* "Shakespeare's Autographical Poems, being his Sonnetsclearly developed," etc. By Charles Armitage Brown. London:James Bohn, 1838.** We find, however, that Coleridge had earlier advancedthe same theory.—Table Talk (Routledge's edition), p. 2071.
Can any body believe that, if these six poems had been the work of the mighty Shakespeare of the Shakespeareans, they would have waited until 1838 without a reader? And, most wonderful of all, that this mighty poet in his own lifetime would allow six of his poems to be torn up into isolated stanzas by a printer, stirred together and run into type hap-hazard, and sold as his "Sonnets?" The Shakespeareans tell us sometimes of their William's utter indifference to fame, but they have never claimed for him an imperturbability quite so stolid as this. And while we could not well imagine Mr. Tennyson regarding with complaisance a publisher who would print his "Maud," "Locksley Hall," "Lady Clara," etc., each verse standing by itself, and calling the whole "Mr. Tennyson's Sonnets," so we fancy even Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, had he been their author, would have thought the printers were going a little too far.
But, all the same, the Shakespeareans, Mr. Armitage Brown among the rest, are determined that these sonnets shall be Shakespeare's and nobody else's, and proceed to tell us who "Mr. W. H." (to whom Mr. Thorpe, at William Shakespeare's request—as if the the man who wrote the sonnets could not write a dedication of them—dedicated them) is. Certain of them believe the letters "W. H." to be a transposition of "H. W.," in which case they might stand for "Henry Wriothesley," Earl of Southampton. Mr. Boaden and two Mr. Browns * read them, as they stand, to mean William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (in either case accounting for William Shakespeare addressing in earl as "Mr."—which may mean "Mister" or "Master"—on the score of earl and commoner having been the closest of "chums").
* Shakespeare's Autographical Poems." By Charles ArmitageBrown. London, 1838. "The Sonnets of Shakespeare solved,"etc. By Henry Brown. London, 1870.
A learned Frenchman, M. Chasles, has conjectured that Thomas Thorpe wrote the first half of the dedication, including the "Mr. W. H.," and William Shakespeare the second half (including, perhaps, though M. Chasles does not say so, the "T. T.") One equally learned German (Herr Bernsdorff) suggests that "W. H." means "William Himself," and that the great Shakespeare meant to dedicate these poems to his own personality (as George Wither, in 1611, dedicated his satirical poems, "G. W. wisheth himself all happiness;") and another supposes Shakespeare to have been in love with a negress, "black but comely," like the lady of the Canticles. Yet another, that this dark lady typified "Dramatic art," the Roman Catholic church, etc., etc. Mr. Dowden will have it that Shakespeare and Spenser, and Mento that Shakespeare and Chapman were rivals for the lady's favor. And there have been other and even more puerile speculations put gravely forth by these same learned and venerable commentators: such as, since the word "Hewes" (in the line, "A man in Hewes all Hewes in his controlling"), is spelled with a capital letter, that, therefore, "AY. H." is William Hewes (whoever he might have been). Wadsworth believes that these sonnets were the repository of the real emotions of William Shakespeare, as a relief to long simulation of other people's emotions in his dramas; while Mr. William Thompson * believes them to be The Sonnett, which Bacon mentions writing in or about 1598, saying: "It happened a little before that time that her Majesty had a purpose to dine at Twickenham Park, at which time I had (though I profess not to be a poet) prepared asonnet, directly tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my lord, which I remember I also showed to a great person," etc.
* The Renascence Drama, or History made Visible. By WilliamThompson, F. R. C. S., F. L. S. Melbourne: Sands & Me-Dougal, Collins street, West, 1880, p. 113, et seq.
Now, Mr. Thompson believes that this "great person" was William Herbert, who read them among the friends of the putative author—was, in short, the "W. H." Mr. Thompson points out that, if these sonnets are not Bacon'sSonnet, the latter has never been found, among Bacon's papers or elsewhere.
If these are the sonnets distributed by William Shakespeare among his private friends—of which Meres seems to have known in 1598—there would be this historical difficulty in connecting them with Lord Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, viz: In the Sydney Papers * is preserved a letter from Rowland White to Sir Robert Sydney, in which the writer says: "My Lord Herbert hath, with much ado, brought his father to consent that he may live at London, but not before the next spring." This letter is dated April 19,1597. "The next spring" would be 1598, the very year in which Meres speaks of these sonnets as in existence among William Shakespeare's friends. Of course, they might have been afterwards collected and dedicated by their author.
