wrote it was afraid the tomb might be violated by the removal of the
bones to the charnel house. Who were they that would most likely
invade Shakspere’s tomb? Obviously those, we repeat, who regarded him
as a hard-hearted man, who pressed poor debtors with all the rigor of
the law to enforce the payment of petty sums; the man who had shown
himself supremely selfish in an attempt to enclose the Stratford common
field; the man who would be made “a gentleman” by misrepresentation,
fraud and falsehood. The foregoing facts, and the legal and municipal
evidence bound up in dusty records, a bogus coat-of-arms, and a rude
epitaph, tell the true story of the life of William Shakspere of
Stratford-on-Avon.
There is no record of any pretended living likeness of Shakspere better
representing him than the Stratford bust. This bust is erected on the
north side of the chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon.
On the floor of the chancel in front of the monument are the graves of
Shakspere and his family. We have no means of ascertaining when the
monument and bust were erected. The first folio edition of his reputed
works was published in 1623. It contained words from Leonard Diggs
prefatory lines “and time dissolves thy Stratford moniment,” monument
being used interchangeably with tomb; but these words do not prove that
the bust was set up before 1623. His image was rudely cut, sensual and
clownish in appearance.
There is not a tittle of evidence adduced to show that a knowledge
of Shakspere’s putative authorship of poems and plays was current
at Stratford when the first folio edition of his reputed works
was published in 1623. The records attest that Shakspere’s fame
reputatively as writer is posterior to this event. How strange it
must seem to those who claim for Shakspere an established reputation
as poet and dramatist of repute anterior to the first folio edition in
1623, that Dr. Hall, himself an author and most advantaged of all the
heirs by Shakspere’s death, should fail to mention his father-in-law in
his “cure-book” or observations! The earliest dated cure is 1617, the
year following Shakspere’s death, but there are undated ones. In “Obs.
XIX.” Hall mentions without date an illness of his wife, Mrs. Hall;
and we find him making a note long afterwards in reference to his only
daughter, Elizabeth, who was saved by her father’s skill and patience.
“Thus was she delivered from death and deadly diseases and was well
for many years.” The illness of Drayton is recorded without date in
“Obs. XXII.,” with its wee bit of a literary biography, and he is
referred to as “Mr. Drayton, an excellent poet.” Had Shakspere received
a like mention as a poet or writer by one who knew him so intimately,
what a delicious morsel it would have been to all those who have
followed the literary antiquarian through the dreary barren waste of
Shakespearean research. We have found nothing but husks, and these,
eulogists of Shakespeare—Hallam, Stevens and Emerson—refused to crunch!
For nearly three centuries the Stratford archives have contained all
matters concerning Shakspere’s life and character, and have given us
full knowledge of the man; nothing has been lost; but of his alleged
literary life, there is not a crumb, no family traditions, no books,
no manuscripts, no letters, no commendatory verses, plays, masques or
anthology.
The biographers of Shakespeare have none of the material out of
which poets and dramatists are made, but only those facts which are
congruous with money lenders, land speculators, play-brokers and
actors; also, a good assortment of apocryphal stores and gossipy yarns
which have become traditional currency. According to Mark Twain there
is something more. He says, “When we find a vague file of chipmunk
tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village we know that
Hercules has been along.” Again he proceeds, “The bust, too, there in
the Stratford church, the precious bust, the calm bust with a dandy
mustache, and the putty face unseamed with care—that face which has
looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty
years, and will look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more with
the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.”
