Part II The Appeal to History
Ut, having taken the liberty of doubting whether—as matter of record—one William Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, sometime part-proprietor of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in London, could have very well been himself and the author of what are known popularly to-day as “the plays of Shakespeare,” although there seemed to be ground for supposing that he might have cast them into something of the acting form they possess as preserved to us; and having come to the conclusion that—once this presumption is lifted—all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of the actual William Shakespeare is actually evidence cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the record: let us proceed to inquire whether—on review—a case rested on this evidence can be rebutted by those certain considerations and matters, by way of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to the surface whenever these waters are troubled—which whoever ventures to canvass the possibilities of an extra Shakesperean authorship of the dramas can so infallibly anticipate.
Granted that the Shakespeare Will does not prove the testator oblivious of his own copyrights or rights in the nature of copyrights; granted that the story of the deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely rejected by the Shakespereans, because conceived to be unworthy of the image they set up; granted that the fact of the circulation of the blood was a familiar fact in the days of William Shakespeare; that the “Menæchmi” of Plautus; that Iago’s speech in “Othello” and the stanza of Berni’s Orlando Innamorato were mere coincidences; or, better yet, admit that there was an English version of the Italian poem in Shakespeare’s day *—admit, if required—that the “Hamlet” of Saxo, had been translated; that the law in “The
* When Iago utters the often quoted lines, “who steals my purse steals trash, etc.,” he but repeats, with little variation, this stanza of the Orlando Innamorato of which poem, to this day, there is no English version.
“Chi ruba un corno un cavallo, un anello E simil cose, ha qualcha discrezione,
E patrebbe chimarsi ladroneello;
Ma quel ehe ruba la reputazione E de l’altrai patiehe si fa bello,
Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone;
E tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno?”
As no English translation has been made of the Orlando Innamorato, I must ask the reader who can not command the original to be content with this rendering of the above stanza:
“The man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring,
Or such a trifle, thieves with moderation,
And may be justly called a robberling;
But he who takes away a reputation And pranks in feathers from another’s wing His deed is robbery—assassination,
And merits punishment so much the greater As he to right and truth is more a traitor.”
Shakespeare, by R. G. White, vol. I, p. 23.
** Of Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian from whom the plot of the “Hamlet” was taken, Whalley says, writing in 1748, that “no translation hath yet been made,” must have been read by the writer of “Hamlet” in the original. “An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare,” etc. By Peter Whalley, A. B.,
Fellow of St. John’s College, London. Printed for J. Waller
at the Crown and Mitre, 1748—And see a suggestion that the
“Hamlet” came from Germany, in a pamphlet “On the Double
Personality of the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet of
Shakespeare. Its Relation to the German Hamlet.” By Dr.
Latham, Royal Society of Literature Transactions. 1878.
Also, “Shakespeare in Germany. Alfred Cohn. Berlin and
London. 1874.
“Merchant of Venice” was “Venetian” instead of “crowner’s quest” Jaw; admit that William Shakespeare “had the advantages in school of something more than the mere rudiments of learning;” admit that “his devotion to his family drove him forth from the rural seclusion of Stratford into the battle of the great world;” that the immortal gift of the second-best bed was, (we quote from Mr. Grant White, who is apparently willing to sacrifice anybody’s reputation if he can thereby prove his William to have been a prodigy of virtue no less than of genius), explained by the fact that, at the time of the hurried marriage, a husband had to be provided for Mistress Hathaway without loss of time, and that little Susannah was as much of a surprise to William as to any body—in other words, that Anne was “no better than she should be,” (oblivious of the fact that “the premature Susannah” was William Shakespeare’s favorite child; that he, at least, never doubted her paternity, for he left her the bulk of his fortune in his will);or even that—according to Steevens, that testamentary second thought was actually “a mark of rare confidence and devotion;” granted all these—if they have anything to do with the question—and a dozen more, and we only attenuate, by the exact value of these, the mountain of probability, nothing less than the complete dilapidation and disappearance of which could leave room for substitution, In the stead of the probability, the possibility of such a suspension of the laws of nature as is required by the Shakespearean theorists. For, as we have said, the evidence is cumulative, and, therefore, no more to be waived or disposed of by doubts as to, or even the dispelment of, this or that or the other item—or disintegration of this or that or the other block—of evidence than the Coliseum has been wiped away and disposed of because its coping has crumbled, or because, for some centuries, the petty Roman princes built their palaces from its debris.
And we may as well remark that, just here, it is always in order to mention Archbishop Whately’s “Historic Doubts.” We wish some of the gentlemen who cite it so glibly, would take the trouble to read that clever little book. It is a logical, not a whimsical effort. It was intended by its author as an answer to “Hume’s Essay on Miracles.” Hume’s argument being, in the opinion of the Archbishop, reducible to the proposition that miracles were impossible because they were improbable, his lordship wrote his little work to show that the history of Napoleon was actually most improbable, and, written of feigned characters, would read like the most extravagant fable. Surely it can not be necessary to reiterate the difference between the Archbishop’s brochure and the proposition of “The Shakspearean Myth!” The one was the argument from improbability, applied to facts in order to show its dangerous and altogether vicious character. The other is the demonstration that history—that the record—when consulted, is directly fatal to a popular impression, and directly contradictory of a presumption, born of mere carelessness and accident, and allowed to gather weight by mere years and lapse of time.
But, for the sake of the argument, let us leave the discussion, for the moment, just where it stands, and take still bolder ground. Instead of sifting evidence and counting witnesses, let us assume that, when we painted William Shakspeare—who lived between the years 1564 and 1616—as an easy-going rural wag, with a rural wit, thereafter to be sharpened by catering to the “gods” of a city theater; a poacher on occasion, and scapegrace generally in his youth, who chose the life of “a vagabond by statute”—i. e. a strolling player—but who turned up in London, and found his way into more profitable connection with a permanent play-house; and, in his advancing years, became thrifty, finally sordid—we had only taken the liberty of conceiving, like every other who ever wrote on a Shakespearean theme, yet one more William Shakespeare; so that, instead of ten thousand William Shakespeares, no two of which were identical, there were now ten thousand and one! Admitting that, the next question would of necessity be—and such an investigation as the present must become utterly valueless if prosecuted with bias or with substitution of personal opinion for historical fact—whose William Shakespeare is probably most a likeness of the true William Shakespeare, who did wander from Stratford to London, who did sojourn there, and who did wander back again to Stratford, and there was gathered to his fathers, in the year 1616?
The popular William Shakespeare, built to fit the plays, is a masterless philosopher, a matchless poet, a student of Greek manuscripts and classic manners, of southern romance and northern sagas, a traveler and a citizen of the world, a scientist, a moralist, a master of statecraft, and skilled in all the graces and amenities of courtly society! Which of these two portraits is nearest to the life? Let us take an appeal to History.
There appears to be but one way to go about to discover; that way is to appeal to the truth of history; to go as nearly back as we can get to the lifetime of the actual man we are after, and inquire, wherever a trace of him can be touched, what manner of man he was. How, it happens that the very nearest we can come to an eye-witness as to the personnel of William Shakespeare is the Reverend John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, who wrote in that town a diary or memoranda, between February, 1662, and April, 1663, say forty-seven years after William Shakespeare’s death. The following meager references to his late fellow-townsman are all (except an entry to the effect that he had two daughters, etc.; and another memorandum, “Remember to peruse Shakespeare’s plays, etc.,) thought worth while by Dominie Ward, viz:
“I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days he lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for that he had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year, as I have heard.”
“Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merrie meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feaver there contracted.”
Next, chronologically, we come to a gentleman named Aubrey. This Mr. Aubrey was himself a native of Warwickshire; was born in 1627—that is, eleven years after Shakespeare died. He entered gentleman commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, and so, presumably, was no Puritan. He was considerable of a scholar himself, and was esteemed, we are told, a Latin poet of no mean abilities, he was admitted a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1646; and so, a scholar, a poet, and a lawyer, might presumably know the difference between a wag and a genius. His manuscripts are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. He gives an account of his fellow-countyman, and, coming as it does, next to Dominie Ward’s, nearer to the lifetime of William Shakespeare than any chronicle extant, (Malone admits it was not written later than 1680), we give it entire:
“Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he exercised his father’s trade; but when he killed a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. There was, at this time, another butcher’s son in that towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young. This Wm. being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson never was a good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was very lowe, and his plays took well. He was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a verie redie and pleasant smooth witt. The humour of the Constable in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ he happened to take at Gremlon, in Bucks,* which is the road from London to Stratford, and there was living that Constable, about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish, and knew him.
Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came. One time, as he was at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, an old rich usurer, was to be buryed; he makes there this extemporary epitaph:
Ten in the hundred the Devil allows,
But Combes will have twelve, he swears and vows.
If any one asks who lies in this tomb,
“Hoh,” quoth the Devil, “’tis my John a Combe!”
He was wont to go to his native country once a year. I think I have been told that he left £200 or £300 a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell (who is counted the best comedian we have now) say that he had a most prodigious witt, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramaticall writers. He was wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life; says Ben Jonson, ‘I wish he had blotted out a thousand.’ His comedies will remain witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum: How our present writers reflect much upon particular persons and coxcombites that twenty years hence they will not be understood. Though, as Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little Latin and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been, in his younger days, a school-master in the country.”*
Imagine this as the record of a real “Shakespeare!” Could we imagine it as the record of a Milton? Let us conceive of a fellow-countryman of John Milton’s, a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the author of “Paradise Lost;” “He was a goodish-looking sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secretary, or something to Cromwell, or some of his gang; had some trouble with his wife; was blind, as I have heard; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was.” And conceive of this, a few years after Milton’s death being actually all the information accessible concerning him!
But to continue our search in the vicinage. On the 10th day of April, 1693 (thirteen years later), a visitor to Warwickshire wrote a letter to his cousin, describing, among other points of interest, the village and church of Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as the letter was discovered among the papers of a well-known nobleman, addressed to a person known to have lived, and indorsed by this latter, “From Mr. Dowdall; description of several places in Warwickshire”—as it bears on its face evidence of its genuineness, and, above all, mentions William Shakespeare, precisely in the same strain that it alludes to other worthies of the county—the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, etc.—it has always been accepted as authentic. After a description of the tomb and resting place of “our English tragedian, Mr. Shakespeare,” the writer continues:
“The clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. * He says that this Shakespeare was formerly of this town, bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he ran from his master to London, and there was received into the play-house as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of his family, but the male line is extinguished. Not one, for fear of the curse abovesaid, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him.”
