Lee's Life of Shakespeare [29]
[29] A Life of Shakespeare. By Sidney Lee.
It is a pleasure to turn from the slovenly and perfunctory work, from the plausible charlatanry and pretentious incompetence which it has so often been our unwelcome duty to expose in these columns, to such a volume as the volume before us. It is books like these which retrieve the honour of English scholarship. A wide range of general knowledge, immense special knowledge, scrupulous accuracy, both in the investigation and presentation of facts, the sound judgment, the tact, the insight which in labyrinths of chaotic traditions and conflicting testimony can discern the clue to probability and truth—these are the qualifications indispensable to a successful biographer of Shakespeare. And these are the qualifications which Mr. Lee possesses, in larger measure than have been possessed by any one who has essayed the task which he has here undertaken. A ranker and more tangled jungle than that presented by the traditions, the apocrypha, the theories, the conjectures which have gradually accumulated round the memory of Shakespeare since the time of Rowe, could scarcely be conceived. In this jungle some, like Charles Knight, have altogether lost themselves; others, like Joseph Hunter, have struck out vigorously into wrong tracks, and floundered into quagmires. Halliwell Phillipps, sure-footed and wary though he was, certainly had not the clue to it. But Mr. Lee, who can plainly say with Comus,—
"I know each lane, and every alley green,
Dingle or bushy dell of this wild wood,
And every bosky bourne from side to side,
My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood,"
has thridded it, and taught others to thrid it, as no one else has done. And he will have his reward. He has produced what deserves to be, and what will probably become, the standard life of our great national poet.
Mr. Lee's book is substantially a reproduction of his article on Shakespeare, contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, the high merits of which have long been recognised by scholars; and he has certainly done well to make that article popularly accessible by reprinting it in a separate form. But the present volume is not a mere reproduction of his contribution to the Dictionary; it is much more. He has here filled out what he could there sketch only in outline; what he could there state only as results and conclusions, he here illustrates and justifies by corroboration and proof. He has, moreover, both in the text and in the appendices, brought together a great mass of interesting and pertinent collateral matter which the scope of the Dictionary necessarily precluded.
More than a century ago George Steevens wrote: "All that can be known with any degree of certainty about Shakespeare is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married and had children there, went to London, where he commenced actor, wrote poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried there." And, if we set aside probable inferences, this is all we do know of any importance about his life. His pedigree cannot certainly be traced beyond his father. Nothing is known of the place of his education—that he was educated at the Stratford Grammar School is pure assumption. His life between his birth and the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593, is an absolute blank. It is at least doubtful whether the supposed allusion to him in Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit, and in Chettle's Kind Heart's Dream have any reference to him at all; it is still more doubtful whether the William Shakespeare of Adrian Quiney's letter, or of the Rogers and Addenbroke summonses, or the William Shakespeare who was assessed for property in St. Helens, Bishopsgate, was the poet. We know practically nothing of his life in London, or of the date of his arrival in London; we are ignorant of the date of his return to Stratford, of his happiness or unhappiness in married life, of his habits, of his last days, of the cause of his death. Not a sentence that fell from his lips has been authentically recorded. At least one-half of the alleged facts of his biography is as purely apocryphal as the life of Homer attributed to Herodotus.
But probability, as Bishop Butler says, is the guide of life, and on the basis of probability may be raised, it must be owned, a fairly satisfactory biography. Mr. Lee has not been able to contribute any new facts to Shakespeare's life, which is certainly not his fault; but he has given us a recapitulation, as lucid as it is exhaustive, of all that the industry of successive generations of memorialists from Ben Jonson to Halliwell Phillipps has succeeded in accumulating, and he has been as judicious in what he has rejected as in what he has adopted. From the curse of the typical Shakespearian biographer—we mean the statement of mere inference and hypothesis as fact—he is absolutely free. He has done excellent service in giving, if not finishing, at least swashing blows to the monstrous fictions of the theorists on the sonnets, particularly to the Fitton-Pembroke mare's nest, fictions which have been gradually generating a Shakespeare, as purely apocryphal as the Roland of the song or the Apollonius of Philostratus.
