The historians “suppose” that Shakespeare attended the Free School in
Stratford from the time he was seven years old till he was thirteen.
There is no _evidence_ in existence that he ever went to school at all.
The historians “infer” that he got his Latin in that school—the school
which they “suppose” he attended.
They “suppose” his father’s declining fortunes made it necessary for
him to leave the school they supposed he attended, and get to work and
help support his parents and their ten children. But there is no
evidence that he ever entered or returned from the school they suppose
he attended.
They “suppose” he assisted his father in the butchering business; and
that, being only a boy, he didn’t have to do full-grown butchering, but
only slaughtered calves. Also, that whenever he killed a calf he made a
high-flown speech over it. This supposition rests upon the testimony of
a man who wasn’t there at the time; a man who got it from a man who
could have been there, but did not say whether he was nor not; and
neither of them thought to mention it for decades, and decades, and
decades, and two more decades after Shakespeare’s death (until old age
and mental decay had refreshed and vivified their memories). They
hadn’t two facts in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen,
but only just the one: he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory
while he was at it. Curious. They had only one fact, yet the
distinguished citizen had spent twenty-six years in that little
town—just half his lifetime. However, rightly viewed, it was the most
important fact, indeed almost the only important fact, of Shakespeare’s
life in Stratford. Rightly viewed. For experience is an author’s most
valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the
breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. Rightly viewed,
calf-butchering accounts for “Titus Andronicus,” the only play—ain’t
it?—that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and yet it is the only
one everybody tried to chouse him out of, the Baconians included.
The historians find themselves “justified in believing” that the young
Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer preserves and got haled
before that magistrate for it. But there is no shred of respectworthy
evidence that anything of the kind happened.
The historians, having argued the thing that _might_ have happened into
the thing that _did_ happen, found no trouble in turning Sir Thomas
Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow. They have long ago convinced the
world—on surmise and without trustworthy evidence—that Shallow _is_ Sir
Thomas.
The next addition to the young Shakespeare’s Stratford history comes
easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-steeling, and
the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmised
vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the
young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh, _such_ a wild young
scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for all time! It is
the very way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton
brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in
the Natural History Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world,
the stateliest skeleton that exists on the planet. We had nine bones,
and we built the rest of him out of plaster of Paris. We ran short of
plaster of Paris, or we’d have built a brontosaur that could sit down
beside the Stratford Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell
which was biggest or contained the most plaster.
Shakespeare pronounced “Venus and Adonis” “the first heir of his
invention,” apparently implying that it was his first effort at
literary composition. He should not have said it. It has been an
embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. They have to
make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and beautiful
poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family—1586 or ’87—age,
twenty-two, or along there; because within the next five years he wrote
five great plays, and could not have found time to write another line.
It is sorely embarrassing. If he began to slaughter calves, and poach
deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest likely
moment—say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched from that
school where he was supposably storing up Latin for future literary
use—he had his youthful hands full, and much more than full. He must
have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect, which wouldn’t be
understood in London, and study English very hard. Very hard indeed;
incredibly hard, almost, if the result of that labor was to be the
smooth and rounded and flexible and letter-perfect English of the
“Venus and Adonis” in the space of ten years; and at the same time
learn great and fine and unsurpassable literary _form_.
However, it is “conjectured” that he accomplished all this and more,
much more: learned law and its intricacies; and the complex procedure
of the law-courts; and all about soldiering, and sailoring, and the
manners and customs and ways of royal courts and aristocratic society;
and likewise accumulated in his one head every kind of knowledge the
learned then possessed, and every kind of humble knowledge possessed by
the lowly and the ignorant; and added thereto a wider and more intimate
knowledge of the world’s great literatures, ancient and modern, than
was possessed by any other man of his time—for he was going to make
brilliant and easy and admiration-compelling use of these splendid
treasures the moment he got to London. And according to the surmisers,
that is what he did. Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able
to teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig
them out of. His father could not read, and even the surmisers surmise
that he did not keep a library.
It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his
vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance
with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for
a time the _clerk of a Stratford court_; just as a bright lad like me,
reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become
perfect in knowledge of the Bering Strait whale-fishery and the
shop-talk of the veteran exercises of that adventure-bristling trade
through catching catfish with a “trot-line” Sundays. But the surmise is
damaged by the fact that there is no evidence—and not even
tradition—that the young Shakespeare was ever clerk of a law-court.
It is further surmised that the young Shakespeare accumulated his
law-treasures in the first years of his sojourn in London, through
“amusing himself” by learning book-law in his garret and by picking up
lawyer-talk and the rest of it through loitering about the law-courts
and listening. But it is only surmise; there is no _evidence_ that he
ever did either of those things. They are merely a couple of chunks of
plaster of Paris.
There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in
front of the London theaters, mornings and afternoons. Maybe he did. If
he did, it seriously shortened his law-study hours and his
recreation-time in the courts. In those very days he was writing great
plays, and needed all the time he could get. The horse-holding legend
ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian’s
difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare’s erudition—an
erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk,
every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day’s catch into
next day’s imperishable drama.
He had to acquire a knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge
of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a
knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily
emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges, too, into his
dramas. How did he acquire these rich assets?