* I.e. (more than “above” three years old when she died.) This letter was among the papers of Lord DeClifford, which were sold by auction—and was purchased by Mr. Rodd, a well-known antiquarian bookseller, of Great Newport Street, London, in 1834. Mr. Rodd printed it in pamphlet form in 1838 (at least the copy we have bears imprint of that year). It is dated “Butler’s Merston in Warwickshire, April, the 10th, 1693;” is signed, “Your very faithful kinsman and most aff’te humble serv’t till death, John at Stiles,” and is addressed, “These for Mr. Southwell, pr. serv’t.” This is Mr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed in his handwriting, “From Mr. Dowdall. Description of several places in Warwickshire.” Mr. Rodd says that the writer was “an Inns’-of-Court-Man.”
Next, chronologically, comes the contribution preserved to us by a Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of Sapperton,* in Gloucestershire. The Reverend William Fulman, who died in 1688, bequeathed certain of his biographical collections to this Reverend Davies. Davies died in 1708, leaving many annotations to his friend’s manuscripts. Among these annotations he writes the following of William Shakespeare: “William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, about 1563-4, much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and some times imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great that he is his ‘Justice Clodpate’** and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three lowses rampant for his arms. From an actor he became a composer. He died April 23, 1616, aetat fifty-three, probably at Stratford—for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd.)
on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one who shall remove his bones. He died a papist. Whatever these may be worth—for, of course, like the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay—it is fair to include them in a collection of what the law calls “general reputation,” “general report,” or “common fame,” and it is fair to offset this collection, at least, against that “common fame” and “common reputation” which has grown up during the last hundred years or so concerning William Shakespeare, which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. Much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with a tradition, related by one John Jordan, a townsman of Stratford, (who was known in the days of Malone and the Ireland forgeries as “the Stratford poet,”) who claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent to a tradition of an alleged drinking-bout of Shakespeare and others (as representing Stratford) against the champions of Pebworth, Marston, Hillborough, Grafton, Wixford, Broom, and Bidford, in which William was so worsted that his legs refused to carry him farther homeward than a certain thorn-tree, thereafter to come in for its share of worshipful adoration from the Shakespearean sticklers. But the tradition is of no value except as additional testimony to the impression of his boon companions, associates, and contemporaries, that William Shakespeare was a jolly dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his wench—was almost any thing, in short, except the student of history, antiquity, and classic manners, no less than the scholar of his own times, that he has been created since by those who knew him not. Nothing travels faster in rural communities, as we have remarked, than a reputation for “book-learning;” let us continue our search for Shakespeare’s.
When an interest in the Shakespearean drama began to assert itself, and people began to inquire who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At the outset they ran full against this village “ne’er-do-weel” and rustic wag, who worked down into a man of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and properties in London, and spent it royally in Stratford, drinking himself into his grave some seven years before the first collection of what the world in time was to credit him with, (but improved and enlarged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes-perean drama—first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie Ward may have been dazzled by the open house of the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes and outlying lands in Stratford, than by the “two plays a year,” in and about the days when from four to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (according to Philip Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. The prodigality which dazed the simple Stratford dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something less than the income named; and such an income, too, would tally with William Shakespeare’s own estimate of his worldly goods in his Will.
But the statement is the nearest and best evidence we have at hand, and so let it he accepted. And so, running up against this William Shakespeare, these commentators were obliged to stop. But there were the dramas, and there was the name “William Shakespeare” tacked to them; it was William Shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the William Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the one they wanted, they straightway began to construct one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history and local tradition only stimulated them, They must either confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make one.
First (for Rowe has only—in his eight honest pages of biographical notice—narrated certain gossip or facts, on the authority, perhaps, of Betterton, and does not claim to be an explorer, and Heminges and Condell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical allusion whatever) came Edmund Malone. With the nicest and most painstaking care he sifted every morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories, chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report—but in vain. The nearer he came to the Stratford “Shaughraun,” the further away he got from a matchless poet and an all-mastering student. But, like those that were to come after him, instead of accepting the situation, and confessing the William Shakespeare who lived at Stratford not mentionable in the same breath with the producer of the august text which had inspired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at the stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the chroniclers who could so overlook prodigies. Far from concluding that—because he finds no such name as William Shakespeare in the national Walhalla—therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes, rather, that the Walhalla builders do not understand their business. He says:
“That almost a century should have elapsed from the time of his [William Shakespeare’s] death, without a single attempt having been made to discover any circumstance which could throw a light on the history of his life or literary career,... are circumstances which can not be contemplated without astonishment. *... Sir William Dugdale, born in 1605, and educated at the school of Coventry, twenty miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, and whose work, ‘The Antiquities of Warwickshire,’ appeared in 1646, only thirty years after the death of our poet, we might have expected to give some curious memorials of his illustrious countryman. But he has not given us a single particular of his private life, contenting himself with a very slight mention of him in his account of the church and tombs of Stratford-upon-Avon.
* Malone’s “Life:” “Plays and Poems,” London, 1821, vol. ii, p. 4.
* Ibid., p. 5.
The next biographical printed notice that I have found is in Fuller’s ‘Worthies,’ folio, 1662; in ‘Warwickshire,’ page 116—where there is a short account of our poet, furnishing very little information concerning him. And again, neither Winstanley, in his ‘Lives of the Poets,’ 8vo, 1687; Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 1699—add anything to the meager accounts of Bug-dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was himself a native of Oxford, and was born but fourteen years after the death of our author, should not have collected any anecdotes of Shakespeare, has always appeared to me extraordinary. Though Shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the ‘Athenæ Oxoniensis,’ that diligent antiquary could easily have found a niche for his life as he has done for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of Davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for such an insertion.”
The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching among the poets for one by the name of William Shakespeare, when there was no such name among the poets; he found him not, because he was not there. He might with as much propriety have searched for the name of Grimaldi in the Poets’ Corner, or for Homer’s on the books of the Worshipful Society of Patten-makers. To be sure, in writing up Stratford Church, Sir William Dugdale can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakespeare, any more than a writer who should set out to make a guide-book of Westminster Abbey could omit description of the magnificent tomb of John Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in that of the cicerone of the Abbey is the merit of the tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, and contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans would have us accept—would have us to swallow, or rather bolt, with our eyes shut—namely, the spectacle (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out among his fellows in a crowded city of some two hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were certain master spirits whose history we have intact to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of with no difficulty—without making any impression on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen years he is forgotten as if he had never been; and—except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village church, finds his name on a stone—passed beyond the memory of a man in less than the years of a babe! The blind old Homer at least was known as a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities which competed for the tradition of his birth when criticism revealed the merit of his song—though he might have begged his bread in their streets—at least did not take him for a tinker! It is not that the Shakespearean dramas were not recognized as immortal by the generation of their composer that is the miracle; neither were the songs of Homer. Perhaps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule than the exception. The miracle is, that in all the world of London and of England nobody knew that there was any Shakespeare, in the very days when the Drama we hold so priceless now was being publicly rendered in a play-house, and printed—as we shall come to consider further on—for the benefit of non-theater-goers!
But, it is said, the great fire of London intervened and burned up all the records—that is how we happen to have no records of the immortal Shakespeare. Then, again, there is the lapse of time—the ordinary wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes of the commercial center of the world. But how about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about Chaucer? Did the great fire of London affect his chronicle and his labors? The records of Horace, and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had more than a great fire of London to contend with. But they have survived the ruin of empires and the crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and might of the Shakespearean page, how greater than Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and Terence! If it all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not a riddle. It is the simplest of facts—the simple fact that the compilers of the Shakespearean pages worked anonymously, and concealed their identity so successfully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the research of this nineteenth century.
But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not deterred by his failure to find a poet of the name of Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that name there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds—and he has the credit of being the first to undertake the task—to construct an immortal bard. And a very pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too!—one that, with such minor variations as have, from time to time, suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative turn of mind, has been a standard immortal William all along. For they who seek will find. Had Mr. Malone searched for the Stratford “shaughraun,” who ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a profession as any other, for the man makes the profession, and not the profession the man); who revisited his native haunts—on the lookout, not for king’s and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes—but for clowns and drunkards and misers to dovetail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that passed under his adapting pen;* had he searched for the Stratford’ butcher’s son, who was the Stratford wag as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep without making a speech to his admiring fellow-villagers, here he was at his hand.
Cob. Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as another, sir!
Cash. Thy rheum, Cob? Thy humor, thy humor! Thou mistak’st.
Cob. Humor? Mack, I think it be so indeed! What is that humor? Some rare thing, I warrant.
Cash. Marry, I tell thee, Cob, it is a gentlemanlike monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by affectation, and fed by folly.
Cob. How must it be fed?
Cash. Oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. Didst thou never hear that? It’s a common phrase, “Feed thy humor.”
Every Man in his Humor, iii. 4.
Couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable Chiefly to such as had the happiness Daily to see how the poor innocent word Was racked and tortured.
Every Man Out of his Humor.
“Humor” was, it would seem by this, the over-used and abused word of these times; just as for example “awful” might be said to be an over-used and abused word during our own times.
But he was searching, not for a butcher’s son, but for a poet—for a courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
The observed of all observers”—
for “an amazing genius which could pervade all nature at a glance, and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared to be unknown;”* and his instinct should have assured him that.—however the works which such a genius had left behind him might travel under the name of the butcher’s boy—it was not the pen of the butcher-boy that had written them; that the composer of pages “from which, were all the arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered,”** was no “jack-of-all-trades,” and could not have lived and publicly presented his compositions nightly, year in and year out, in the glare of a metropolis crowded with courtiers, play-goers, and students—in the age and days of Bacon and Raleigh and Elizabeth—unknown save to a handful of his pot-fellows, and faded out of the world, unknown and unnoticed, fading from the memory of men, without the passing of an item in their mouths!
The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,
Approaching near these eyes would drink my tears And quench his fiery indignation.
This may be mere coincidence, but the dramas are crowded with such coincidences, and for that, if for that only, are marvelous. In either case, according to the Shakespereans, we have only to go on, for the rest of time, in discovering new truths in nature and facts in science, only to find that the Stratford butcher’s boy knew all about them three hundred years ago—was familiar with all that we have yet to learn, and that to his unlettered genius our wisdom was to be sheer foolishness.
