*Â This class of evidence can not be recapitulated in thespace of a foot note, but the curious reader will do well torefer to the chapter on the attainments of the author ofShakespeare, at pages 56-65 Holmes's "Authorship ofShakespeare," third edition.
Genius itself can not account for the Shakespearean plays. Genius may portray, but here is a genius that not only portrayed that which after his death became fact, but related other facts which men had forgotten; the actors in which had lain in the dust for centuries, and whose records had slept sealed in dead languages, in manuscripts beyond his reach! Genius, intuition,is beyond education indeed. It may prophesy of the future or conceive of the eternal; but only knowledge can draw record of the past. If the author of Shakespeare had been a genius only, his "Julius Cæsar" might have been a masterpiece of tragedy, or pathos, or of rage; but it would have portrayed an ideal Rome, not the real one. His "Comedy of Errors" might have been matchless in humor and sparkling in contretemps, but, three years afterward, on translating a hidden manuscript of Plautus, the comedies would not have been found quite identical in argument. *
* Viz: with the Menæchmiof Plautus. In "Pericles," allusionis made to a custom obtaining among a certain undiscussableclass of Cyprians, which it is fair to say could not befound mentioned in a dozen books of which we know the namesto-day, and which, from its very nature, is treated of in noencyclopaedia or manual of information, or of popularantiquities. How could any one but an antiquarian scholar,in those days, have possessed himself—not in this alone,but in a thousand similar instances—of such minute,accurate, and occult information?
The precocity of a child may be intuitive. But no babe learns its alphabet spontaneously or by means of its genius; but out of a book, because the characters are arbitrary. Pascal, when a child, discovered the eternal principles of geometry, and marked them out in chalk upon the floor; but he did not know that the curved figures he drew were called "circles," or that the straight ones were called "lines;" so he named them "rounds" and "bars." He discovered what was immutable and could be found by the searcher, but his genius could not reinvent arbitrary language that had been invented before his birth. In short, to have possessed and to have written down, in advance, the learning and philosophy of three centuries to come,might have been the gift of Prophecy (such a gift as has ere this fallen from we know not where upon the sons of men) descending into the soul of a conceivable, genius. But who can tell of more than he knows? Second sight is not retrospective. And to have testified of the forgotten past, without access to its record, was as beyond the possibilities of genius as the glowing wealth of the Shakespearean page is above the creation of an unlettered man of business in the age of Elizabeth or of Victoria.
Here is the dilemma with which the Shakespear-eans struggle: that in those years the man William Shakespearedidlive, and was a theatrical manager and actor in London; and precisely the same evidence which convinces us that this man did live in those days, convinces the world to-day—or must convince it, if it will only consent to look at it—that the dramas we call Shakespearean were so called because they were first published from the stage of William Shakespeare's theaters in London, just as we call certain readings of the classics the "Delphin classics," because brought together for a Dauphin of Prance; or certain paintings "Düsseldorf paintings," because produced in the Düsseldorf school. If, however, in the course of ages it should come to be believed that the Dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named Düsseldorf painted the pictures, even then the time would come to set the world right. If there had been no Dauphin and no Düsseldorf, we might have assigned those names to a power which might have produced the poems or the pictures. If there had been no William Shakespeare, we might easily have idealized one who could have written the plays. But, unhappily, there was the actual, living, breathing man in possession of that name, who declines to assign it to another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the Shakespeareans want. And, moreover, once the presumption is waived and the question is opened again; there is a mass of evidence in the possession of this century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped together, is a mountain over which the airiest skeptic can not vault.