* Vol. II., p. 43.
But at the time they were so collected, Lord Herbert was Earl Pembroke, and was surely notthen, if he had ever been (which he hadnot), plain "Mr. H." In other words, if the sonnets were William Shakespeare's, he must either have dedicated them to a stranger—a boy at Oxford—or have waited until that hoy had become of age and an earl, and then dedicated them to him in either case by a title not his own. In the absence of explanation., nowadays, we would be obliged to regard such a dedication an insult rather than a compliment. And men were at least no less punctilious about titles in the age of Elizabeth than they are to-day.
It is interesting, in this connection, to note that in 1595, and while young Lord Herbert was at Oxford, a play, "Edward III.," was entered in the register of the Stationers' Company. In both this play and in Sonnett XCIV. occur the line,
"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."
Were thereanymeans of ascertaining in which the line is original and in which quotation, it might be of aid in solving this question of authorship. But, unhappily, none are at hand.
Mr. Hiel believes that "W. H." means "William Hathaway," Shakespeare's brother-in-law, and that "onlie begetter" of these sonnets means "only collector;" (going into considerable philology to make good his assertion), and that Hathaway collected his broth-er-in-law's manuscripts and carried them to Thorpe. Mr. Massey has, for his part, constructed a tremendous romance out of the sonnets, * in which "W. H." meansWilliam Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
* Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before interpreted. London,1866. Vide, a volume "Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare,showing that they belong to the Hermetic class of writings,and explaining their general meaning and purpose." New York:James Miller, 1866. Printed Anonymous, but written by JudgeE. A. Hitchcock.
But all these commentators alike agree to ignore the fact that William Shakespeare did not dedicate the sonnets to any body, or, so far as we know, procure Thomas Thorpe to do so for him. A poem, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is sometimes bound up with these, described as "Verses among the Additional Poems to Love's Martyr; or, Rosalin's Complaint," printed in 1601, but nobody knows by what authority, except that publishers have got into the habit of doing so.
Then, again, anonymous authorship was a fashionable pastime among the gallants and the gentle of this Elizabethan day, and joint authorship a familiar feature in Elizabethan letters. It is said that the great dramas we call Shakespeare's so persistently nowadays, and which began to appear unheralded at about this time, bear internal traces of courtly and aristocratic authorship. The diction is stately and sedate. No peasant-born author could have assumed and sustained so haughty a contempt for every thing below a baronet (for only at least that grade of humanity—it is said by those who have carefully examined the drama in this view *—does any virtuous or praiseworthy attribute appear in a Shakespearean character: while every thing below is exceedingly comic and irresistible, but still "base, common, and popular").
* Mr. Wilkes' Shakespeare from an American Point of View.New York: Appletons, 1876,
If certain noblemen of the court proposed amusing themselves at joint anonymous authorship, they were certainly right in concluding that the name of a livingman, in their own pay, was a safer disguise than a pseudonym which would challenge curiosity and speculation. At least—so say the New Theorists—such has turned out to be the actual fact. It is the New Theory that, while in employment in the theater, William Shakespeare was approached by certain gentlemen of the court. Perhaps their names were Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery, and possibly among them was a needy and ambitious scholar named Bacon, who, with an eye to preferment, maintained their society by secret recourse to the Jews or to any thing that would put gold for the day in his purse. Possibly they desired to be unknown, for the reasons given by Miss Bacon. In what they asked of him, and what he did for them, he found, at any rate, his profit. The story goes that the amount of profit he realized from one of these gentlemen alone was no less a sum than a thousand pounds. If so—considering the buying power of pounds in those days—it is not so wonderful that, at this rate, William Shakespeare retired with a fortune. Even at its most and its best, it is an infinitely small percentum of the world's wealth that finds its way into the poet's pocket; poetasters are sometimes luckier than poets. That William Shakespeare's fortune came faster than the fortune of his fellows we do know. This was at once the most secure and the most lucrative use he could have made of his name. For, as we have seen, owing to the condition of the common law, while he could hardly have protected himself against any piracy of his name by injunction, he might have loaned it for value to the printers, or to any one desirous of employing it, therisk of piracy to be the borrower's. If these noble gentlemen desired to write political philosophy—as Miss Bacon believed, or belles lettres for their own pleasure—they had their opportunity now; and the new theory is not inconsistent, either with the Delia Bacon theory or with the Baconian theory proper, as elaborated by Judge Holmes, who recognizes Bacon's pen so constantly throughout the dramas. The same difficulties which those theories meet would still confront us if, as Mr. Boucicault and others have suggested, the plays were offered from lesser sources, and rewritten entirely by William Shakespeare; for we should still be obliged to ask, How did he dare to retain in the plays the material which, unintelligible to him, he must have believed to be unintelligible to his audiences, as calculated to drive them away, rather than to attract them?