Mr. Lee's most remarkable contribution to speculative Shakespearian criticism, in which, we are glad to say, he does not often indulge, is his contention that the W. H. of the dedication to the sonnets was William Hall, a small piratical stationer. It is never wise to speak positively on what must necessarily be, till certain evidence is obtainable, a matter of speculation. But we are very much inclined to think that Mr. Lee's contention has at least something in its favour. Our readers will remember that one of the chief points in the enigma of the sonnets is the dedication, and it runs thus: "To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." It has generally been assumed that the "W. H." is the youth who is the hero of the first group of sonnets, and the poet's friend, and he has commonly been identified either with William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, or with Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The difficulties in the way of either hypothesis—and on each hypothesis not Babels merely, but cities of Babels have been raised—are to an unprejudiced mind insurmountable. Mr. Lee maintains with plausible ingenuity, but not, we think, conclusively, that there is no proof that the youth of the sonnets was named "Will" at all. His analysis of the "Will" sonnets is a masterpiece of subtle ingenuity, and well deserves careful attention. He then proceeds to adopt the theory that the word "begetter" is not to be taken in the sense of "inspirer," but simply as "procurer" or "obtainer" of the sonnets for T. T., i.e., the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. In other words, that Thorpe dedicated the sonnets to W. H., in return for W. H. having piratically obtained them for him. This is at least doubtful. In the first place it may reasonably be questioned whether "begetter" could have the meaning which is here assigned to it; the passages quoted from Hamlet ("acquire and beget a temperance") and from Dekker's Satiro-mastix, "I have some cousins german at Court shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King's Revels," are anything but conclusive. Still, Thorpe, who is by no means remarkable for the purity of his English, may have used it in the sense which Mr. Lee's theory requires.
Shakespeare's sonnets, as is well known, were circulating among his friends in manuscript, and Mr. Lee has discovered that one William Hall was well known as an Autolycus among publishers, and had already edited, under the initials W. H., a collection of poems left by the Jesuit poet, Southwell—in other words had already done for the publisher, George Eld, what it is assumed that he now did for Thomas Thorpe. Mr. Lee's theory is, it must be admitted, plausible, and few would hesitate to pronounce it far more probable than the theory which would identify the enigmatical initials with the names of Pembroke or Southampton.
The chapters dealing with the sonnets are, in our opinion the most valuable contribution which has ever been made to this important province of Shakespearian study, and it may be said of Mr. Lee, as Porson said of Bentley, that we may learn more from him when he is wrong than from many others when they are right. His contention is, and it is supported with exhaustive erudition, that these poems are, in the main, a concession to the fashion, then so much in vogue, of sonnet writing; that their themes are the conventional themes treated in those compositions; that some of them were dedicated to Southampton, that some may be autobiographical, but that they are wholly miscellaneous, and tell no consecutive story, as so many critics have erroneously assumed. We cannot accept all Mr. Lee's theories and conclusions, but one thing is certain, that they are supported with infinitely more skill and learning than any other theories which have been broached on this hopelessly baffling problem.
We will conclude by noticing what seem to us slight blemishes in this admirable work. There is nothing to warrant the assertion on p. 158 that most of Shakespeare's sonnets were produced in 1594, which is to cut the knot of a most difficult question. Indeed, with respect to the whole question of the sonnets, Mr. Lee is, we venture to submit, a little too dogmatic. It is a question which no one can settle as positively as Mr. Lee seems to settle it. There is surely no good, or even plausible reason for doubting the authenticity of Titus Andronicus, whatever innumerable Shakespearian critics may say, external and internal evidence alike being almost conclusive for its genuineness. There is nothing to warrant the supposition that Shakespeare was on bad terms with his wife. The famous bequest in his Will was probably a delicate compliment, and we are surprised that Mr. Lee should not have noticed this. Among the testimonies to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, Mr. Lee should have recorded that of Archbishop Sharp, who, according to Speaker Onslow, used to say "that the Bible and Shakespeare had made him Archbishop of York."
Mr. Lee must also forgive us for adding that, in this work at least, æsthetic criticism is not his strong point, and he would have done well to keep it within even narrower bounds than he has done. Many of those who would be the first to admire his erudition and the other scholarly qualities which are so conspicuous in every chapter of his book, will, we fear, take exception to much of his criticism, especially in relation to the sonnets. It is too positive; it is unsympathetic; it is too mechanical. But our debt to Mr. Lee is so great, that we feel almost ashamed to make any deductions in our tribute of gratitude.