But did none of William Shakespeare's contemporaries suspect the harmless deception? There is no proof at hand, nor any evidence at all positive, that the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or to have ever pretended to have been, the original author of the text of the plays he gave to his players. Let us hasten to do William Shakespeare the justice to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his having asserted a falsehood. But, if he did so pretend to his intimates, and if the dramas we now call "Shakespearean" were actually produced, in those days, on William Shakespeare's own stage, under that pretension, certainly some of them must have wagged their heads in secret. Surely, Ben Johnson, who bears testimony that his friend Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek," must have queried a little within himself as to where certain things he read in the text of his friend's plays came from, always supposing that he did not know perfectly well where theydidcome from. It seems more than probable, as we have already said, that, whoever suspected or knew the source of the plays, and who also knew, if such was the fact, that they were claimed as Shakespeare's compositions—had more cue to wink at than to expose the humbug. We find, indeed, that one, Robert Greene, by name, did protest against "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and adapter of other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when he was not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, beeing an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceyt the only Shake-scene in a countrey." That is to say, in language more intelligible at this day, that, being a sort of Jack-of-all-trades around the theater—holding horses, taking tickets, acting a little, putting pieces on the stage, and writing out their parts for the actors—he (Shakespeare) came in time to consider himself a dramatist, a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. Doubtless Greene was inspired by jealousy—for he was a writer of plays for the stage himself—in making and publishing this sneer. But, as he was endeavoring to make his remarks so personal to Shakespeare as to be readily recognized, he would not have alluded to him except by some well-known characteristic. So he calls him a "Jack-of-all-trades," that is, a man who did a little of everything. Is a Jack-of-all-trades about a theater the ideal poet, philosopher, and seer, who wrote the Shakespearean drama—the ideal of the Sliakespeareans?
According to the chronicles and the record, then, one William Shakespeare, a "general utility" actor, andJohannes Factotum, lived and thrived in London, some two hundred and fifty odd years ago. At about that date a book is likewise written. Who are these who find this book, and make this man to fit it?Verily, there are none so blind as those who are determined not to see! To have written that book one must needs have been, let us say—for he was at least all these—a philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a leech, a naturalist, a traveler, a student of Bible history! Strange to say, at the time this book—in portions—is making its appearance, there are two men living, each of whom is a poet, a philosopher, a student of laws and of physics, and a traveler over the by-ways of many lands beside his own. One of them is known to have read the Bible, then what we understand to-day by a "current work." Together, these two men possess in themselves about all of their age with which subsequent ages care to connect themselves. But it is not suggested that these two men, Bacon and Raleigh, might have written the book for which an author is wanted. We are to pass them by, and sift the dust at their illustrious feet, if haply we may find a fetich to fall down before and worship!
Must the man that wrote the dramas have visited Italy? Mr. Halliwell and others inform us of Shakespeare's visit to Verona, Venice, and Florence. Must Shakespeare have been at the bar? My Lord Campbell writes us a book to show his familiarity with the science of jurisprudence. (That book has traveled far upon a lordly name. It is an authority until it happens to be read. Once we open it, it is only to find that, the passages of the Shakespearean dramas which stamp their author's knowledge of the common law are the passages his lordship does not cite, while over the slang and dialect which any smatterer might have memorized from turning the pages of an attorney's hornbook, his lordship gloats and postulates and relapses into ecstasy). Must Shakespeare have been a physician? There have not been wanting the books to prove him that. * And, crowning this long misrule of absurdity, comes an authority out of Philadelphia, to assure us that the youth Shakespeare, on quitting his virgin Stratford for the metropolis, was scrupulous to avoid the glittering temptations of London; that he eschewed wine and women; that he avoided the paths of vice and immorality, and piously kept himself at home, his only companion being the family Bible, which he read most ardently and vigorously! **
* "The Medical Acquirement of Shakespeare." By C. W.Stearns, M. D. New York, 1865. Shakespeare's MedicalKnowledge. By Dr. Bucknill. London. 1860.** "Shakespeare and the Bible." By John Bees, etc., etc.Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1876.We commend to readers of this paper this latest authority,and can not forbear noting a few of his "discoveries." Mr.Rees has found out (p. 37) not only that William Shakespearewrote the lines—"———-Not a hair perished,On their sustaining garments not a blemish,But fresher than before." ("The Tempest," i. 2)But that he took them from Deuteronomy viii. 4.And in Acts xxvii. 34:There shall not a hair fall from the head of any of you.In which the parallelism is in the word hair!!!Or, again (p. 36) that the lines:Though they are of monstrous shape,...Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of Our humangeneration you shall find Many, nay, almost any ("TheTempest," iii. 3),are taken from the following:In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man ofthe island, whose name was Publius; who received us, andlodged us three days courteously,... who also honored uswith many honors; and when we departed, they laded us withsuch things as were necessary.—(Acts xxviii. 7-10.In which—unless it be in the fact that one of thesepassages is in an act and the other in Acts—the reader mustfind the parallelism for himself, without assistance fromMr. Rees.Shakespeare, Mr. Rees tells us, never neglected his Bible,because (p. 28) "he was indebted to one whose love added abright charm to the holy passages she taught him to read andstudy—to his mother was Shakespeare indebted for earlylessons of piety, and a reverence for a book from whosepassages in afterlife he wove himself a mantle of undyingfame!"
