of the many plays which
had appeared during his life, and been circulated and considered as his,
or of which mention can (according to the Shakes-peareans) be anywhere
found, only twenty-six appeared in this folio, while ten plays are
included which never appear to have been seen or heard of until their
presence in this Heminges and Condell collection. The Shakespeareans
allow that this is "mysterious," but precisely the same "mystery"
would have been discovered in the days of Heminges and Condell
them{288}selves, if it had been worth the while of anybody then living
to look into the question. Nothing has happened, since, the death
of William Shakespeare, to make the Shakespeare question any more
"mysterious" than he left it himself.
To make this apparent at a glance, let us present the whole in a
tabulated statement, only asking the reader to observe that we have
in every case given the Shakespeareans the benefit of the doubt, and
accepted the mention of a similar name of any play as proof positive of
its being the play nowadays attributed to William Shakespeare; and their
own chronology everywhere.
The following table shows the plays passing as William Shakespeare's, in
London, in the years when he resided in London, as part proprietor and
concerned in the management of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters; the
dates of their earliest mention or appearance, and which of them were
included in the first folio, edited by Heminges and Condell, in 1628: on
the supposition that the plays mentioned by Meres (of which, however, no
other traces can be found, during William Shakespeare's life), besides
those names in Manningham's and Forman's diaries, and the "Account
of the Levels at Court," are the identical plays now included in the
Shakespearean drama. The dates are Mr. Grant White's. {289}
[Illustration: 0289]
* This play is put in between the Histories and Tragedies,
as if received "too late for classification," as the
newspapers say. Its pages are not numbered, and so it does
not disturb the pagination of the folio.
PART VI.--THE NEW THEORY, {290}A play called "Duke Humphrey," attributed
to Shakespeare, was amongst the dramatic manuscripts destroyed by the
carelessness of Warburton's servant, in the early part of the last
century, as appears by the list preserved in the British Museum--MS.
Lans-downe, 849.
Leaving out these plays mentioned by Meres, we then have twenty-one
entirely new plays, which never appeared in William Shakespeare's life,
first appearing in Heminges and Condell's edition.
It appearing, then, that, of some forty-two plays credited to William
Shakespeare during his lifetime, Heminges and Condell selected only
twenty-five, and printed and hound up with those twenty-five nine plays
which nobody had ever heard of in print or on the stage or anywhere
else, until William Shakespeare had been dead and in his grave seven
years, besides the "Othello," which was first heard of five years after
his death: it follows either that Heminges and Condell knew that William
Shakespeare was in the habit of allowing plays to be called by his name
which he never wrote, or that Heminges and Condell's collection of "Mr.
William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, published
according to the true original copies," is nothing more or less than a
collection of plays written prior to the year 1623, and not earlier than
the reign of Elizabeth. The Shakes-peareans may take either horn of the
dilemma they please. "Pericles," one of the plays rejected by Heminges
and Condell has since been restored to favor, and no editor now omits
it. Surely, under the circumstances, we are justified in asking the
question: "If William Shakespeare ever wrote any plays or {291}poems,
which of the above did he write, and which are 'doubtful?5"
'Whether the hand that wrote the "Hamlet" also composed the "Fair Em;"
or the classicist who produced the "Julius Cæsar" and the "Coriolanus"
at about the same time achieved "The Merry Devil" and "The London
Prodigal," is a question lying within that sacred, peculiar realm
of "criticism" which has "established" and forever "proved" so many
wonderful things about "our Shakespeare"--a realm beyond our purview
in these papers, and wherein we should be a trespasser. Fortunately,
however, the question has been settled for us by those to whom criticism
is not ultra vies, and may safely be said to be at rest now and forever.
The burden of the judgment of the whole critical world is of record that
the only true canon of "William Shakespeare" consists of the plays
first brought together in one book by Heminges and Condell, plus the
"Pericles;" and that certain of the above-mentioned plays, known to have
been published under the name of William Shakespeare are "spurious;"
that, during the lifetime of William Shakespeare, and in the city where
he dwelt--under his very nose, that is to say--divers and sundry plays
did appear from time to time which he did not write, but which he
fathered. Whether, in pure philanthrophy and charity, he regarded these
as little Japhets in search of a father, and so, pitying their abandoned
and derelict condition, assumed their paternity, or, whether he took
advantage of their bastardy for mere selfish and ill-gotten gain, the
critical world find it unprofitable to speculate. But there can be no
reasonable doubt that, in London in {292}the days of Elizabeth, in the
name of "William Shakespeare" there was much the same sort of common
trade-mark as exists, in Cologne, in the days of Victoria, in the
name "Jean Maria Farina"--that it was at everybody's service. And if
William Shakespeare farmed ont his name to playwrights, just as the
only original Farina farms out his to makers of the delectable water
of Cologne, wherein shall we find fault? If, two hundred years after,
a lesser Sir Walter of Abbotsford, be acquitted of moral obliquity in
denying his fatherhood of "Waverly," for the sake of the offspring,
surely the elastic ethics of authorship, for the sale of the great book,
will stretch out far enough to cover the case of a Shakespeare,
who neither affirmed nor denied, but only held his peace! William
Shakespeare, at least in the days when Lord Coke lays that a play-actor
was, in contemplation of law, a vagabond and a tramp, * never had to
shift for his living. He always had money to spend, and money to lend,
in the days when we know many of his contemporaries in the theatrical
and dramatic line were "in continued and utter extremity, willing to
barter exertion, name, and fame for the daily dole that gets the daily
dinner. ** Of all the co-managers--and, among them, one Burbage was the
Booth or Forrest of his day--William Shakespeare is the only one whose
pecuniary success enables him to retire to become a landed gentleman
with a purchased "Esquire" to his name.