Most wonderful of all, this utter ignoring of William Shakespeare among the poets, if unjust, provoked no remonstrance from the immediate family or any kin of the Stratford lad. Either the Shakespeares, Ardens, and Hathaways were wonderfully destitute of family pride, or else the obscurity accorded their connection was perfectly just and proper. No voice of kin or affinity of William Shakespeare (at least we may say this with confidence) ever claimed immortality for him; although it can not be said that they had no opportunity, had they wished to do so, for William Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was alive until 1670; his sister, Joan Hart, till 1646; and his daughters, Susannah Hall and Judith Queeny, until 1662. So that Dugdale, at least, if not Wood and the rest of them, would not have had to go far to confirm any rumors they might have stumbled upon as to the acquirements and accomplishments of the man Shakespeare; but it seems that not even the partiality of his own kin, nor family fame, nor pride of ancestry, ever conceived the idea of palming off their progenitor upon futurity as a giant of any build. If there is any exception to this statement, it would appear to be as follows:
I. It is recorded by Oldys that, one of his (Shakespeare’s) “younger brothers, who lived to a great age, when questioned, in his last days, about William, said he could remember nothing of his performance but seeing him ‘act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried to a table at which he was seated among some company, and one of them sang a song.’” Mr. Fullom has demonstrated from the Shakespeare family records, that Oldys must have been mistaken as to any brother of William Shakespeare’s having furnished this reminiscence; but, admitting it as the statement of a surviving brother, it stands for what it is, and it certainly is not the record or tradition of one whose popular memory in men’s minds was that of an immortal prodigy.*
II. An epitaph was placed over the remains of Susannah Hall, presumably by one of the family, which read:
“Witty above her sex, but that’s not all:
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she’s now in bliss.”
Whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant that either William Shakespeare or Mistress Hall, or both, were “witty above their sex” or “wise to salvation,” cannot, at this date, be determined: but it would seem that this is all the immediate family of William Shakespeare have ever contributed to our knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contemporaries.
But Mr. Malone—and, being the first investigator, he would, doubtless, have been followed, as he has been, whatever the result of his inquiries—Mr. Malone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to whose pages he had recourse, not only assumed all he could not find authority for, but undertook to tell us the precise dates at which his Stratford lad composed the plays themselves. Among other achievements he constructed an admirable “chronology” of the Shakespearean plays; which—with such fanciful variations as have been made to it from time to time since—is an authority with the Sliakespeareans even to this day. To be sure, Mr. Malone did not rely entirely upon external evidence for this apochrypha. He often appeals to the text, as when, for example, he settles the date at which the “Merchant of Venice” was composed—as 1594, because Portia says:
“Even as a flourish when true subjects bow
To a new crowned monarch,”
referring of course, says Mr. Malone, (and this guesswork he not only called “commentary,” but has actually succeeded in making all his successor “commentators” accept him as final) to the coronation of Henry IV., of France! Again, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” he finds the words, (Act I, scene iii) “Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores.”
“This shows,” says Mr. Malone, “that this comedy must have been written after Sir Walter Raleigh’s return from Guinia, in 1696. And so on.”
We will not rehearse the scope and burden of Mr. Malone’s painstaking and wonderful labors, but, from one instance of the credulity which, once it has overmastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and silly search, we can judge of the calm historical value of his “discoveries.” In 1808, Mr. Malone published a pamphlet—“An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of ‘The Tempest’ were derived, and the Date ascertained.”*
The “Tempest” is the most purely fanciful and poetical of the Shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it; that it is all real: the “Magic Island,” a real island; the magician Prospero, a real portrait; the “monster,” a real, living curiosity, which happened to be on exhibition in England in the days when the play either was written or about to be written, (it makes no difference to these gentlemen which) and the storm at sea—as if the brain which conceived the play could not have conceived—what is not, now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon thing in the world— a storm at sea!—a real historical hurricane!
In 1839, the Reverend Joseph Hunter, following in the Malone footsteps, published “A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin. Date, etc., of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” in which the Magic Island is the island of Lampedusa: first, because it is uninhabited; secondly, because it is small; thirdly, because it lies on the route between Naples and the coast of Africa, so that had a prince been traveling from one to the other, and wrecked on an island between, he could have been conveniently wrecked on this one without going out of his course; fourthly, because it bore the reputation (Mr. Hunter does not say with whom) of being haunted; fifthly, because there was a cell upon it, which Pros-pero might have found most opportune for his ghostly residence; and sixthly, that the island of Malta gets fire-wood from it. This last fact being strongest in the way of proof, because we are told that Prospero impressed Ferdinand into his service and kept him piling logs of wood.
But it was reserved for Mr. Edward Dowden, in 1881, to locate the island beyond the necessity of further conjecture, and to give us accurate sailing directions for reaching it. “Prospero’s Island,” he tells us, “was imagined by Shakespeare as within two days’ quick sail of Naples,” for “Ariel is promised his freedom after two days” (Act I, scene ii). “Why two days? The time of the entire action of the Tempest is only three hours. What was to be the employment of Ariel during two days? To make the winds and seas favorable during the voyage.” (Dowden’s Shakespeare’s Mind and Art. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1881. p. 373.)
It seems that Mr. Malone finds reference to a hurricane that once dispersed a certain fleet of a certain nobleman, one Sir George Somers, in July, 1609, on a passage, with provisions, for the Virginia Colony; the above nobleman, and a Sir Thomas Gates, having been wrecked on the island of Bermuda. This discovery is warranty enough for Mr. Malone, and he goes on gravely to argue that William Shakespeare not only wrote his “Tempest” to commemorate this particular tempest—and, as will be seen by an examination of the premises, the relation between the occurrence and the play is confined merely to the word “tempest” and goes no further—but that he (Shakespeare) did not place the scene of his shipwreck on the Bermudas, “because he could spread a greater glamour over the whole by not alluding to so well-known islands as the Bermudas.” Mr. Malone further remarks naively that, “without having read Tacitus, he (Shakespeare) well knew that ‘omne ignotum pro magnifico est’!” Without pausing to wonder how Mr. Malone knew that Shakespeare of Stratford had never read Tacitus—(a slander, by the way, on the omniscient Shakespeare, too—the man who studied Plautus in Greek manuscript, the author of “Julius Cæsar”—that he had not read a simple Latin historian!)—or to dwell on the most marvelous coincidence between the wreck of Sir George Somers and that of Prince Ferdinand (the coincidence, according to Malone, being, that one was wrecked on the Bermuda and the other wasn’t); or ask if a storm at sea was so rare an occurrence as to be easily identified; or to note that “the tempest” in the play of that name is an episode which covers only about a dozen lines of text, and which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the argument—without pausing for this, or to remark that Mil Malone might have taken to himself the ‘omne ignotum pro magnifico est’ of Tacitus more appositely than heap-plied it either to Sir George Somers or the Bermudas, had he reflected as generously as he took it for granted—it is as well to take our leave of Mr. Malone and his labors at this point, with a compliment to their zeal and impressment which must be withheld from their results.*
And the world would doubtless be as well off could we also here take leave of the rest of the Shakespeare-makers. But we are not allowed to do so. From the time of Malone onward, the Shakespeare-making, Shakespeare-mending, and Shakespeare-cobbling have gone on without relaxation. Each fresh rencontre with an emergency in the Shakespearean text has necessitated at least one and often several new Shakes-peares. And they have been prepared and forthcoming as fast as wanted. Was it found that the bard had, of all his worldly goods, left the wife of his bosom no recognition save the devise of a ramshackle old bedstead? A score of gentlemen hurried to the front to prove that, by law, history, logic, custom, and every thing else, in those days a “second-best bed” was really the most priceless of possessions; of fabulous value, and a fortune in itself; and that in no other way could her immortal husband have so testified his tender regard and appreciation of Mrs. Shakespeare—the sweet Ann Hathaway of old, who had thrown herself away on a scapegrace butcher’s son! The fact (as it appears, on inspection of the instrument itself, to be) that Mrs. Shakespeare was not even alluded to in the first draft of the testament—her name and the complimentary devise of the precious husband’s precious “second-best bed” having been written in as “a poet’s after-thought,” and not appearing in the first draft at all—does not affect their statements in the least! They have even gone so far as to ascertain that William was no truant lord to willingly desert his lonesome lady. According to the very latest authority we are able to cite, the fault of the separation was wholly her own. We are assured by a very recent explorer that Mrs. Shakespeare “did not accompany her husband to London, objecting to the noise and turmoil of that city.”*
Unless it be assumed, therefore, that investigation is reliable in proportion to the distance from its subject at which it works, it would seem to appear that, even if the William Shakespeare we have portrayed were our own creation, the creation is actually a nearer resemblance to the William Shakespeare known to those nearest to him in residence and time; than the inspired genius of the Shakespeareans, who, from Malone downward, have rejected every shred of fact they found at hand, and weaved, instead, their warp and woof of fiction (and that it is charming and absorbing fiction, we are eager to admit) around a vision of their own.
Nor have the Shakespeareans rested their labors here. Having created a Shakespeare to fit the plays, it was necessary to proceed to create a face to fit the Shakespeare, and a cranial development wherein might lodge and whence might spring the magic of the works he ought to have written. This may, very fairly, be called “the young ladies’ argument.”* “Look on his portrait,” say the Shakespeareans; “look at that magnificent head!”—and they point to the Chandos portrait—“is not that the head of a genius?”
“Was there ever such a head?” We should say, yes, there might have been such another head created, even admitting the Chandos portrait to be the very counterfeit head of William Shakespeare. But it does not appear, on taking the trouble to look into the matter, either that the Chandos picture is a portrait, or that—with one exception—any other of the pictures, casts, masks, busts, or statues of William Shakespeare are any thing but works of art, embodying the individual “Hamlet,” or “Lear,” and the elaborate criticism to which a new “portrait” of either of them is subjected—criticism, which, in the case of a portrait of William Shakespeare, in no case pretends to be historical, but is always romantic, or sentimental, or picturesque: as to the proper pose of a poet, or the correct attitude for a man receiving efflatus directly from the gods; never as to the stage manager of the Blackfriars, or the husband of Anne Hathaway, or the son of John Shakespeare, of Stratford.