Any one of these schemes of assimilated authorship seems at least to tally with the evidence from what we know as the "doubtful plays." In 1600, there appeared in London an anonymous publication—a play entitled "Troilus and Cressida." It was accompanied by a preface addressed, "A never writer to an ever reader," which, in the turgid fashion of the day, set forth the merit and attractions of the play itself. Among its other claims to public favor, this preface asserted the play to be one "never stal'd with the stage, never claperclawed with the palms of the vulgar"—which seems (in English) to mean that it had never been performed in a theater. But, however virgin on its appearance in print, it seems to have very shortly become "staled with the stage," or, at any rate, with a stage name, for, a few months later,a second edition of the play (printed from the same type) appears, minus the preface, but with the announcement on the title-page that this is the play of "Troilus and Cressida, as it was enacted by the King's Majesty his servants at the Globe.Written by William Shakespeare." * Now, unless we can imagine William Shakespeare—while operating his theater—writing a playto be published in print—and announcing it as entitled to public favor on the ground that it had never been polluted by contact with so unclean and unholy a place as a theater, it is hard to escape the conviction that he was not the "never writer"—in other words, that he was not its author at all—but on its appearance in print, levied on it for his stage, underlined it, produced it, and—it proving a success—either himself announced it, or winked at its announcement by others, as a work of his own.
Again, in 1600, a play wras printed in London entitled "Sir John Oldcastle" in 1605, one entitled "The London Prodigal" in 1608, one entitled "The Yorkshire Tragedy" in 1609, one entitled "Pericles, Prince of Tyre;" and, at about the same time, certain others, viz: "The Arraignment of Paris;" "Arden of Fever-sham" (a very able work, by the way); "Edward III.;" "The Birth of Merlin "Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter;" "Mucedorus;" "The Merry Devil of Edmonton;" "The Comedy of George a Green;" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen." All the above purported, and were understood to be, and were sold as being, works of William Shakespeare, except "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," which was announced asby Shakespeare and Rowley, and "The Two Noble Kinsmen," as by Shakespeare and Fletcher.
* Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, pp.144-147.
Now, it is certainly a fact that William Shakespeare, from his box-office at the Globe, or from his country-seat at Stratford, never corroborated the printers by admitting, or contradicted them by denying his authorship of any of the above enumerated plays. The "Hamlet" had been previously published in or about 1603, and the "Lucrèce" had made its appearance in 1594. It is certainly a fact that none of these—from "Hamlet" to "Fair Em," from "Lucrece" to "The Merry Devil of Edmonton"—did William Shakespeare ever either deny or claim as progeny of his. He fathered them all as they came, "and no questions asked." And, had Mr. Ireland been on hand with his "Vortigern," it might have gone in with the rest, with no risk of the scrutiny and the scholarship which exploded it so disastrously in 1796. No plays, bearing the name of William Shakespeare on their title-page, now appeared from 1609 to 1622. But in the year 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare's death, a folio ofthirty-sixplays is brought out by Heminges and Condell, entitled "The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare." Of the many plays which had appeared during his life, and been circulated and considered as his, or of which mention can (according to the Shakes-peareans) be anywhere found, only twenty-six appeared in this folio, while ten plays are included which never appear to have been seen or heard of until their presence in this Heminges and Condell collection. The Shakespeareans allow that this is "mysterious," but precisely the same "mystery" would have been discovered in the days of Heminges and Condell themselves, if it had been worth the while of anybody then living to look into the question. Nothing has happened, since, the death of William Shakespeare, to make the Shakespeare question any more "mysterious" than he left it himself.