* "The fatal end," he says, "of these fire is beggary--the
alchiemyst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer,
and the poetaster." A "play-actor," he elsewhere affirms,
was a fit subject for the grand jury, as a "vagrant."
** "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852. p. 88.
{293}No wonder Robert Greene, a well-known contemporary actor, but
"who led the skeltering life peculiar to his trade! and who had either
divined or shared the secret of the "Shakespearean" dramas, raised
his voice in warning of the masquerade in borrowed plumes! Was William
Shakespeare a shrewd masquerader, who covered his tracks so well that
the search for a fragment of Shakespearean manuscript or holograph,
which has been as thorough and ardent as ever was search for the
philosopher's stone, has been unable to unearth them? Certainly no scrap
or morsel has been found. The explanation of all this mystery, according
to the New Theory, is of very little value, except in so far as it
throws light upon what otherwise seems inexplicable, namely, that
these magnificent philosophical dramas (which are more precious in our
libraries as text-book and poems than as stage shows wherewith to pass
an idle evening in our enlightened day) should have been popular with
the coarse audiences of the times from which they date. Rut, if, to
conceal their real authors, these magnificent productions were simply
sent out under a name that was at every body's disposal, the discovery
is of exceeding interest. From the lofty masterpiece of the "Hamlet" to
what M. Taine calls "a debauch of imagination... which no fair and frail
dame in London should be without" *--the "Venus and Adonis"--it was
immaterial what they printed as his, so this William Shakespeare earned
his fee for his silence. As for young Southampton--then just turned of
nineteen--his part in the covert work of the {294}junta might, and,
indeed, seems to have been, the accepting of the famous dedication.
* Crawley, quoted by Taine, "English Literature," book ii.,
chapter iv.
That a rustic butcher-lad should, while holding horses at the door of
a city theater, produce as "the first heir of his invention"--the very
first thing he turned his pen to--so maturely voluptuous a poem as the
"Venus and Adonis," would be a miracle, among all the other miracles,
not to be lost sight of.
We believe that historical and circumstantial evidence alone is adequate
to settle or even to disturb this Shakespearean question; for it appears
to be the unanimous verdict of criticism that the style of Bacon and the
style of "Shakespeare" are as far apart as the poles. Experts have even
gone so far as to reduce both to a "euphonic test," * and pronounce it
impossible that the two could have been written by the same hand. But
this is not very valuable as evidence; for never, we think, can mere
expert evidence be of itself sufficient as to questions of forgery of
authorship any more than of autograph. If mere literary style had been
all the evidence accessible, our Shakespeareans would have been
making oath to the Ireland forgeries to-day as stoutly as when, in
the simplicity of their hearts, they swore the impromptus of a boy
of eighteen surpassed any thing in "Hamlet" or Holy Writ. Even Mr.
Spedding, who ignores any "Baconian Theory," in writing the life of
Bacon, admits that whenever a literary doubt has to be decided by the
test of style, "the reader must be allowed to judge for himself."
* Wilkes's "Shakespeare from an American point of view,"
Part III.
It was only by just such circumstantial evidence as has been grouped
in these papers (such as the {295}Elizabethan orthography and
philology--the use of Roman instead of Arabic numerals! etc.) that the
Ireland imposture was exploded. Forgery is the imitation of an original,
and, If the original be inimitable, there can surely be no forgery. In
the case of forgery of a signature, lawyers and experts know that the
nearer the imitation, the more easy is it detectable; for no man writes
his own name twice precisely alike, and, if two signatures attributed to
the same hand are found to be _fac similes_, and, on being superimposed
against the light, match each other in every detail, it is irrefutable
evidence that one is intentionally simulated. * In the case of literary
style, however, we are deprived of this safeguard, because, the more
nearly exact the counterfeit, the more easily the critic is deceived.
Pope was not afraid to entrust whole sections of the paraphrase he
called the "Odyssy of Homer," just as Michael Angelo did his frescoes,
to journey-workmen--and not a critic has ever been able to pronounce, or
even guess, which was Pope and which was Pope's apprentice; and not only
the Chatterton, Ireland, and Macpherson forgeries, but the history of
merely sportive imitation and parody prove that literary style is any
thing but inimitable; that, in fact, it requires no genius, and very
little cleverness to counterfeit it. ** Nor is--what is incessantly
appealed {296}to--"the internal evidence of the plays themselves" of any
particular value to the end in view.
* Hunt versus Lawless, New York Superior Court, November,
1879. And see, also, Moore versus United States, 2 Otto,
United States, 270. Criminal Law Journal, Jersey City, N.