It appears that, as a matter of fact, there never was but one picture of the Elizabethan Manager which ever enjoyed any thing in the semblance of a certification to its authenticity; and that certification was in the very unsatisfactory form of rhyme, in the shape of a set of verses said to have been written by Ben Jonson (and, as we propose to show, are quite as likely to have been placed under the particular picture without Jonson’s authority as with it); while, that they were written to fit the particular picture in question (for they are in the form of a sort of apostrophe to some picture or portrait, and will be hereafter quoted), there seems to be no information sufficient to form a belief either way. If they were written for that particular picture, and if that particular picture is a speaking likeness, then the phrenological, or at least the physiognomical, argument must droop away and die; for the person represented has as stupefied, stultified, and insignificant a human countenance as was ever put upon an engraver’s surface; and, as a matter of fact, no Shakespearean has yet been found to admit it as the image of his dream. But, of course, this is mere matter of personal opinion, and entitled to no weight whatever in the discussion. The question is—Is there any authentic portrait of William Shakespeare, as there is of Elizabeth, Bacon, Raleigh, Southampton, and other more or less prominent characters of the age in which William Shakespeare is known to have lived and died? Let us do the best we can toward investigating this question.
We have before us a volume, “An Enquiry into the Authenticity of Various Pictures and Prints, which, from the Decease of the Poet to our own Times, have been offered to the Public as Portraits of Shakespeare. Containing a Careful Examination of the Evidence on which they claim to be received; by which the Pretended Portraits have been rejected, the Genuine confirmed and established,” etc., etc. By James Boaden, Esq. * We must content ourselves with a simple review of Mr. Boaden’s labors. He was a friend and disciple of Malone’s, and a Shakespearean; a believer in the poet; and he writes under the shadow of the mighty name—the shadow out from under which we of this age have stepped, and so become able to inspect, not only the facts of history uncurtained by that shadow, but the shadow itself.
* London. Printed for Robert Triphook, 23 Old Bond Street,
1824.
But we will take every one of Mr. Boaden’s statements for granted, nevertheless, and draw our opinions, when we venture on any, from the portraits which he has given in his book. At least Mr. Boaden is not a “Baconian,” and not a “Raleigh man,” and, whenever he finds it necessary to speak of Shakespeare’s history, he follows Malone’s own version. For convenience, we will change Mr. Boaden’s numeration of the “portraits,” preserving the designation, however, which he assigns them.
No. 1. William Shakespeare dies in Stratford in 1616. In 1623, appears, on the title-page of Heminges and Condell’s first folio of the plays, the portrait by Martin Droeshout. It is an engraving, and, Mr. Boaden believes, a good engraving, of some original picture from which it must have been taken; “for,” he says, “there were good engravers in those days; for Chapman’s ‘Homer’ was published in that year, with a very tine engraving of Chapman.”
Under this engraving is printed a copy of Jonson’s lines, as follows:
To the Reader
This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the graver had a strife *
With nature to outdo the life:
O, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brasse as he hath hit
His face: the print would then surpasse
All that was ever done in brasse.
But, since he can not, reader, look,
Not on his picture, but his booke.
* Look, when a painter would surpasse the life,
His art’s with nature’s handiwork at strife.
Venus and Adonis.
In this picture the head of the subject is represented as rising out of an horizontal plain of collar appalling to behold. The hair is straight, combed down the sides of the face and bunched over the ears; the forehead is disproportionately high; the top of the head bald; the face has the wooden expression familiar in the Scotchmen and Indians used as signs by tobacconists’ shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare that would be but a sorry advertisement for the humblest establishment in that trade; and which we would be quite as unlikely to look for in the Stratford scapegrace as in the immortal bard of the Shakespeareans. It is of this picture that Boaden quotes somebody’s remark that “it is lucky these metrical commendations are not required to be delivered on oath.” And Steevens says, on the supposition that Ben Jonson, and not the engraver, put the copy of verses on the title-page beneath the effigy: “Ben Jonson might know little about art, care less about the resemblance, and, never having compared the engraving from the picture, have rested satisfied with the recollection that the original was a faithful resemblance; and that, no doubt, the engraver had achieved all that his art could perform.” No. 2. The edition of the plays of 1690 is accompanied with what is known as “Marshall’s picture;” which so closely follows, as to face, forehead, hair, beard, and collar, the engraving above described, as to suggest that it was a copy either of that engraving, or of the unknown picture from which that was taken. But, if a copy, it is certainly, from a pictorial point of view, an improvement. It looks much more like a man. The simpleton stare around the eyes is toned down, and the wooden aspect is modified into something like life. Marshall has taken liberties with the dress of No. 1, throwing in a sort of tunic over the left shoulder, hitching on an arm with a gauntleted hand grasping a sprig of laurel, etc., etc.
No. 3. The Felton Head.—“In the catalogue of the fourth exhibition and sale by private contract,” says Boaden, (page 81),”at the European Museum, King Street, St. James Square, 1792.” this picture was announced to the public in the following words:
“No. 359—a curious portrait of Shakespeare, painted in 1597.”
On the 31st of May, 1792, a Mr. Felton bought it for five guineas, and, on requiring its credentials, received the following letter:
To Mr. S. Felton, Drayton, Shropshire—Sir: The head of Shakespeare was purchased out of an old house, known by the sign of “The Boar,” in Eastcheap, London, where Shakespeare and his friends used to resort; and report says was painted by a player of that time, but whose name I have not been able to learn.
This letter was signed “J. Wilson,” who was the conductor of the European Museum. This “J. Wilson” appears to have been the original Barnum. Although Prince Hal and Falstaff are said in the play to have affected “The Boar’s head in Eastcheap,” it does not appear, except from Mr. “J. Wilson,” that “Shakespeare and his friends” ever resorted thither. There was an old inn in Eastcheap, but it was not called “The Boar’s Head.” There was an inn by that name, however, in Blackfriars, near the theater, from which the manager might have borrowed it. Then, again, Mr. “J. Wilson” seemed to have forgotten the great fire in London in 1666, which, “in a few hours, in a strong east wind, left the whole of Eastcheap a mass of smoking ruins, and the wretched inhabitants could think of saving nothing but their lives.” Mr. Wilson subsequently amended his story so as to read that “it was found between four and five years ago at a broker’s shop at the Minories by a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed,” etc., etc. Mr. Steevens, who scouted the other pictures as spurious, accepted this picture, for a time, as the original of the engravings we have called No. 1 and No. 2; but finally, the whole thing exploded and was forgotten.
No. 4. The Bust in Stratford Church.—This was carved by nobody knows whom, from nobody knows what, nobody knows when; for the statement that it was cut by “Gerard Johnson,” an Amsterdam “tomb-maker,” is invariably accepted, but can be traced to no historical source. Says Boaden (page 81), “The performance is not too good for a native sculptor.” In 1623 Leonard Digges alludes to it in a few verses well known. It seems to have been originally colored, but there is no testimony as to the original colors. In 1748, one hundred and twenty-five years after Digges, John Hall, a Stratford artist, “restored” it, painting the eyes a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. This was “a good enough” Shakespeare for all practical purposes for the next half-hundred years or so. But in 1793 came Mr. Malone. He caused the bust—in deference, probably, to a purer taste and a sense of churchly propriety—to be covered completely with a thick coat of white paint.*
From this bust, Mr. Boaden says, a Mr. Bullock once took a cast, which is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of the plays, in which case it is entitled “Cast of the head of William Shakespeare, taken after death,” which may or may not—for Mr. Boaden can not tell us who this “Mr. Bullock” was—be the German “Death Mask” noticed further on, (at any rate the statement “taken after death”—“William Shakespeare being unquestionably dead at the time—is literally true.)
The bust represents its subject as possessing a magnificent head, admirably proportioned, with no protruding “bumps.” The face is represented as breaking into a smile. According to this effigy, Shakespeare must have had an extraordinarily long upper lip, the distance between the base of the nose and the mouth being remarkably out of proportion with the other facial developments; there seems to be a little difficulty, too, about the chin, which is pulled out into what appears to be a sort of extra nose; but, nevertheless, the Stratford bust represents a fine, soldierly-looking man, with a fierce military mustache cocked up at the ends, and a goatee. If Ben Jonson—knowing his friend William Shakespeare to have been the martial and altogether elegant-looking gentleman the Stratford bust represents him—authorized the verses we have already quoted to be placed under the “Droe-shout engraving,” it was a deliberate libel on his part, and as gross as it was deliberate, and only perhaps to be explained by Jonson’s alleged secret enmity to, or jealousy of, William Shakespeare, his rival playwright, which we shall be called to examine at length further on.*
No. 5. “The Chandos Portrait.” This picture, so termed because once the property of the Duke of Chandos, is the best known of all the so-called portraits—being, in fact, the one from which the popular idea of Shakespeare is derived; therefore, when a man is said to resemble Shakespeare, it is meant to be conveyed that he bears a likeness to the Chandos picture. Mr. Malone announced that it was painted in 1607, but never gave any other authority than his own ipse dixit for the statement, not even taking the trouble to refer, like Mr. J. Wilson, to “a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed.” Mr. Boaden lays (page 42) that he once saw it, and compared it “with what had been termed a fine copy, I think by Piamberg, and found it utterly unlike.”
“Indeed,” he continues, “I never saw any thing that resembled it.” He also says (pages 41-42) that “the copies by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr. Humphrey were not only unlike the original, but were unlike each other, one being smiling and the other grave.” That is to say, that not only have the romancers constructed “biographies,” but the artists have kept up with them; and we may, every one of us, select our own Shakespeare to-day—poet or potman, scholar or clown, tall or short, fair or dark; we may each suit our own tastes with a Shakespeare to our liking. Mr. Boaden continues (page 49): “It” (the Chandos) “was very probably painted by Burbage,” the great tragedian, who is known to have handled the pencil; it is said to have been the property of Joseph Taylor, our poet’s Hamlet, who, dying about 1653, at the advanced age of seventy, left the picture by will to Davenant. At the death of Davenant in 1663, it was bought by Betterton, the actor, and when he died Mr. Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, gave Mrs. Barry, the actress, forty guineas for it. From Mr. Keck it passed to Mr. Nichol, of Southgate, whose daughter married the Marquis of Caernarvon.
Steevens, whom Boaden quotes (page 43), declined to be convinced by this genealogy, and said, “Gossip rumor had given out that Davenant was more than Shakespeare’s godson. * What folly, therefore, to suppose that he should possess a genuine portrait of the poet, when his lawful daughters had not one! Mrs. Barry was an actress of acknowledged gallantry; as she received forty guineas for the picture, something more animated might have been included though not specified in the bargain,” etc., etc. Steevens was fond of calling this picture “the Davenantico Bettertono-Barryan-Keckian-Hicolsian-Chandosian portrait.”