To make this apparent at a glance, let us present the whole in a tabulated statement, only asking the reader to observe that we have in every case given the Shakespeareans the benefit of the doubt, and accepted the mention of a similar name of any play as proof positive of its being the play nowadays attributed to William Shakespeare; and their own chronology everywhere.
The following table shows the plays passing as William Shakespeare's, in London, in the years when he resided in London, as part proprietor and concerned in the management of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters; the dates of their earliest mention or appearance, and which of them were included in the first folio, edited by Heminges and Condell, in 1628: on the supposition that the plays mentioned by Meres (of which, however, no other traces can be found, during William Shakespeare's life), besides those names in Manningham's and Forman's diaries, and the "Account of the Levels at Court," are the identical plays now included in the Shakespearean drama. The dates are Mr. Grant White's.
0289m
* This play is put in between the Histories and Tragedies,as if received "too late for classification," as thenewspapers say. Its pages are not numbered, and so it doesnot disturb the pagination of the folio.
A play called "Duke Humphrey," attributedto Shakespeare, was amongst the dramatic manuscripts destroyed by the carelessness of Warburton's servant, in the early part of the last century, as appears by the list preserved in the British Museum—MS. Lans-downe, 849.
Leaving out these plays mentioned by Meres, we then have twenty-one entirely new plays, which never appeared in William Shakespeare's life, first appearing in Heminges and Condell's edition.
It appearing, then, that, of some forty-two plays credited to William Shakespeare during his lifetime, Heminges and Condell selected only twenty-five, and printed and hound up with those twenty-five nine plays which nobody had ever heard of in print or on the stage or anywhere else, until William Shakespeare had been dead and in his grave seven years, besides the "Othello," which was first heard of five years after his death: it follows either that Heminges and Condell knew that William Shakespeare was in the habit of allowing plays to be called by his name which he never wrote, or that Heminges and Condell's collection of "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, published according to the true original copies," is nothing more or less than a collection of plays written prior to the year 1623, and not earlier than the reign of Elizabeth. The Shakes-peareans may take either horn of the dilemma they please. "Pericles," one of the plays rejected by Heminges and Condell has since been restored to favor, and no editor now omits it. Surely, under the circumstances, we are justified in asking the question: "If William Shakespeare ever wrote any plays orpoems, which of the above did he write, and which are 'doubtful?5"
'Whether the hand that wrote the "Hamlet" also composed the "Fair Em;" or the classicist who produced the "Julius Cæsar" and the "Coriolanus" at about the same time achieved "The Merry Devil" and "The London Prodigal," is a question lying within that sacred, peculiar realm of "criticism" which has "established" and forever "proved" so many wonderful things about "our Shakespeare"—a realm beyond our purview in these papers, and wherein we should be a trespasser. Fortunately, however, the question has been settled for us by those to whom criticism is not ultra vies, and may safely be said to be at rest now and forever. The burden of the judgment of the whole critical world is of record that the only true canon of "William Shakespeare" consists of the plays first brought together in one book by Heminges and Condell, plus the "Pericles;" and that certain of the above-mentioned plays, known to have been published under the name of William Shakespeare are "spurious;" that, during the lifetime of William Shakespeare, and in the city where he dwelt—under his very nose, that is to say—divers and sundry plays did appear from time to time which he did not write, but which he fathered. Whether, in pure philanthrophy and charity, he regarded these as little Japhets in search of a father, and so, pitying their abandoned and derelict condition, assumed their paternity, or, whether he took advantage of their bastardy for mere selfish and ill-gotten gain, the critical world find it unprofitable to speculate. But there can be no reasonable doubt that, in London inthe days of Elizabeth, in the name of "William Shakespeare" there was much the same sort of common trade-mark as exists, in Cologne, in the days of Victoria, in the name "Jean Maria Farina"—that it was at everybody's service. And if William Shakespeare farmed ont his name to playwrights, just as the only original Farina farms out his to makers of the delectable water of Cologne, wherein shall we find fault? If, two hundred years after, a lesser Sir Walter of Abbotsford, be acquitted of moral obliquity in denying his fatherhood of "Waverly," for the sake of the offspring, surely the elastic ethics of authorship, for the sale of the great book, will stretch out far enough to cover the case of a Shakespeare, who neither affirmed nor denied, but only held his peace! William Shakespeare, at least in the days when Lord Coke lays that a play-actor was, in contemplation of law, a vagabond and a tramp, * never had to shift for his living. He always had money to spend, and money to lend, in the days when we know many of his contemporaries in the theatrical and dramatic line were "in continued and utter extremity, willing to barter exertion, name, and fame for the daily dole that gets the daily dinner. ** Of all the co-managers—and, among them, one Burbage was the Booth or Forrest of his day—William Shakespeare is the only one whose pecuniary success enables him to retire to become a landed gentleman with a purchased "Esquire" to his name.