J., March, 1881. Arty "Calligraphy and the Whittaker Case."
** The curious reader is referred to "Supercheries
Literaries, Pastiches, etc.," one of the unique labors of
the late M. Delapierre. London, Trubner & Co., 1872.
Were the question before us, "Was the author of these works a poet,
statesman, philosopher, lawyer?" etc., etc., this internal evidence
would be, indeed, invaluable. But it is not. The question is not _what_,
but _who_, was the author. Was his family name "Shakespeare," and was
he christened "William"? The Shakespearean has been allowed to confound
these questions, and to answer them together, until they have become as
inseparable as Demosthenes and his pebble-stones. But, once separated,
it is manifest that the internal evidence drawn from the works
themselves, however satisfactory as to the one question, is utterly
incompetent as to the other, and that it is by purely external--that is
to say, by circumstantial evidence, by history, and by the record--that
the question before us must be answered, if, indeed, it ever is to be
answered at all. And, therefore, it is by circumstantial evidence alone,
we think, that literary imposture can be satisfactorily exposed. Neither
can we trust to internal evidence alone; for an attempt to write the
biography of William Shakespeare by means of the internal evidence of
the Shakespearean plays, has inevitably resulted in the questions we
have already encountered. Was Shakespeare a lawyer, was Shakespeare a
physician--a natural philosopher--a chemist--a botanist--a classical
scholar--a student of contemporary life and manners--an historian--a
courtier--an aristocrat--a biblicist--a journeyman printer, and the
rest!--and in giving us the fairy stories of Mr. Knight and Mr. De
Quincy in place of the truth we crave. For we can not close our eyes
to the fact that history very decid{297}edly negatives the idea that
William Shakespeare, of Stratford, was either a lawyer, a physician, a
courtier, a philosopher, an aristocrat, or a soldier. Moreover,
while the internal evidence is fatal to the Shakespearean theory, it
preponderates in favor of the Baconians: for, when we should ask these
questions concerning Francis Bacon, surely the answer of history would
be, Yes--yes, indeed; all this was Francis Bacon. The minute induction
of his new and vast philosophy did not neglect the analysis of the
meanest herb or the humblest fragment of experimental truth that could
minister to the comfort or the health of man. And where else, in the
range of letters--except in the Shakespearean works, where kings
and clowns alike take their figures of speech from the analogies of
nature--is the parallel of all this faithful accumulation of detail and
counterfeit handwriting of Nature? The great ex-chancellor had stooped
to watch even the "red-hipped bumble-bee" and the "small gray-coated
gnat." Had the busy manager been studying them as well? His last act
on earth was to alight from his carriage to gather handfuls of snow,
to ascertain if snow could be utilized to prevent decomposition of dead
flesh; and it is related that, in his dying moments--for the very act
precipitated the fever of which he died--he did not forget, to record
that the experiment had succeeded "excellently well." From these to
lordly music, * and in all the range between, no science had escaped
Francis Bacon. Had the busy {298}manager followed or preceded the
philosopher's footsteps, step by step, up through them all?
* Ulrici, p. 248, book ii, Chapter vi., refers to "Two
Gentlemen of Verona," Act 1, Sc. 2. as proving that the
author of that play "possessed in an unusual degree the
power of judging and understanding the theory of music."
And did he pause in his conception or adaptation of a play, pen in hand,
to take a trip to Italy, or a run-up into Scotland to get the name of a
hostelry or the topography of a highway, to make it an encyclopaedia as
well as a play as he went along? If the manager alone was the author
of these works, there is, we have seen, no refuge from this conviction.
But, if, as is the New Theory, those plays were amplified for the press
by a learned hand, perhaps, after all, he was the stage manager, actor,
and human being that history asserts him to have been. If, as has been
conjectured, William Shakespeare sketched the clowns and wenches with
which these stately dramas are relieved, it would account for the
supposed Warwickshire source of many of them. And if William Shakespeare
was pretty familiar with the constabulary along his route between home
and theater, so often traveled by himself and jolly coetaneans with
heads full of Marian Hackett's ale, and thought some of them good
enough to put into a play, his judgment has received the approval
of many audiences beside those of the Bankside and Blackfriars. The
Shakespearean plays, as now performed in our theaters, are the editions
of Cibber, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, Macready, Booth, Irving, and others,
and, while preserving still the dialogues which passed, perhaps, through
Shakespeare's hands, retain no traces of his industry, once so valuable
to the Globe and Blackfriars, but now rejected as unsuited to the
exigencies of the modern stage, the "business" inserted in them by
William Shakespeare's editorship has long since been rejected. Little as
there is of the man of {299}Stratford in our libraries, there is still
less of him in our theaters in 1881. But the world still retains the
honest Dogberry, who lived at Grendon, in Bucks, on the road from London
to Stratfordtown, and doubtless many more of the witty manager's
master strokes. At least, the "New Theory" and the "Delia Bacon
Theory" coincide in this, that William Shakespeare was fortunate in the
manuscripts brought to him, and grew rich in making plays out of them
and matching them to his spectacles.