It is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his latest authority has truth for his color and testimonyfor his oil. The picture has at least the freshness and charm of utter novelty!
The work of Shakespeare-making goes on. The facts are of record. We may ran as we read them! But rather let us, out of reverence for the errors of our fathers, refuse to read at all, and accept the ideal of Malone, of Halliwell and De Quincy, of Grant White, and of ten thousand more, who prefer to write their biographies of William Shakespeare, not in the first person, like Baron Munchhausen, nor in the second person, like the memoirs of Sully, but in the probable and supposititious person of "it is possible he didthis," and "it is likely he didthat."
Let those who will, disparage the boy and man William Shakespeare, who married and made an honest woman of Anne Hathaway of Shottery; left home to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the slender household store; used his first wealth to make a gentleman of his father; and who, with what followed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood'sbanks, where—"procul negotiis"—in the evening of life he might enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. But that he ever claimed, much less wrote, what we call the Shakespearean drama, let those bring proof who can.
9069Original
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 merelyrejected 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'sOrlando Innamoratowere 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 mypurse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with littlevariation, this stanza of theOrlando Innamoratoof whichpoem, to this day, there is no English version."Chi ruba un corno un cavallo, un anello E simil cose, haqualcha discrezione,E patrebbe chimarsi ladroneello;Ma quel ehe ruba la reputazione E de l'altrai patiehe si fabello,Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone;E tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno?"As no English translation has been made of the OrlandoInnamorato, I must ask the reader who can not command theoriginal to be content with this rendering of the abovestanza:"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 feathersfrom another's wing His deed is robbery—assassination,And merits punishment so much the greater As he to right andtruth is more a traitor."Shakespeare, by R. G. White, vol. I, p. 23.** Of Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian from whom theplot of the "Hamlet" was taken, Whalley says, writing in1748, that "no translation hath yet been made," must havebeen read by the writer of "Hamlet" in the original. "AnEnquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare," etc. By PeterWhalley, A. B.,Fellow of St. John's College, London. Printed for J. Wallerat the Crown and Mitre, 1748—And see a suggestion that the"Hamlet" came from Germany, in a pamphlet "On the DoublePersonality of the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet ofShakespeare. Its Relation to the German Hamlet." By Dr.Latham, Royal Society of Literature Transactions. 1878.Also, "Shakespeare in Germany. Alfred Cohn. Berlin andLondon. 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, thepossibilityof 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 demonstrationthat 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! Admittingthat,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, whodidwander from Stratford to London, whodidsojourn there, and whodidwander backagain 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 thathe 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.
*Â Aubrey says, in a note at this place: "I think it was amidsummer's night that he happened there. But there is noConstable in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'" Aubrey probablyintended reference to Dogberry, in the "Much Ado."
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 waswont 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 handlesmores 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." *
* Aubrey's MSS. was called "Minutes of Lives," and wasaddressed to his "worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquaryof Oxford." A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680,accompanied it, in which Aubrey says: "'T is a task that Inever thought to have undertaken till you imposed it uponme, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my generalacquaintance, having now not only lived above half a centuryof years in the world, but have also been much tumbled upand down in it, which hath made me so well known. Besidesthe modern advantage of coffee-houses, before which men knewnot how to be acquainted but with their own relations orsocieties, I might add that I come of a long-aevious race,by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings oftime for several generations, which does reach high."
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 beingactually 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 therewas 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, whichwere 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 in1838 (at least the copy we have bears imprint of that year).It is dated "Butler's Merston in Warwickshire, April, the10th, 1693;" is signed, "Your very faithful kinsman and mostaff'te humble serv't till death, John at Stiles," and isaddressed, "These for Mr. Southwell, pr. serv't." This isMr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed in hishandwriting, "From Mr. Dowdall. Description of severalplaces 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.)
*Â His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Rev. William Fulman(in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all inthe library of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford.**Â Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in "Merry Wivesof Windsor." p. 520.
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 wehave 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 evidencewe 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.
*Â Malone's "Life:" "Plays and Poems," London, 1821, vol.ii, p. 4.*Â 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 nothave 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 werecertain 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 therewasany 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 howabout 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 theStratford' 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.