* There is a story that once, on the occasion of one of Shakespeare’s visits to Stratford, a villager, meeting young Davenant in the street, asked him where he was going. “To the inn, to see my godfather Shakespeare,” said the lad. “Beware how you take the name of God in vain, my lad,” said the other. The allusions to William’s gallantries are numerous. On the Stratford parish records there is entry of the birth of one “Thomas Green, alias Shakespeare.” The tale of the interrupted amour, at the theater, of “Richard the Third” and “William the Conqueror,” as is apt to be the case, is about the most widely familiar of the Shakespearean stories, and unnecessary to be repeated here. But Davenant was proud to claim the dishonor of his mother, and Shakespeare for his father, to his dying day.
“There are,” says Boaden (page 53), “a few circumstances relating to the picture of which some notice should be taken in this examination. There is, it seems, a tradition that, no original picture of Shakespeare existing, Sir Thomas Clarges caused a” (i. e., this) “portrait to be painted from a young man who had the good fortune to resemble him” (i. e., Shakespeare. Query: How did Sir Thomas know that the young man resembled Shakespeare?). Mr. Malone traced this story to “The Gentleman’s Magazine” for August, 1759, and called on the writer for his authority; but the writer, whoever he was, never gave it, any more than Malone gave his authority for announcing its date to be 1607; but Malone himself says that “most reports of this kind are an adumbration of some fact, and indication of something in kind or degree similar or analogous.”
No. 6. This is a portrait, so called, by Zuccharo, which need not detain us, since Mr. Boaden himself demonstrates very clearly that it was not in any event painted from life, and, not improbably, did not originally claim to have been intended for Shakespeare at all.
Mr. Boaden’s No. 7 is the “Cornelius Jansen picture,” and to this Mr. Boaden pins his earnest faith. He says this “is now in the collection of the Duke of Somerset;” but he appears to make no attempt to connect it with William Shakespeare except as follows: Cornelius Jansen is said to have painted the daughter of Southampton—ergo, he might have been Southampton’s family painter, and Southampton might have been desirous to possess a portrait of his friend Shakespeare done by his own painter—ergo, Jansen might have had William Shakespeare for a sitter! This is all the authority for the authenticity. But that it is—judging from the engraving in Mr. Boaden’s book—a magnificent picture, we think there can be no question.
On the supposition that the Chandos is an authentic likeness of Shakespeare, this Jansen certainly bears a strong Shakespearean resemblance. In it the hair is curling, as in the Chandos, not straight, as in the Droeshout and the Marshall engravings. The mustache, which is cut tight to the face without being shaved, as in the Droeshout, and strong and heavy, as in the bust, is lighter than the Chandos, while the beard is fuller. There is nothing of the tremendous upper lip represented in the bust.
Mr. Boaden (page 195) describes it as an eye-witness, he having had access to it for the purposes of the book before us. He says: “It is an early picture by Cornelius Jansen, tenderly and beautifully painted. Time seems to have treated it with infinite kindness, for it is quite pure, and exhibits its original surface.... The portrait is on panel, and attention will be required to prevent a splitting of the oak, in two places, if my eyes have not deceived me.”
As for Earlom, who copied the picture, Boaden says: “He had lessened the amplitude of the forehead; he had altered the form of the skull; he had falsified the character of the mouth; and, though his engraving was still beautiful, and the most agreeable exhibition of the poet, I found it would be absolutely necessary to draw the head again, as if he had never exercised his talent upon it” (page 195). Mr. Boaden specifies further the picture laid to have once decorated the pair of bellows belonging to Queen Elizabeth’s own private apartments, besides still one other, both of which he rejects as spurious.
Thus, it has taken an army of novelists, painters, engravers, and essayists to erect simple William Shakespeare of Stratford into the god he ought to have been; and, on the best examination we are enabled to make, and according to the Shakespeareans themselves, there is only one picture of William Shakespeare extant which has the even assumed advantage of having been pronounced a likeness by any one who ever saw William Shakespeare himself in his (William Shakespeare’s) lifetime. Even if—as Mr. Steevens surmises—this eye witness never saw the engraving, but only the original portrait from which it was copied, the Droeshout still enjoys an authentication possessed by no other so-called likeness, and, if rejected—as it infallibly is by all devout Shakespeareans—there remains nothing of certitude, nothing even of the certitude of conjecture, as to the features of the Stratford boy, whoever he was, and whatever his works. One further effort was, however, made, so lately as 1849, to clinch this “young lady’s argument,” by yet one more genuine discovery. This time it was a “Becker ‘death mask!’” A plaster mask of an anonymous dead face is found in a rubbish-shop in Mayence, in 1849. Regarded as a mask of William Shakespeare, it bears a certain resemblance to the Stratford bust; and, regarded as a mask of Count Bismarck (for example), it would be found to bear a very strong resemblance to Count Bismarck. (We write from an inspection of photographs only, never having seen the mask.) Having always been annoyed that a creature so immortal as they had created their Shakespeare left no death-mask, the Shakespeareans at once adopt this anonymous mask as taken from the face of the two-days defunct William Shakespeare, who died in 1616. Credat Judams! Either William Shakespeare, at his death, was known to be an immortal bard or he was not. If he was, how could the sole likeness moulded of departed greatness be smuggled away from the land that was pious to claim him as its most distinguished son and nobody miss it, or raise the hue and cry? If he was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask from the family who cared enough about the dead man’s memory to go to the expense of it? But, at any rate, in 1849 it falls into the hands of jealous believers. They search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, and for the date of their hero’s death, and they find both. Had they made up their minds to find a scrap of Shakespearean cuticle, we may be sure it would have been there. Professor Owen, of the British Museum, declared that, if the fact of the mask having originally come from England could be established, there was “hardly any sum of money which the Museum would not pay for the mask itself.” But the missing testimony has not been supplied, though doubtless it is incubating. For now and then we see a newspaper paragraph to the effect that old paintings have turned up (in pawn-shops invariably) which “resemble the death-mask,” thus accustoming us to the title, which, in time, we shall doubtless come to accept—as we have come to accept Shakespeare himself—from mere force of habit. The last of these discoveries is in Australia, farther off than even Mayence, “said to resemble the Becker death-mask.” * The Stratford portrait of Shakespeare claims no authority further than a resemblance to the accepted ideal, and the terra-cotta bust in the possession of the Garrick club was “found to order,” and represents a man who, it would seem, bore not even a resemblance to the accepted Shakespearean features.
* See the “Academy,” London, May 31, 1879, p. 475, We understand that the mask is at present in possession of the British Museum.
We should, perhaps, mention that Mr. Boaden surmises that the Droeshout picture is a portrait of William Shakespeare the actor, in the character of “Old Ivnowell,” and that the Stratford bust was caused to be executed by Dr. Hall, a son-in-law of its subject, and was the work of one Thomas Stanton, who followed a cast taken after death. But, as Mr. Boaden admits, this is his surmise only. However insuperable, therefore, in the run of cases, the “young ladies argument” to prove from the pictures that William Shakespeare was not author of the plays is quite weak enough; but, as an argument to prove that he was such author, it is weakness and impotence itself.
It now becomes necessary to ask the ordinary question which a court would be obliged to ask concerning any exhibit produced before it, and claimed as authentic or authoritative: namely, Where did the plays called Shakespeare’s come from? how did they get into print? who, if anybody, delivered the “copy” to the printer, and vouched for its authorship? It is manifest that we have no business here with any question of criticism, or as to an authenticity between different editions of the same play; but the plays were written to be played; how did they come to be published so that millions of readers, who never entered a playhouse where they were performed, read and still read them?
In order to arrive at any supposition as to these considerations which would be of value to our purpose in these papers, it will be necessary to glance at the state of literary property in the days between 1585 and 1606. How, in those days, there was absolutely no legal protection for an author’s manuscript. Once it had strayed beyond the writer’s hand it was practically “publici juris”—any body’s property. The first law of copyright enacted in England was the act of Anne, of April 10, 1710, more than one hundred years after the last date at which commentators claim the production of a Shakespearean play. Even the first authoritative pronunciation of a competent tribunal as to literary property at common law (which preceded, of course, all literary property definable by statute) was not made until 1769, fifty-nine years later. But the Court of Star Chamber (of obscure origin, but known to have been of powerful jurisdiction in the time of Henry VII.) was in the height of its ancient omnipotence in those years. And of the various matters of which it took cognizance, one of the earliest was the publishing, printing, and even the keeping and reading of books. Under date of June 23,1585—the year that many commentators assign as that in which William Shakespeare first turned up in London—this Star Chamber, which had already issued many such, issued a decree that none should “print any book, work, or copy, against the form or meaning of any restraint contained in any statute of laws of this realm,” except, etc., etc. Twenty-nine years before—in 1556—Philip and Mary had erected ninety-seven booksellers into a body called “The Stationers’ Company,” who were to monopolize the printing of books, if they so chose. They had given them power and authority—and their second charter, in 1558, confirmed them in it—to print such books as they obtained, either from authors’ manuscripts or translations, and to see very carefully that nobody else printed them. Their power was absolute—they had their “privilegium ad imprimendum solum,” and in the pursuit of any body who interfered with it they were empowered to “break locks, search, seize,” and, in short, to suppress any printed matter they did not choose to license, wherever they pleased. This the Worshipful Company of Stationers did not fail to do; they pursued, and the Star Chamber convicted. The disgraceful record of infamous and inhuman prosecutions and punishments for reading, keeping, selling, or making books might well detain us here, did our scope permit. * Whatever literature accomplished in those days it accomplished by stealth, in defiance of the implacable and omnipotent Star Chamber and its bloodhound, the Stationers’ Company, who ran in its victims.
It can not, we think, be doubted, by a student of those times,* that whatever literary property existed at common law then existed in the shape of a license to print a work under permission of the Stationers’ Company; that no estate or property obtained in anything except the types, ink, paper, in the license to use them all together to make a book, and in the resulting volume; and that what we understand by “copyright” to-day—namely, an author’s or a proprietor’s right to demand a royalty or percentage, or to exercise other control over the work when once printed and published—was altogether unconceived and unclaimed.