Not having found the slightest trace of Shakespeare in 1592 as writer
of plays, or as adapter or elaborator of other men’s work, his
advent into literature must have been at a later date, if at all. In
1593 “Venus and Adonis” appeared in print with a dedication to Lord
Southampton, and signed “William Shakespeare.” In 1594 appeared another
poem, “Lucrece,” also with a dedication to Lord Southampton. The
poems bore no name of an author on the title page. Here is literary
tangibility, but does it establish the identity of their author, or
attest the responsibility of the young Stratford man for the poems
which were published under the name of Shakespeare? This was the first
mention of the now famous name? Was it a pseudonym, or was it the
true name of the author of the poem? The enthusiastic reception of
the poems awakens a suspicion when we learn that their popularity was
due to a belief in their lasciviency; and that the dedicatee was the
rakish Henry Wriothesley, third Earle of Southampton; and, furthermore,
that the name of the dedicator, “Shakespeare,” was one of a class of
nicknames which in 1593 still retained in some measure that which was
derisive in them. In 1487 a student at Oxford changed his own name of
“Shakespeare” into “Saunders,” because he considered it too expressive
and distinctive of rough manners, and significant of degradation, and
as such was unwilling to aid in its hereditary transmission, when all
that is derisive in the name Shakspere remained fixed and fossilized
in the old meaning. In those unlettered times, lascivious persons
were sometimes branded, so to speak, with the nickname “Shakspere.”
Primarily, the name has no militant signification. There is no such
personal name in any known list of British surnames. They are of the
parvenu class without ancestry.
Mr. Sidney Lee admits that the Earle of Southampton is the only patron
of Shakspere that is known to biographical research (p. 126). By
what fact, or facts, may we ask, is the authenticity of the Earl’s
friendship or patronage attested? Southampton was the standing patron
of all the poets, the stock-dedicatee of those days. It was the fashion
of the times to pester him with dedications by poets grave and gay.
They were after those five or six pounds, which custom constrained
his Lordship to yield for having his name enshrined in poet’s lines.
All the poets of that age were dependents, and there is, with few
exceptions, the same display of pharisaic sycophancy, greediness, and
on the part of dedicatee an inordinate desire for adulation. Every
student of Elizabethan literature and history should know that the
Southampton-Shakspere friendship cannot be traced biographically.
The Earl of Southampton was a voluminous correspondent, but did not
bear witness to his friendship for Shakspere. A scrutinous inspection
of Southampton’s papers contained in the archives of his family,
descendants and contemporaries, yields nothing in support of the
contention that Southampton’s friendship, or patronage, is known
to biographical research, and it is as attestative as that other
apocryphal story preserved by Rowe “which is fast disappearing from
Shakespearean biography.”
“There is one instance so singular in its munificence that if we
had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William
Davenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs,
we should not venture to have inserted that my Lord Southampton at
one time gave him (Shakspere) a thousand pounds, to enable him to go
through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.” (Davenant
was the man who gave out that he was the natural son of Shakspere).
A present of a thousand pounds which equals at least twenty-five
thousand dollars to-day! The magnitude of the gift discredits the story
nevertheless, the startled Rowe, is the first to make it current, but
does not give his readers the ground for his assurance. Be it what it
may, he could hardly satisfy the modern reader that this man, a son,
who insinuatingly defiles the name and fair fame of his own mother,
is a credible witness, or that such a man is “fit for wolf bait.”
What purchase did Shakspere “go through with?” Not New Place in 1597,
for the purchase money was only sixty pounds. Neither could it have
been the Stratford estate in 1602, for at that time Southampton was a
prisoner in the Tower. In fact, the whole sum expended by Shakspere did
not amount to a thousand pounds in all. The truth is, the social Rules
of Tudor and Jacobin times did not permit peer and peasant to live on
terms of mutual good feeling. Almost all the poets in hope of gain,
penned adulatory sonnets in praise of Lord Southampton. In those times
they had a summary way of dealing with humble citizens. Jonson, Chapman
and Marston, were imprisoned for having displeased the king by a jest
in “Eastward Ho,”—
“A nobleman to vindicate rank brought an action in the star-chamber
against a person, who had orally addressed him as ‘Goodman Morley.’”
The literati of those days found in scholastic learning, neither
potency, nor promise, to abrogate class distinctions by giving a
passport to high attainment in literature, poetry and philosophy. Ben
Jonson says, “The time was when men were had in price for learning, now
letters only make men vile. He is upbraidingly called a poet as if it
were a contemptible nickname.”