In the usual way: by surmise. It is _surmised_ that he traveled in
Italy and Germany and around, and qualified himself to put their scenic
and social aspects upon paper; that he perfected himself in French,
Italian, and Spanish on the road; that he went in Leicester’s
expedition to the Low Countries, as soldier or sutler or something, for
several months or years—or whatever length of time a surmiser needs in
his business—and thus became familiar with soldiership and soldier-ways
and soldier-talk and generalship and general-ways and general-talk, and
seamanship and sailor-ways and sailor-talk.
Maybe he did all these things, but I would like to know who held the
horses in the mean time; and who studied the books in the garret; and
who frolicked in the law-courts for recreation. Also, who did the
call-boying and the play-acting.
For he became a call-boy; and as early as ’93 he became a
“vagabond”—the law’s ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in ’94 a
“regular” and properly and officially listed member of that (in those
days) lightly valued and not much respected profession.
Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theaters, and
manager of them. Thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing business
man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty years. Then in
a noble frenzy of poetic inspiration he wrote his one poem—his only
poem, his darling—and laid him down and died:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
He was probably dead when he wrote it. Still, this is only conjecture.
We have only circumstantial evidence. Internal evidence.
Shall I set down the rest of the Conjectures which constitute the giant
Biography of William Shakespeare? It would strain the Unabridged
Dictionary to hold them. He is a brontosaur: nine bones and six hundred
barrels of plaster of Paris.
V
“WE MAY ASSUME”
In the Assuming trade three separate and independent cults are
transacting business. Two of these cults are known as the
Shakespearites and the Baconians, and I am the other one—the
Brontosaurian.
The Shakespearite knows that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s Works; the
Baconian knows that Francis Bacon wrote them; the Brontosaurian doesn’t
really know which of them did it, but is quite composedly and
contentedly sure that Shakespeare _didn’t_, and strongly suspects that
Bacon _did_. We all have to do a good deal of assuming, but I am fairly
certain that in every case I can call to mind the Baconian assumers
have come out ahead of the Shakespearites. Both parties handle the same
materials, but the Baconians seem to me to get much more reasonable and
rational and persuasive results out of them than is the case with the
Shakespearites. The Shakespearite conducts his assuming upon a definite
principle, an unchanging and immutable law: which is: 2 and 8 and 7 and
14, added together, make 165. I believe this to be an error. No matter,
you cannot get a habit-sodden Shakespearite to cipher-up his materials
upon any other basis. With the Baconian it is different. If you place
before him the above figures and set him to adding them up, he will
never in any case get more than 45 out of them, and in nine cases out
of ten he will get just the proper 31.
Let me try to illustrate the two systems in a simple and homely way
calculated to bring the idea within the grasp of the ignorant and
unintelligent. We will suppose a case: take a lap-bred, house-fed,
uneducated, inexperienced kitten; take a rugged old Tom that’s scarred
from stem to rudder-post with the memorials of strenuous experience,
and is so cultured, so educated, so limitlessly erudite that one may
say of him “all cat-knowledge is his province”; also, take a mouse.
Lock the three up in a holeless, crackless, exitless prison-cell. Wait
half an hour, then open the cell, introduce a Shakespearite and a
Baconian, and let them cipher and assume. The mouse is missing: the
question to be decided is, where is it? You can guess both verdicts
beforehand. One verdict will say the kitten contains the mouse; the
other will as certainly say the mouse is in the tom-cat.
The Shakespearite will Reason like this—(that is not my word, it is
his). He will say the kitten _may have been_ attending school when
nobody was noticing; therefore _we are warranted in assuming_ that it
did so; also, it _could have been_ training in a court-clerk’s office
when no one was noticing; since that could have happened, _we are
justified in assuming_ that it did happen; it _could have studied
catology in a garret_ when no one was noticing—therefore it _did_; it
_could have_ attended cat-assizes on the shed-roof nights, for
recreation, when no one was noticing, and have harvested a knowledge of
cat court-forms and cat lawyer-talk in that way: it _could_ have done
it, therefore without a doubt it _did_; it _could have_ gone soldiering
with a war-tribe when no one was noticing, and learned soldier-wiles
and soldier-ways, and what to do with a mouse when opportunity offers;
the plain inference, therefore, is that that is what it _did_. Since
all these manifold things _could_ have occurred, we have _every right
to believe_ they did occur. These patiently and painstakingly
accumulated vast acquirements and competences needed but one thing
more—opportunity—to convert themselves into triumphant action. The
opportunity came, we have the result; _beyond shadow of question_ the
mouse is in the kitten.
It is proper to remark that when we of the three cults plant a “_we
think we may assume_,” we expect it, under careful watering and
fertilizing and tending, to grow up into a strong and hardy and
weather-defying “_there isn’t a shadow of a doubt_” at last—and it
usually happens.
We know what the Baconian’s verdict would be: “_There is not a rag of
evidence that the kitten has had any training, any education, any
experience qualifying it for the present occasion, or is indeed
equipped for any achievement above lifting such unclaimed milk as comes
its way; but there is abundant evidence—unassailable proof, in
fact—that the other animal is equipped, to the last detail, with every
qualification necessary for the event. without shadow of doubt the
tom-cat contains the mouse_.”