** “The person who first resolved on printing a book, and entered his design on that register, became thereby the legal proprietor of that work, and had the sole right of printing it.”—Carte, quoted in “Reasons for a Further Amendment of the Act 54, George III., c. 15,” London, 1817. John Camden Hotten, “Seven Letters, Etc., on Literary Property,” London, Hotten, 1871, describes the modern Stationers’ Company as entrusted with “a vested interest over somebody else’s property, a prescriptive right to interfere with the future work of other people’s hands.”
We are aware that this statement as to the condition of authors’ rights in the days of Elizabeth will not pass unchallenged; but a review of the reported cases, as well as the extant records of the Stationers’ Company, will, we think, support our conclusion.
The first reported case of piracy was in 1735, when the Master of the Rolls enjoined publication of “The whole Duty of Man” (Morgan’s “Law of Literature,” vol. ii., p. 672).
Whatever compensation the author of a work was able to obtain, he doubtless obtained beforehand, by sale of his manuscript, and dreamed not of setting up a tangible property as against any one who had obtained the Stationers’ Company’s license to print it. The Stationers’ Company, at the outset of their career, opened a record, in which it entered the name of every book it licensed—the date, and the name of the person authorized to print it. * It was not until 1644, twenty-eight years after William Shakespeare’s death (so far as we can ever know) that John Milton, in his “Are-opagitica”—the greatest state paper in the republic of letters, the declaration of independence, and the bill of rights of the liberty of literature—asserted * ** for the first time “the right of every man” to “his several copy, which God forbid should be gainsayd.”
* For the text of the “Areopagitica” and copious notes as to the history of the days which called it out, see edition of J. VV. Hale’s, Clarendon Press Series, Macmillan & Co., Oxford, 1874.
** In a pamphlet, “The Prayse of the Red Herring” cited by
Farmer, in his “Learning of Shakespeare,” page 45.
Once in their hands, printers did what they pleased with a manuscript; abridged it if they found it too long, and lengthened it if they found it too short. Thomas Nashe says, that, in a play of his, called “The Isle of Dogs,” four acts, without his consent “or the least guesse of his drifte or scope,” were added by the printers. * The printers also assigned the authorship of the work to any name they thought would help sell the book, and dedicated it to whom they pleased. (Just as the first printer of the sonnets we call Shakespeare’s, dedicated them to “W. H.,” which two initials have supplied the Shakespeareans with an excuse for at least as many dozen octavo volumes of conjecture as to who “W. H.” was.) Sometimes the author thus despotically assigned to the work rebelled. Dr. Heywood recognized two of his own compositions in a collection of verses called “The Passionate Pilgrim,” printed by one Jaggard, in 1599, upon the title-page to which, this Jaggard had placed the name of William Shakespeare as author. Hey-wood publicly claimed his own, but William Shakespeare never denied or affirmed; his name, however, was removed by the printer from the title-page of the third edition of the book, in 1612. * But, as a rule, the Stationers’ Company were too powerful, and the author too poor, to bring the trick to exposure.
* Shakespeare, by R. G. White. Vol. 1., page lxxvii.
It was under these circumstances, and in times like these, that the Shakespearean plays began to appear in print. Where did they come from? They were written to be played. According to all accounts they were very valuable to the theater which produced them. Every personal and selfish interest of the proprietors, whether of the theater or of the manuscript plays, dictated that they should be kept in secret—least of all that they should be printed and made accessible to the public outside of the theater, who otherwise, to see them, must become patrons of the house where they were performed. That the author or authors of the plays could have made them of more profit by selling them to the printers than to the players is doubtful; that they personally entered them—or such of them as were entered—on the books of the Stationers’ Company, is certainly not the fact; the only persons to whose interest it was to print them were the printers themselves, and, in all probability, it was the printers who did cause them to be printed. But where did these printers procure the “copy” from which to set up the plays they printed? The question will never be answered. The manuscripts might have been procured by bribing individual actors, each of whom could have easily furnished a copy of his individual part, and so the whole be made up for the press. The fact that the plays never were printed without more or less of the stage directions or “business” included, lends probability to this theory: but, as to whether a play made up in this fashion would have resulted in any thing like what we possess to-day, we have considered further on. Mr. Grant White admits,* as must everybody who examines into the matter, that whatever the printers printed was unauthorized and surreptitious. But, having admitted this much, Mr. White is too ardent a Shakespearean not to make some effort to throw a guise of authenticity around the text he has so lovingly followed. In the article we have just quoted from in our foot-note, he says, “It is not improbable that, in case of great and injurious misrepresentation of the text of a play by” this surreptitious method of publication, “fair copies were furnished by the theatrical people at the author’s request in self-defence.” Perhaps these plays might have found their way into print just as the comedy of “Play” found its way into print in 1868,** or the play of “Mary Warner,” *** at about the same date. At any rate the editors of the first folio speak of the “stolne and surreptitious copies” which had preceded them.
*** Crowe v. Aiken. 2 Bissel R. 208.
The first and second editions of “Hamlet,” says Mr. White, “in 1603 and 1604, might have been the result of such maneuvers on the part of the printers and the stenographers, or those who had access to the manuscripts of the author. However this may be, twenty of Shakespeare’s plays were published by various stationers during his lifetime; they are known as the quartos, from the form in which they are printed. They are most of them full of errors.... Some of them seem to have been put in type from stage copies, or, not improbably, from an aggregation of the separate parts which were in the hands of the various actors.” In other words, Shakespeare’s works were so imperfectly printed, against his will, during his lifetime, that he himself authorized other imperfect—Mr. White says they were imperfect—versions to be likewise printed!
Mr. White might have looked nearer home to more purpose. Nobody knows, nobody can know better than he, that what is called the “accepted” or “received” text of Shakespeare (if there is, to speak minutely, any such to-day) has been arrived at and made up piecemeal, and in the course of time, by the commentators selecting from the folios, and other original editions, such “readings” as the judgment of scholarship or the taste of criticism has, on the whole, adopted; and any body who cares to take the trouble to examine these original editions can see as much for himself. To suppose that this text, as it stands to-day, is the text as its author or authors wrote it, is, it seems to us, to suppose at least ten thousand coincidences, every one of which is, to say the least, improbable.
Before proceeding any further, let us recapitulate the three historical certainties to which we have arrived. First, that the state of the law was favorable, (indeed, it would be impossible to conceive of a state more favorable), to literary imposture or incognito. Second, that nobody stands on record as claiming to know the authorship of these plays, except the printers, who were able to sell them by using the name of the manager of a popular theater; and, therefore, whose interest it was to affix that name to them; and, Third, that there was never a period in which it was so reasonably an author’s interest to be anonymous, or preserve his incognito, as these very years covered by the lifetime of William Shakespeare; when, between the Stationers’ Company and the Star Chamber, it was a fortunate author, printer or reader, who escaped hanging, disemboweling, and quartering, with only the loss of ears or liberty.
Who wrote these plays? London was full of playwrights, contemporary with William Shakespeare, many of them his friends and familiars; possibly, all of them submitting their manuscripts to his editorial eye. We have their works extant to-day.
Ben Jonson was a poet and a pedant; Greene, a university-bred man. And we may go through the list and verify the records of them all, and find in each some quality or training from which to reasonably expect fruitage. But nobody has ever ventured to hazard so wild a theory as that any of them wrote the anonymous immortal plays to which the best of their own acknowledged masterpieces are mere rubbish. But a butcher’s boy, lately from Stratford, happens to be manager of a contemporary theater. He, therefore, must be the writer, and there can not be the slightest doubt of it. The story that this boy ever stole deer is rejected as resting on insufficient evidence. But no evidence is required to prove his authorship of the topmost works in the history or the literature of England. We have seen the monopoly that overruled the press. We have seen that the Stationers’ Company insisted upon recording the name and ownership of every printed thing; and their record-books are still extant, and bear no trace of any such claimant as William Shakespeare. We have weighed the surmises of the Shakespeareans as to these times, and seen their probable value; and have found it just as impossible to connect the immortal fragments we call the Shakespearean plays to-day with William Shakespeare, of Stratford, as we have already found it to imagine him as having access to the material, the sealed records, and the hidden muniments employed in their construction. Is there any more evidence to be examined?
But were these plays, so printed outside, the same plays as those acted inside the theater? When we recall the style of audiences that assembled in those days (M. Taine says the spectators caroused and sang songs while the plays progressed; that they drank great draughts of beer; and, if they drank too much, burned juniper instead of retiring; anon, they would break upon the stage, toss in a blanket such performers as pleased them not, tear up the properties, etc., etc.)—when we recall this, it is not the easiest thing in the world to imagine this audience so very highly delighted, for instance, with Wolsey’s long soliloquy (which the actor of to-day delivers in a dignified, low, and unimpassioned monotone, without gesture), or Hamlet’s philosophical monologues, or Isabella’s pious strains. Some plays were highly popular inside those theaters. Were these the ones? Mr. Grant White has all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, when he insists that the theater most jealously guarded the manuscripts of the plays that were making its fortune; and that it would have been suicide in it to have circulated them outside, in print. But may not the echo of the popularity of certain plays called “Hamlet,” “King John,” “Macbeth,” etc., have induced others, outside the theater, to have circulated plays, christened with these names (or with and under the popular name of Shakespeare), for gain among the “unco guid” who would not, or the impecunious who could not, enter the theater door? There is no need of opening up so hopeless a speculation—a speculation pure and simple, that can never, in the nature of things, be confronted by data either way. But the fact does remain that these marvelous plays appeared in print contemporaneously with the professional career of an actor named William Shakespeare, and in the same town where he acted; that, if they were his, it would have been to his interest to have kept them out of print; and that their appearance in print he most certainly did not authorize; and who can claim that one guess is not as good as another, where history is silent, and tradition askew, and the truth buried under the dust of centuries, overtopped yy the rubbish of conjecture? We repeat, we have no warrant to intrude upon the domain of criticism. The Shakespearean text, as we possess it to-day, is too priceless, whatever its source, to be rudely touched. But, so far as is revealed by the record of its appearance among printed literature, there is no evidence, internal or external, as to William Shakespeare’s production of it, and as to its origin we are as hopelessly in the dark as ever.
Dubious as is the chronicle of those days as to other matters, it is singularly clear as to what was printed and what was not. For those were the sort of days when men whose names were not written in the books of the Stationers’ Company printed at the peril of clipped ears and slit noses, or worse; and those books are still extant. But, by the fatality which seems to follow and pervade the name of William Shakespeare, this record, like every other, national or local, yields nothing to the probe but disappointment and silence as to the man of Stratford and the actor of Blackfriars.