Mr. Lee tells us, that the state papers and business correspondence
of Southampton were enlivened by references to his literary interest
and his sympathy with the birth of English Drama. (P. 316.). “However,
Mr. Lee has extracted no reference to Shakspere from the paper.”
Southampton’s zest for the theatre is based on the statement contained
in the “Sidney Papers” that he and his friend Lord Rutland “come not
to court but pass away the time merely in going to plays every day.”
When a new library for his old college, St. Johns, was in course
of construction, Southampton collected books to the value of three
hundred and sixty pounds wherewith to furnish it. Southampton’s
literary tastes and sympathy with the drama cannot be drawn from
his gift to the library, for it consisted largely of legends of the
saints and mediaeval chronicles. When and where did William Shakspere
acknowledge his obligations to the only patron of the player? According
to Mr. Lee, who is known to biographical research, not one of the
Shakespearean plays was dedicated to Southampton. The name “Shakspere”
is conspicuously absent from among the distinguished writers of his
day, who in panegyrical speech and song acclaimed Southampton’s release
from prison in 1602.
Francis Meres, a pedantic schoolmaster and Divinity student, had his
“Palladis Tamia” registered September 7, 1598, and published shortly
after. Meres in his “Tamia” writes of the mellifluous and honey-tongued
Shakespeare, and his “Venus and Adonis,” and his “Lucrece,” and his
sugared sonnets to his friends, and enumerates twelve plays—though
at the time three only had been published with his name. Like others
of his contemporaries, Meres writes tritely of the honey-tongued,
the honey sweet and the sugared. With him, everything written is
mellifluent, but he says nothing of the man. In fact, no contemporary
left on record any definite impression of Shakespeare’s personal
character. Meres asserted that Ben Jonson was one of our best poets
for tragedy, when at that time (1598) Jonson had not written a single
tragedy, and but one comedy.
Before, we transcribe, in part, “Wits Treasury” by Francis Meres, we
ask the readers’ pardon for this abuse of their patience, for Meres
merely repeats names of Greek, Latin and modern play-makers. “As
these tragic poets flourished in Greece—Aeschylus, Euripides” (in all
seventeen are named and these among the Latin, Accius, M. Attilus,
Seneca and several others). “So these are our best for tragedy; the
Lord Buckhurst, Dr. Leg of Cambridge, Dr. Eds of Oxford, Master Edward
Ferris—the author of the ‘Merriour for Magistrates,’—Marlowe, Peele,
Watson, Kyd, Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, Decker and Benjamin Jonson.
The best poets for comedy”—(Meres proceeds with his enumeration, naming
sixteen Greeks and ten Latins, twenty-six in all.) “So the best for
comedy amongst us be Edward, Earl of Oxford; Dr. Lager of Oxford;
Master Rowley; Master Edwards: eloquent and wittie John Lilly; Lodge;
Gascoyne; Greene; Shakespeare; Thomas Nash; Thomas Heywood; Anthony
Munday. Our best plotters: Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathaway and Henry
Chettle.”
Meres does not seem to have considered it necessary to read before
reviewing. Had he done so he would not have placed the name of Lord
Buckhurst first in his list, giving primacy to this mediocrist, and
the author of “Romeo and Juliet,” whoever he was, ninth in his list of
dramatic poets which he considered best among the English for tragedy;
nor, would he have named for second place on the list Dr. Leg of
Cambridge, instead of the author of “The Jew of Malta” (Marlowe). What
has Dr. Eds of Oxford, whose name stands third in the Meres list,
written that he should have been mentioned in the same connection with
the author of “The White Devil” (Webster) or the author of that classic
“The Conspiracy,” and “The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron” (Chapman)?
Why this commingling of such insignificant writers as Edward, Earl of
Oxford, Lord Buckhurst, Drs. Lager and Leg, with the giant brotherhood?