* "The fatal end," he says, "of these fire is beggary—thealchiemyst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer,and the poetaster." A "play-actor," he elsewhere affirms,was a fit subject for the grand jury, as a "vagrant."** "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852. p. 88.
No wonder Robert Greene, a well-known contemporary actor, but "who led the skeltering life peculiar to his trade! and who had either divined or shared the secret of the "Shakespearean" dramas, raised his voice in warning of the masquerade in borrowed plumes! Was William Shakespeare a shrewd masquerader, who covered his tracks so well that the search for a fragment of Shakespearean manuscript or holograph, which has been as thorough and ardent as ever was search for the philosopher's stone, has been unable to unearth them? Certainly no scrap or morsel has been found. The explanation of all this mystery, according to the New Theory, is of very little value, except in so far as it throws light upon what otherwise seems inexplicable, namely, that these magnificent philosophical dramas (which are more precious in our libraries as text-book and poems than as stage shows wherewith to pass an idle evening in our enlightened day) should have been popular with the coarse audiences of the times from which they date. Rut, if, to conceal their real authors, these magnificent productions were simply sent out under a name that was at every body's disposal, the discovery is of exceeding interest. From the lofty masterpiece of the "Hamlet" to what M. Taine calls "a debauch of imagination... which no fair and frail dame in London should be without" *—the "Venus and Adonis"—it was immaterial what they printed as his, so this William Shakespeare earned his fee for his silence. As for young Southampton—then just turned of nineteen—his part in the covert work of thejunta might, and, indeed, seems to have been, the accepting of the famous dedication.
* Crawley, quoted by Taine, "English Literature," book ii.,chapter iv.
That a rustic butcher-lad should, while holding horses at the door of a city theater, produce as "the first heir of his invention"—the very first thing he turned his pen to—so maturely voluptuous a poem as the "Venus and Adonis," would be a miracle, among all the other miracles, not to be lost sight of.
We believe that historical and circumstantial evidence alone is adequate to settle or even to disturb this Shakespearean question; for it appears to be the unanimous verdict of criticism that the style of Bacon and the style of "Shakespeare" are as far apart as the poles. Experts have even gone so far as to reduce both to a "euphonic test," * and pronounce it impossible that the two could have been written by the same hand. But this is not very valuable as evidence; for never, we think, can mere expert evidence be of itself sufficient as to questions of forgery of authorship any more than of autograph. If mere literary style had been all the evidence accessible, our Shakespeareans would have been making oath to the Ireland forgeries to-day as stoutly as when, in the simplicity of their hearts, they swore the impromptus of a boy of eighteen surpassed any thing in "Hamlet" or Holy Writ. Even Mr. Spedding, who ignores any "Baconian Theory," in writing the life of Bacon, admits that whenever a literary doubt has to be decided by the test of style, "the reader must be allowed to judge for himself."
* Wilkes's "Shakespeare from an American point of view,"Part III.
It was only by just such circumstantial evidence as has been grouped in these papers (such as theElizabethan orthography and philology—the use of Roman instead of Arabic numerals! etc.) that the Ireland imposture was exploded. Forgery is the imitation of an original, and, If the original be inimitable, there can surely be no forgery. In the case of forgery of a signature, lawyers and experts know that the nearer the imitation, the more easy is it detectable; for no man writes his own name twice precisely alike, and, if two signatures attributed to the same hand are found to befac similes, and, on being superimposed against the light, match each other in every detail, it is irrefutable evidence that one is intentionally simulated. * In the case of literary style, however, we are deprived of this safeguard, because, the more nearly exact the counterfeit, the more easily the critic is deceived. Pope was not afraid to entrust whole sections of the paraphrase he called the "Odyssy of Homer," just as Michael Angelo did his frescoes, to journey-workmen—and not a critic has ever been able to pronounce, or even guess, which was Pope and which was Pope's apprentice; and not only the Chatterton, Ireland, and Macpherson forgeries, but the history of merely sportive imitation and parody prove that literary style is any thing but inimitable; that, in fact, it requires no genius, and very little cleverness to counterfeit it. ** Nor is—what is incessantly appealedto—"the internal evidence of the plays themselves" of any particular value to the end in view.