We will, presently, consider as to whether the same intellect composed the “Hamlet” at one sitting, and at another, located Bohemia on the sea-coast; and whether, on inspection, it might not be strongly suggested that the two conceptions indicated geniuses of quite different orders and not one and the same person; that one showed the hand-marks of a poet and the other the hand-marks of the stage-manager, etc. If the limits of this work permitted, we believe the same hand-marks might be collected from the treatment of the text of every play. For instance, the “Comedy of Errors” is supposed to occur during the days when Ephesus was ruled by a duke, and follows—as we have already shown—the unities of the Menæchmi of Plautus. But the ignoramus who doctored the paraphrase for the Blackfriars stage found it convenient, to bring on his stage effect, to introduce a Christian monastery into Ephesus at about that time, with a lady abbess who could refuse admission to the duke himself, so inviolable and sacred was the sanctuary of consecrated Christian walls! The monastery was as convenient to bringing all the befogged and befooled and sadly mixed up personages of the comedy face to face at the moment, as was the seashore and the bear, in “A Winter’s Tale,” to account for the princess Perdita among the shepherds, and so in they all go. These, and the like brummagem and ruses de convenances, are simple enough to understand, and detract in no degree whatever from the value of the plays: they can be retired or retained at pleasure, and no harm done, if we only remember to whom and to what they are assignable. But, if we forget that, and insist that the very same pen which wrote the dialogue wrote the setting—wrote every entrance, exit, and direction to the scene-shifters and stage-carpenters, and, therefore, that every dot and comma, every call and cue, every “gag” and localism, is as sacred as holy writ, no wonder the scholars of the text are puzzled!
For example, we find that Mr. Wilkes, and Mr. Harper, in the “American Catholic Review” for January, 1879—who otherwise believe the author of the Shakespearean plays to have been a roman catholic—are almost persuaded that he must have been a protestant, because he finds occasion to make mention of an “evening mass.” But let us assure Messrs. Wilkes and Harper that they need neither abandon nor adopt a theory on rencontre with so trivial a phenomenon. If William Shakespeare felt the need of an “evening mass” at any time, we may be fairly sure, from our experience of that worthy, that he put one in. He had bolted too many camels in his day to hesitate at such a gnat as that! The creator of a convent in old Ephesus and of a sea-coast to Bohemia was not one to stick at a trifling “evening mass!”
The gentlemen above mentioned, believe the author of the plays to have been a romanist, not because the reverend Richard Davies, writing soon after 1685, distinctly says “he died a Papist,” (for any statement made anywhere within a hundred years of William Shakespeare’s lifetime is “mere gossip,” and it is only the biographies we write now-a-days that are to be relied upon), but mainly because the liturgy and priesthood of that church are invariably treated with respect in the plays, while dissenting parsons are poked fun at without stint. Doubtless, in the modern drama the same rule will be perceived to obtain. The imperious liturgy and priesthood of the roman or of the stately anglican church appear to be beyond the attempts of travesty; while the snivel and preach of mere puritanism has always been too tempting an opportunity for “Aminadab Sleek” and his type—to be resisted, and such a fact would justify very little conclusion either way. Besides, there is no call to insist that the stage, in epitomizing life into the compass of an hour, shall preserve every detail; nothing less than a Chinese theater could answer a demand like that. There is a dramatic license even broader than the license accorded to poetry, and we would doubtless find the drama a sad bore if there were not. William Shakespeare, during his managerial career, appears to have understood this as well as any body; nor have the liberties he took with facts and chronology befogged any body, except the daily lessening throng of investigators, who believe him to be the original of the masterpieces he cut into play-hooks for his stage.
But did William Shakespeare ever try his hand at verse-making? There is considerable rumor to the effect that, during the leisure of his later life, no less than in the lampooning efforts of his vagrom youth, he did turn his pen to rhymes. And the future may yet bring forth a Shakespearean honest enough to collect these verses—as they follow here—and to entitle them—
The Complete Poetical Works of William Shakespeare
Epitaph on Elias James. *
When God was pleased, the world unwilling yet,
Elias James to nature paid his debt,
And here reposeth; as he liv’d he dyde;
The saying in him strongly verified—
Such life, such death; then, the known truth to tell,
He lived a godly lyfe, and dyde as well.
Epitaph on Sir Thomas Stanley. **
Ask who lyes here, but do not weepe:
He is not dead, he doth but sleepe;
This stony register is for his bones,
His fame is more perpetual than these stones,
And his own goodness, with himself being gone,
Shall live when earthly monument is none.
* On the authority of “a MS. volume of poems by Herrick and others, said to be in the handwriting of Charles I., in the Bodleian Library.
** On the authority of Sir William Dugdale (“Visitation Book”), who says, “The following verses were made by William Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian.” This appears to be our author’s longest and most ambitious work.
Not monumental stone preserves our fame
Nor skye aspyring pyramids our name;
The memory of him for whom this stands
Shall outlive marble and defacer’s hands,
“When all to Time’s consumption shall be given;
Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven.
Epitaph Ox Tom-a-Combe, Otherwise Thixbeard. *
Thin in beard and thick in purse,
Never man beloved worse;
He went to the grave with many a curse,
The Devil and he had both one nurse.
Whom I Have Drunken With. **
Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillsborough and hungry Grafton;
With dancing Exhall, Papist Wixford,
Beggarly Bloom and drunken Bidford.
David and Goliath. ***
Goliath comes with sword and spear,
And David with a sling;
Although Goliath rage and swear
Down David doth him bring.
ON JOHN COMBE, A COVETOUS RICH MAN, MR. WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE WRIGHT THIS ATT HIS REQUEST WHILE HEE WAS YETT LIVEING FOR HIS EPITAPHE. ****
Ten in the hundred lies here engraved;
' Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved;
If any one asks, “Who lies in this tomb?”
“Hoi hoi” quoth the Devil, “’tis my John a Combe.”——
* On the authority of Peck, “Memoirs of Milton,” 4to, 1740
** On the authority of John Jordan. There is a strong poetic license here—according to the well-known legend, William had really only drunk with Bidford; the quantrain is probably the work of Jordan and not Shakespeare.
*** On the authority of Stratford local tradition.
**** Aslimolean MS., cited by Halliwell. The pun is on the Warwickshire pronunciation, “Ho! ho!” quoth the Devil, “’tis my John has come!” See Aubrey’s version:
“Ten in the hundred the Devil allows,
But Coombs will have twelve he swears and vows,” etc.
——BUT BEING DEAD, AND MAKING THE POOR HIS HEIRES, HEE AFTER WRIGHTES THIS FOR HIS EPITAPHE. *
Howere he lived judge not,
John Combe shall never be forgott
While poor hathe memmorye, for he did gather
To make the poor his issue, be their father,
As record of his tilth and seedes,
Did crown him in his later needes.
Finis. W. Shak.
Lampoon on Sir Thomas Lucy. **
Sir Thomas was too covetous,
To covet so much deer,
When horns enough upon his head
Most plainly do appear.
Had not his worship one deer left?
What then? He had a wife.
Took pains enough to find him horns
Should last him all his life.
* Ashmolean MS. same as preceding. Both the above are given by Mr. Grant White. Shakespeare, vol. I, p. ci.
** This is given to us by Mr. S. W. Fullom (History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet; with New Facts and Traditions. London: Saunders, Oatley & Co., 1864, p. 133,) with the following note: “The manner in which this fragment was recovered is not different from that to which we owe so many local ballads, known only to the common people. About 1690, Joshua Barnes, the Greek Professor at Cambridge, was in an inn at Stratford, when he heard an old woman singing these stanzas, and, discerning the association with Shakespeare, offered her ten guineas to repeat the whole ballad. This, however, she was unable to do, having forgotten the remaining portion.” Mr. Fullom says these verses “reveal the Shakespearean touch,” and alludes to a scandal touching Lady Lucy’s infidelity to her husband.
The following additional verses were furnished by John Jordan, who altered the above stanza into the same meter, and asserted the whole to be Shakespeare, as unearthed and restored by himself:
He’s a haughty, proud, insolent knight of the shire
At home nobody loves, yet there’s many that fear;
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it—
Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.
To the Sessions he went, and did lowdly complain
His park had been robbed and his deere they were slain;
This Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miseall it—
Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.
He sayd It was a ryot, his men had been beat,
His venison was stol’n and clandestinely eat:
So Lucy is lowsie as some volke miscall it—
Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.
So haughty was he when the fact was confessed
He sayd ’twas a wrong that could not be redressed;
So Luey is lowsie, as some volke miseall it—
Synge lowsie Luey, whatever befall it.
Though luces a dozen he wear on his coat,
His name it shall lowsie for Luey be wrote;
For Luey is lowsie, as some volke miseall it—
We’ll sing lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it.
If a juvenile frolic he can not forgive,
We’ll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live;
And Luey the lowsie a libel may call it—
We’ll sing lowsie Lucy whatever befall it.
Mr. Collier (Shakespeare, R. G. White, Ed. 1854, p. cciii), gives the following four verses as by William Shakespeare:
On the King
Crown have their compass, length of days their date,
Triumphs their tomb, Felicity her fate;
Of naught but earth can earth make us partaker,
But knowledge makes a king most like his maker.
But gives no other authority for it than “a coeval manuscript.”
The world has, very regrettingly, come to look with such suspicion on Mr. Jollier’s discoveries, that this relic, until confirmed, will hardly be accepted as genuine.
Another Version of the Lampoon. *
A Parliament member, a justice of peace,
At home a poor scarecrow, at London an asse;
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it.
He thinks himself greate,
Yet an asse is his state:
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it,
Sing, O lowsie Lucy, whate’er befalle it.
Some lampoon was affixed by young William to Sir Thomas Lucy’s park gate, and enraged the baronet to such a degree that—according to Capell—he directed a lawyer at Warwick to commence a prosecution against the lad. The Lucy note, however, makes no mention of the lawyer, only stating that young Shakespeare deemed it prudent to quit Stratford, “at least for a time.” The long ballad of six stanzas (which we give in the foot-note) was written by John Jordan, a harmless rustic who lived at Stratford in the days of Malone and Ireland, i. e. in the last years of the eighteenth century, and went about claiming to have inherited the mantle of Shakespeare. The “Piping Pebworth” verses, and perhaps the whole story was written by him.