The fact is, so far as attesting the responsibility of anybody or
anything, the Meres averments are as worthless as “a musty nut.” What
was said of John Aubrey is also true of Francis Meres, “His brain was
like a hasty pudding whose memory and judgment and fancy were all
stirred together.” Yet this is the writer that many Shakespearean
commentators confidently appeal to, in part, and whose testimony, in
part, they, with equal unanimity impeach.
The slight mention of Shakespeare by the “judicious Webster,” as Hazlet
calls him, comprehends no more than that Shakspere was one of the hack
writers of the day: “detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance.” For
mine own part I have ever truly cherished “my good opinion of other
men’s worthy labours, especially of that full and heightened style of
Master Chapman, the laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson,
the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master
Beaumont and Fletcher, and lastly (without wrong last to be named) the
right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker
and Master Heywood.”
These words written by the third greatest of English tragic poets
are very significant, for Webster wrote for the theatre to which
Shakspere, the player and play-broker, belonged; yet industry is
the only distinguishing mark in Shakspere which he must share with
Dekker, and Heywood, hack writers for the stage. Dekker’s many plays
attest his copious industry, when we remember that this writer spent
three years in prison, and Heywood’s industry cannot be doubted for
he claimed to have had a hand and main finger in two hundred twenty
plays. Copious industry signifies to the reader the existence of an
author not utterly unknown, it is true, but it fails to identify him
as the author of the immortal plays. What shall we say then? Were the
works called Shakespeare’s but little known? Shakspere’s biographers
say that they were the talk of the town. If that is true, then the
writer who was commended for industry was not regarded by Webster
as the author of “Hamlet,” “Lear,” and “Macbeth,” for Shakespeare’s
distinctive characteristics are not individualized from those of Dekker
and Heywood, while those of Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher are.
In the last four named is perfect interlacement of personality with
authorship, but not so in Shakespeare.
John Webster’s judgment of his fellow craftsman was just, “I have
ever truly cherished my good opinion of other men’s worthy labours.”
Webster never conceals or misrepresents the truth by giving evasive, or
equivocating, evidence. He reveals the judicial trait of his character
in placing Chapman first among the poets then living, assuming that
the name Shakespeare was used by printers and publishers, if not by
writers, as an impersonal name, masking the name of a true poet.
Sidney, Marlowe and Spencer had then descended to the tomb.
George Chapman’s name has not received due prominence in the modern
hand-books of English literature, but he was a bright torch and
numbered by his own generation, among the greatest of its poets. He,
whom Webster calls the “Prince’s Sweet Homer” and “My Friend,” was not
unduly honored by the “full and heightened style” which Webster makes
characteristic of him. “Our Homer-Lucan,” as he was gracefully termed
by Daniel, is a poet much admired by great men. Edmund Waller never
could read Chapman’s Homer without a degree of transport. Barry is
reputed to have said that when he went into the street after reading
it, men seemed ten feet high; Coleridge declares Chapman’s version of
the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the “Faerie Queene.” He
also declares that Chapman in his moral heroic verse stands above Ben
Jonson. “There is more dignity, more lustre, and equal strength.”
Translation was in those times a new force in literature. By the
indomitable force and fire of genius Chapman has made Homer himself
speak English by translating the genius, and by having chosen that
which prefers the spirit to the letter. It is in his translation that
the “Iliad” is best read as an English book. Out of it there comes a
whiff of the breath of Homer. It is as massive and majestic as Homer
himself would have written in the land of the virgin queen. “He has
added,” says Swinburne, “a monument to the temple which contains the
glories of his native language, the godlike images, and the costly
relics of the past.” “The earnestness and passion,” says Charles Lamb,
“which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible
to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the
honor of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew
bigotry with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the
old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson
against the uncircumcised.” It was the reflected Hellenic radiance of
the grand old Chapman version to the lifted eyes of Keats flooded with
the “light which never was on sea or shore.” This younger poet sang:
“Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen,
Round many western islands have I been,
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold;
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.”