* Hunt versus Lawless, New York Superior Court, November,1879. And see, also, Moore versus United States, 2 Otto,United States, 270. Criminal Law Journal, Jersey City, N.J., March, 1881. Arty "Calligraphy and the Whittaker Case."** The curious reader is referred to "SupercheriesLiteraries, Pastiches, etc.," one of the unique labors ofthe late M. Delapierre. London, Trubner & Co., 1872.
Were the question before us, "Was the author of these works a poet, statesman, philosopher, lawyer?" etc., etc., this internal evidence would be, indeed, invaluable. But it is not. The question is notwhat, butwho, was the author. Was his family name "Shakespeare," and was he christened "William"? The Shakespearean has been allowed to confound these questions, and to answer them together, until they have become as inseparable as Demosthenes and his pebble-stones. But, once separated, it is manifest that the internal evidence drawn from the works themselves, however satisfactory as to the one question, is utterly incompetent as to the other, and that it is by purely external—that is to say, by circumstantial evidence, by history, and by the record—that the question before us must be answered, if, indeed, it ever is to be answered at all. And, therefore, it is by circumstantial evidence alone, we think, that literary imposture can be satisfactorily exposed. Neither can we trust to internal evidence alone; for an attempt to write the biography of William Shakespeare by means of the internal evidence of the Shakespearean plays, has inevitably resulted in the questions we have already encountered. Was Shakespeare a lawyer, was Shakespeare a physician—a natural philosopher—a chemist—a botanist—a classical scholar—a student of contemporary life and manners—an historian—a courtier—an aristocrat—a biblicist—a journeyman printer, and the rest!—and in giving us the fairy stories of Mr. Knight and Mr. De Quincy in place of the truth we crave. For we can not close our eyes to the fact that history very decidedly negatives the idea that William Shakespeare, of Stratford, was either a lawyer, a physician, a courtier, a philosopher, an aristocrat, or a soldier. Moreover, while the internal evidence is fatal to the Shakespearean theory, it preponderates in favor of the Baconians: for, when we should ask these questions concerning Francis Bacon, surely the answer of history would be, Yes—yes, indeed; all this was Francis Bacon. The minute induction of his new and vast philosophy did not neglect the analysis of the meanest herb or the humblest fragment of experimental truth that could minister to the comfort or the health of man. And where else, in the range of letters—except in the Shakespearean works, where kings and clowns alike take their figures of speech from the analogies of nature—is the parallel of all this faithful accumulation of detail and counterfeit handwriting of Nature? The great ex-chancellor had stooped to watch even the "red-hipped bumble-bee" and the "small gray-coated gnat." Had the busy manager been studying them as well? His last act on earth was to alight from his carriage to gather handfuls of snow, to ascertain if snow could be utilized to prevent decomposition of dead flesh; and it is related that, in his dying moments—for the very act precipitated the fever of which he died—he did not forget, to record that the experiment had succeeded "excellently well." From these to lordly music, * and in all the range between, no science had escaped Francis Bacon. Had the busymanager followed or preceded the philosopher's footsteps, step by step, up through them all?
* Ulrici, p. 248, book ii, Chapter vi., refers to "TwoGentlemen of Verona," Act 1, Sc. 2. as proving that theauthor of that play "possessed in an unusual degree thepower of judging and understanding the theory of music."