* According to Capell, Oldys, and Grant White. (See Mr. White’s Shakespeare, Vol. I. p. xxxviii.) Oldys leaves out the “O” in the fourth and eighth lines. Mr. Fullom (cited above) declares this version to be spurious. (See note 3, p. 121.)
At any rate, he seems to have succeeded in obtaining immortality by mixing his own efforts so successfully with the Shakespearean remains as to make them all one in the local traditions. The above, with the
Inscription for His Own Tomb
Good frend, for Jesvs’ sake forbeare,
To digg ye dust encloased here.
Blesse be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.
(which was originally placed on the stone over William Shakespeare’s vault in the chancel of Trinity Church, Stratford—was recut in the new stone which was found necessary fifty years ago, and now appears with the verbal contractions as given above) are all the literary compositions which, according to the local traditions of Stratford, his home, where he was born, lived, and died—where alone, for a century or more after his death his reputation was cherished—William Shakespeare ever produced. There is nothing: in them inconsistent with the record of the man himself; and, so far as we know, have never been rejected by the Shakespeareans themselves. It certainly would not be honest, in our present appeal to history, to insert in this edition—we may fairly call it “The Stratford Edition”—of Master Shakespeare’s poetry, all that he edited for the stage; or, worse yet, borrowed and dressed up, and—according to Robert Greene—passed for his own.
We are very far from desiring even to do justice to poor Robert Greene, if in so doing we shall detract a hair’s weight from the merits of William Shakespeare. But it is not impossible to say a good word even for Greene. Although his language is not within such bounds of propriety as the Shakespeareans could wish, modern research has amply proved that he told the truth, and that William Shakespeare borrowed, or rather seized upon and adopted, without compensation, the work by which Greene earned his bread. For Greene’s language, Chettle, Greene’s editor, makes haste, sometime afterward, when William Shakespeare had been taken up by “divers of worship” to apologize, as far as an editor can apologize for an author. We shall see, further on, how William Shakespeare was shrewd enough to make himself useful to these “divers of worship,” and in those days, and for a century after, no slavery was so abject as the slavery of letters to patronage. So, of course, Chettle hastened to make his peace with them too. But the truth remains, nevertheless, that poor Greene told only the truth. It is fashionable with the Shakespeareans to sneer at Greene, because he was “jealous” of Shakespeare. He appears to have had reason to be jealous! But no name is bad enough to bestow on him. Mr. Grant White says: “Robert Greene, writing from the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee, warns three of his literary companions to shun intercourse with,” etc., “certain actors, Shakespeare among the rest.” If Robert Greene died from over-debauch, it is no more than Shakespeare himself died of, according to the entry in the diary of the Rev. John Ward. “It is not impossible,” says Mr. White, “even that this piece of gossiping tradition is true.” Mr. White is right to call it “gossiping tradition,” for it is piece and parcel of all the other mention of William Shakespeare of Stratford. If it were not for “gossiping tradition,” we had never heard, and Mr. White had never written, of that personage. But Mr. White makes no reservation of “gossiping tradition” in the case of Robert Greene. Greene dies “on the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee,” because he was jealous of William Shakespeare, and was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself as to call that “jack of all trades” an “upstart crowe, beautified with our feathers,” etc. It seems that poor Robert Greene’s dying words—if they were his dying words—were his ante-mortem legacy of warning and prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. But they have not been heeded. His “upstart crowe” has not only kept all his borrowed feathers, but is arrayed each passing day with somebody’s richer and brighter plumage. If Robert Greene could speak from the dust, he doubtless could tell us—as Jonson and the rest might have told us in their lifetimes, if they only would—whose all this plumage really was and is. But all are dust and ashes together now—dust and ashes three centuries old—and, as Miss Bacon said, “Who loses any thing that does not find” the secret of that dust? However, not a Shakespearean stops to waste a sigh over the memory of poor Robert Greene,* who saw his bread snatched from his mouth by a scissorer of other men’s brains, and who was too human to see and hold his peace; but over the drunken grave of the Stratford pretender—who was vanquished in his cups at Bidford and Pebworth, and lay all night under the thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the last—they weep as for one cut off untimely, as Dame Quickly over the lazared and lecherous clay of Sir John Falstaff: “Nay, sure, he’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur’s bosom.’A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any Christom child.” But let us not assume the appearance of unkindness to William Shakespeare. He lived a merry life; and, so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his own wife, poor Robert Greene, and perhaps the delinquent for malt delivered. He loved his own, but that is no wrong. And, we must not forget that, so far as the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save by his silence, the works a too flattering posterity has assigned him.
* “Robert Greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetry or rhetoric than his fellows (Nash, Peele, and William Shakespeare), was, from his miscellaneous and discursive reading, a very useful man in his coterie.” Dr. Latham speaks of his book as “A Groats Worth of Rest, purchased with a Million of Repentance,” which certainly makes better sense than “a groat’s worth of wit,” etc., as usually written. Which is right? Greene died in 1592.
The appeal to history not only declines to set aside, but affirms, with costs, the verdict rendered upon the evidence. And the sum is briefly this: If William Shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle; every thing else being equal, the presumption is against a miracle; but, here, every thing else is not equal, for all the facts of history are reconcilable with history and irreconcilable with the miracle; if history is history, then miracle there was none—in other words, if there were one miracle, then there must have been two. If there had lived no such man as William Shakespeare, that “William Shakespeare” would be as good a name as any other to designate the authorship of the Shakespearean page, who will consider it worth while to question? But to credit the historical man with the living page demands, in our estimation, either a willful credulity, or an innocence that is almost physical blindness!
Notes
* Aubrey says, in a note at this place: “I think it was a midsummer’s night that he happened there. But there is no Constable in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’” Aubrey probably intended reference to Dogberry, in the “Much Ado.”
* Aubrey’s MSS. was called “Minutes of Lives,” and was addressed to his “worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford.” A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680, accompanied it, in which Aubrey says: “’T is a task that I never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up and down in it, which hath made me so well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses, before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or societies, I might add that I come of a long-aevious race, by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings of time for several generations, which does reach high.”
* His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Rev. William Fulman (in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all in the library of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford.
** Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in “Merry Wives of Windsor.” p. 520.
* It is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue and choruses of the “Henry V.” and “Henry VIII.” are apologies for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly of the multitude they catered to. As to the internal testimony of the authorship of these compositions, any reader can judge for himself. We have expressed our own opinion as being that William Shakespeare might be credited with the characters of Nym and Bar-dolph; especially of the Corporal, whose part consists of the phrase, “There’s the humor of it,” intruded at each convenient interval; and it is possible that Shakespeare, in fitting up the matter in hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the moment. There seems to be reason for believing that this expression did happen to be a favorite at about that time; and that Shakespeare was not the only one who rang the changes on it as a season to stage material. Witness the following:
* Whalley.
** Ibid. A curious instance of this familiarity—to be found in the Shakespearean dramas—with the least noticed facts of science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped the critics, we might allude to here: In one of Jules Verne’s realistic stories wherein he springs his romantic catastrophes upon scientific phenomena—“Michael Strogoff”— he makes Michael fall among enemies who sentence him to be blinded. The blinding is to be accomplished with a heated iron, but Michael sees his mother at his side, and, tears suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is neutralized, and fails to destroy the sight. So, in “King John,” Act IV., Scene 1, Arthur says to Hubert:
* We take this quotation from Mr. Grant White’s article on Shakespeare in Appleton’s “American Cyclopoedia.” Mr. White’s admirable contributions to our Shakespearean literature entitle his opinion to great weight in any mooted question as to William Shakespeare; and we must confess that, in some portions, his paper we have just mentioned almost suggests him as agreeing with us as to his subject. Mr. White says, in another place: “Young lawyers and poets produced plays rapidly. Each theatrical company not only ‘kept a poet,’ but had three or four, in its pay. At the time of his leaving Stratford the drama was rising rapidly in favor with all classes in London, where actors were made much of in a certain way. And where there was a constant demand for new plays, ill-provided younger sons of the gentry, and others who had been bred at the universities and the inns-of-court, sought to mend their fortunes by supplying this demand.” And again: “We are tolerably well informed by contemporary writers as to the performances of the eminent actors of that time, but of Shakespeare’s we read nothing.” Mr. White admits, a few lines below the sentence just quoted, that Shakespeare’s position in the stock at the Blackfriars was “general utility.” We should rather call it, from the evidence, “first old man.”
* By Edmond Malone. London: printed by C. & R. Baldwin,
Newbridge street, 1808.
* DeQuincy accepts this “origin” “with great alacrity.”
* “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.” By William Tegg, F. R. H. S. London: William Tegg & Co., 1879. Chapter I., “Sketch of the Life of Shakespeare,” p. 4. As every circumstance connected with William Shakespeare and Stratford is of interest in the connection, we may as well note that, according to Mr. Grant White, when William Shakespeare first went to London, he went into the office of a cousin of his, who was an attorney in that city. Like Mr. Tegg, Mr. White gives himself as an authority for this item. See his “Shakespeare” in Johnston’s Encyclopaedia.
* So the young ladies of New York were of opinion that Stokes should not be hanged for the murder of Fisk, “because he was so awfully good-looking.” inspiration—the ideal of the artist, who conceives, in every case, his own “Shakespeare;” and if we were called upon for proof that “Shakespeare” is quite as much of an ideal to the most of us as a “Hamlet,” or a “Lear,” we could cite, perhaps, nothing more convincing than the latitude which is allowed to artists with any of the three—“Shakespeare,”
* While these pages are going through the press (April, 1879), however, we find a statement that within a year or two (and since the writer of these pages visited it) one Simon Colling has applied a bath to the bust—removing Malone’s whitewash, and revealing the identical auburn hair and hazel eyes which tradition had asserted to be underneath.
* Post Part III. The Jonsonian testimony.
* See “Omitted Chapters of the History of England,” by
Andrew Basset, 1864
* “Such of his plays as were published during his lifetime seem to have been given to the press entirely without his agency; indeed, his interest was against their publication.... It was the interest of all concerned, whether as proprietors, or only as actors, or, like himself, as both, that the theaters should have the entire benefit of whatever favor they enjoyed with the public. But the publishers, or stationers, as they were then called, eagerly sought copies of them for publication, and obtained them surreptitiously: sometimes, it would seem, by corrupting persons connected with the theater, and sometimes, as the text which they printed shows, by sending short-hand writers to the performance.”
** Palmer v. DeWitt, 47 New York R. 532.