The preface to Webster’s tragedy, “The White Devil,” which contains
a slight mention of Shakespeare, was printed in 1612, after all the
immortal plays were written and their reputed author had returned to
Stratford, probably in 1611, in his forty-seventh year, where he lived
idly for five years before his death. John Webster possessed a critical
faculty and an independent judgment, but the way he makes mention of
Shakespeare shows that he knew nothing about the individual man, or
the work, called Shakespeare.
The generous reference to “The laboured and understanding works of
Master Jonson” gives a clear idea of the main characteristics of the
work of Jonson, who, not having reached the fruition of his renown in
1611, but in the after time, came into Dryden’s view as “The greatest
man of the last age, the most learned and judicious writer any theatre
ever had.” John Webster writes of “the no less worthy composures of
Beaumont and Fletcher” then in the morning of life. They present an
admirable model for purity of vocabulary and simplicity of expression
and were of “loudest fame.” “Two of Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s plays
were acted to one of Shakespeare’s, or Ben Jonson’s,” in Dryden’s time.
There is strong presumptive proof that printers and publishers in
Elizabethan and Jacobin times were in the habit of selecting names or
titles that would best sell their books. The most popular books or
best sellers they printed were books of songs, love-tales, comedies and
sonnets of the amorous, scented kind, and it mattered not to publishers
if the name printed on the title-page was a personal name, or one
impersonal. Title-pages were not even presumptive proof of authorship
in the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. The printers chose to
market their publications under the most favorable conditions, and
some writers chose the incognizable name “Shakespeare” which had been
attached to the voluptuous poem “Venus and Adonis.” This was published
by Richard Field, in whose name it had been entered in the Stationer’s
Register in 1593. There was no name of an author on the title-page, but
the dedication was to the Earl of Southampton and was signed “William
Shakespeare.” This was the first appearance of the name “Shakespeare”
in literature, being the non-de-plume, doubtless, of the writer who
gave this erotic poem to the world—“The first heir of my invention.”
Not finding “Shakespeare” in the anthology of his day, the most
natural inference would be that all those who wrote under the name
“Shakespeare” wrote incognito. We know that Marlowe, Beaumont, Greene,
Drayton and many writers of that age wrote anonymously for the
Elizabethan stage. Many of the anonymous writings have been retrieved;
much, doubtless, remains still to be reclaimed from the siftings of
what are named Early Comedy, Early History, and Pre-Shakespearean
Group of plays. Mr. Spedding had the good fortune to be the first to
demonstrate the theory of a divided authorship of “Henry VIII.,” to
reclaim for Fletcher “Wolsey’s Farewell to all his Greatness.” Thirteen
out of the seventeen scenes of “Henry the Eighth” are attributed by Mr.
Lee (P. 212) to Fletcher. A majority of the best critics now agree with
Miss Jane Lee, in the assignment of the second and third part of Henry
VI. to Marlowe, Greene and Peele.
The difficulty of identifying Shakespeare, the author poet, with
the young man who came up from Stratford, has induced Shakespearean
scholars to question the unity of authorship. Mr. Swinburne tells us
that no scholar believes in the single authorship of “Andronicus.”
Mr. Lee admits that Shakespeare drew largely on the “Hamlet,” which
he has attributed to Kyd (P. 182). “It is scarcely possible,” says
Mr. Marshall in the “Irving Shakespeare,” “to maintain that the play
‘(Hamlet)’ referred to as well known in 1589, could have been by
Shakspere—that is—by the young actor from Stratford. Surely not. We
see the question of the unity of the author and authorship involves
the question of his identity.” It is evident that the author poet,
whoever he was, had, in his time of initiation, “purloyned plumes” from
Marlowe, Kyd and Greene, and, when nearing the close of his literary
career, according to Prof. A. H. Thorndike, he was a close imitator of
John Fletcher—not so much an innovator as an adapter.