And did he pause in his conception or adaptation of a play, pen in hand, to take a trip to Italy, or a run-up into Scotland to get the name of a hostelry or the topography of a highway, to make it an encyclopaedia as well as a play as he went along? If the manager alone was the author of these works, there is, we have seen, no refuge from this conviction. But, if, as is the New Theory, those plays were amplified for the press by a learned hand, perhaps, after all, he was the stage manager, actor, and human being that history asserts him to have been. If, as has been conjectured, William Shakespeare sketched the clowns and wenches with which these stately dramas are relieved, it would account for the supposed Warwickshire source of many of them. And if William Shakespeare was pretty familiar with the constabulary along his route between home and theater, so often traveled by himself and jolly coetaneans with heads full of Marian Hackett's ale, and thought some of them good enough to put into a play, his judgment has received the approval of many audiences beside those of the Bankside and Blackfriars. The Shakespearean plays, as now performed in our theaters, are the editions of Cibber, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, Macready, Booth, Irving, and others, and, while preserving still the dialogues which passed, perhaps, through Shakespeare's hands, retain no traces of his industry, once so valuable to the Globe and Blackfriars, but now rejected as unsuited to the exigencies of the modern stage, the "business" inserted in them by William Shakespeare's editorship has long since been rejected. Little as there is of the man ofStratford in our libraries, there is still less of him in our theaters in 1881. But the world still retains the honest Dogberry, who lived at Grendon, in Bucks, on the road from London to Stratfordtown, and doubtless many more of the witty manager's master strokes. At least, the "New Theory" and the "Delia Bacon Theory" coincide in this, that William Shakespeare was fortunate in the manuscripts brought to him, and grew rich in making plays out of them and matching them to his spectacles.
Such, briefly sketched, are the theories concerning these glorious transcripts of the age of Elizabeth, which, while two centuries of literature between is obsolete and moribund, are yet unwithered and unstaled, and the most priceless of all the treasuries of the age of Victoria. And yet, there seems to be a feeling that any exploration after their authorship is a sacrilege, and that this particular historical question must be left untouched—as Pythagoras would not eat beans, as parricidal—that William Shakespeare is William Shakespeare—and the doggerel curse of Stratford hangs over and forefends the meddling with his bones. But no witch's palindrome for long can block the march of reason and of research. Modern scholarship is every day dissolving chimera, and, if this Shakespeare story has no basis of truth, it must inevitably be abolished along with the rest. If this transcendent literature had come down to us without the name, would it have been sacrilege to search for its paternity? And does the mere name of William Shakespeare make that, which is otherwise expedient, infamous?Or, is this the meaning of the incantation on the tomb—that cursed shall he be that seeks to penetrate the secret of the plays? Such, indeed, was the belief that drove poor Delia Bacon mad. But we decline to see any thing but the calm historical question. It seems to us that, if we are at liberty to dispute as much as we like as to whether two a's or only one, or three e's or only two belong of right in the name "Shakespeare," surely it can not be debarred us to ask of the Past the origin of the thousand-souled pages we call by that name. We believe that, if the existence of these three theories—as to each of which it is possible to say so much—proves any thing, it proves that history and circumstantial evidence oppose the possibility of William Shakespeare's authorship of the works called his, and that there is a reasonable doubt as to whether any one man did write, or could have written, either with or without a Bodleian or an Astor Library at his elbow, the whole complete canon of the Shakespearean works.
But is there not a refuge from all these more or less conflicting theories in the simple canon that human experience is a safer guide than conjecture or miracle? In our own day, the astute manager draws from bushels of manuscript plays, submitted to him by ambitious amateurs or plodding playwrights, the few morsels he deems worthy of his stage, and, restringing them on a thread of his own, or another's, presents the result to his audiences. Can we imagine a reason why the same process should have been improbable in the days of Elizabeth and James? And if among these amateurs and playwrights there happened to be the same proportion of lawyers, courtiers, politicians,soldiers, musicians, physicians, naturalists, botanists, and the rest (as well as contributions from the hundreds of learned clerks whom the disestablishment of the monasteries had driven to their wits for support), that we would be likely to find among the corresponding class to-day, it would surely be a less violent explanation of "the myriad-minded Shakespeare," than to conjecture the "Shakespeare" springing, without an interval for preparation, at once into the finished crown and acme of each and all of these. In fact, is it not William Shakespeare the editor, and not the author, to whom our veneration and gratitude is due?
It almost seems as if not only the skepticism of the doubter but the criticism of scholarship has all along tended irresistibly to accept this compromise, as all criticism must eventually coincide with history, if it be criticism at all. The closest examination of the Shakespearean plays has revealed to scholars traces of more than one hand. It is past a hundred years since Theobald declared that, "though there are several master strokes in these three plays (viz.: the three parts of 'King Henry VI.'), yet I am almost doubtful whether they were entirely of his (Shakespeare's) writing. And unless they were wrote by him very early, I should rather imagine them to have been brought to him as a director of the stage, and so have received some finishing beauties at his hands. An accurate observer will easily see the diction of them is more obsolete, and the numbers more mean and prosaical than in the generality of his genuine composition." *
* Theobald's Shakespeare (1733). Vol. IV., p. 110.
We have elsewhere shownthat Farmer stumbled upon the same difficulty. Malone "wrote a long dissertation," says Mr. Grant White, "to show that the three parts of 'King Henry VI.' were not Shakespeare's, but had only been altered and enriched by him; and that the first 'part' was written by another person than the author of the second and third."* Drake proposed that the "First Part of 'King Henry VI.' be excluded from future editions of Shakespeare's Works, because it offers no trace of any finishing strokes from the master bard." ** "It remains to inquire," says Hallam (after a discussion of these plays, which he says Shakespeare remodeled from two old plays "in great part Marlowe, though Greene seems to have put in for some share in their composition"), "who are to claim the credit of these other plays, so great a portion of which has passed with the world for the genuine work of Shakespeare." *** And again, what share he (Shakespeare) may have had in similar repairs of the many plays he represented, can not be determined. **** And Dyee, Halliwell, and all the others follow Mr. Hallam (whose authority' is Greene's well-known complaint about the "Johannes Factotum, who struts about with his tyger's heart wrapped in a player's hide;" *v which allusion to a line in the third part of Henry the Sixth, locates the particular "steal" which Greene had most at heart when he complained).
* An essay on the authorship of the three parts of KingHenry the Sixth. By Richard Grant White. Riverside Press. H.O. Houghton & Go., Cambridge, Mass., 1859.** Shakespeare and His Times. Vol. II., p. 297.*** Note to Hallam's Literature of Europe. Part II., chap,vi., § 30.**** Id., §35.*v "O, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide."—III. Hen.VI.
Last of all comes Mr.Grant White, a most profound believer in Shakespeare, and all that name implies! with "An Essay on the authorship of the Three Parts of King Henry the Sixth," * to prove that William Shakespeare, in plagiarizing from the earlier tragedies, only plagiarized from himself, he himself having really written all that was worth saving in them! Mr. White labors considerably to fix the exact date at which Marlowe, Peale and Greene—the most eminent play writers of the day—employed a raw Stratford youth, just truanting in London, to kindly run over, prune, and perfect their manuscripts for them, and to clear Mr. White's Shakespeare from the stigma of what, if true, Mr. White admits to have been a "want of probity on Shakespeare's part, accompanied by a hardly less culpable indifference on the part of his fellows." ** This "indifference" can not be charged to one sufferer, at least, Robert Greene, who was not silent when he saw his work unblushingly appropriated: thus giving us assurance of one occasion, at least, upon which William Shakespeare posed as editor instead of author.
At any rate, we have seen the circumstantial evidence has been corroborated by the experts (for so, to borrow a figure, let us call them) Aubrey, Cartwright, Digges, Denham, Fuller, *** and Ben Jonson.
* Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton & Co. Riverside Press,1859** Id, p. 100.*** See the quotation from his "Worthies of England," inthe foot-note, ante, this chapter.
All these assure us (Ben Jonson twice, once in writing and once in conversation) that William Shakespeare was a natural wit—a wag in the crude—but that he wanted art. Old Dominie Ward made a note "to read Shakespeare's plays to post him," but even he had heard that he was a wit, but that he wanted art. * This testimony may not compel conviction, but it is all we have; we must take it, or go without any testimony at all. At any rate, it sustains and is sustained by the circumstances, and these seven different witnesses, at least, testify, without procurement, collusion, or knowledge of the use to be made of their testimony, and opposed to them all is only the little elegiac rhyme by one of themselves:
"Yet must I not give nature all thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare must enjoy a part."
Only one single scrap of mortuary effusion on which to hang the fame of centuries! And if we exclude the circumstantial evidence and the expert testimony as false, and admit the one little rhyme as true, then our reason, judgment, and inner consciousness must accept as the author of the learned, laborious, accurate, eloquent, and majestic Sheakespearean pages, a wag—a funny fellow whose "wit (to quote Jonson again) was in his own power," but not "the rule of it," so much so, "that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."