* See the "Academy," London, May 31, 1879, p. 475, Weunderstand that the mask is at present in possession of theBritish 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 thesame 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 existedat 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.
* See "Omitted Chapters of the History of England," byAndrew Basset, 1864** "The person who first resolved on printing a book, andentered his design on that register, became thereby thelegal proprietor of that work, and had the sole right ofprinting it."—Carte, quoted in "Reasons for a FurtherAmendment of the Act 54, George III., c. 15," London, 1817.John Camden Hotten, "Seven Letters, Etc., on LiteraryProperty," London, Hotten, 1871, describes the modernStationers' Company as entrusted with "a vested interestover somebody else's property, a prescriptive right tointerfere 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 republicof 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 asto the history of the days which called it out, see editionof J. VV. Hale's, Clarendon Press Series, Macmillan & Co.,Oxford, 1874.** In a pamphlet, "The Prayse of the Red Herring" cited byFarmer, 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 thethird 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.
* "Such of his plays as were published during his lifetimeseem to have been given to the press entirely without hisagency; indeed, his interest was against theirpublication.... 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 ofwhatever favor they enjoyed with the public. But thepublishers, or stationers, as they were then called, eagerlysought copies of them for publication, and obtained themsurreptitiously: sometimes, it would seem, by corruptingpersons connected with the theater, and sometimes, as thetext which they printed shows, by sending short-hand writersto the performance."** Palmer v. DeWitt, 47 New York R. 532.*** 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 authorizedother 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 recapitulatethe 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 printedoutside, the same plays as those actedinsidethe 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), orHamlet's philosophical monologues, or Isabella's pious strains.Someplays 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 appearanceamong 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 camelsin 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 thedaily 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—
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.
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 andothers, said to be in the handwriting of Charles I., in theBodleian Library.** On the authority of Sir William Dugdale ("VisitationBook"), who says, "The following verses were made by WilliamShakespeare, the late famous tragedian." This appears to beour 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.
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.
Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillsborough and hungry Grafton;
With dancing Exhall, Papist Wixford,
Beggarly Bloom and drunken Bidford.
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 strongpoetic license here—according to the well-known legend,William had really only drunk with Bidford; the quantrain isprobably the work of Jordan and not Shakespeare.*** On the authority of Stratford local tradition.**** Aslimolean MS., cited by Halliwell. The pun is on theWarwickshire pronunciation, "Ho! ho!" quoth the Devil, "'tismy 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.
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 givenby Mr. Grant White. Shakespeare, vol. I, p. ci.** This is given to us by Mr. S. W. Fullom (History ofWilliam Shakespeare, Player and Poet; with New Facts andTraditions. London: Saunders, Oatley & Co., 1864, p. 133,)with the following note: "The manner in which this fragmentwas recovered is not different from that to which we owe somany local ballads, known only to the common people. About1690, Joshua Barnes, the Greek Professor at Cambridge, wasin an inn at Stratford, when he heard an old woman singingthese stanzas, and, discerning the association withShakespeare, offered her ten guineas to repeat the wholeballad. This, however, she was unable to do, havingforgotten the remaining portion." Mr. Fullom says theseverses "reveal the Shakespearean touch," and alludes to ascandal touching Lady Lucy's infidelity to her husband.The following additional verses were furnished by JohnJordan, who altered the above stanza into the same meter,and asserted the whole to be Shakespeare, as unearthed andrestored by himself:He's a haughty, proud, insolent knight of the shireAt 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 complainHis 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 confessedHe 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:
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.
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 outthe "O" in the fourth and eighth lines. Mr. Fullom (citedabove) 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 Shakespeareanremains as to make them all one in the local traditions. The above, with the
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. ButMr. 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
* "Robert Greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetryor rhetoric than his fellows (Nash, Peele, and WilliamShakespeare), was, from his miscellaneous and discursivereading, a very useful man in his coterie." Dr. Lathamspeaks of his book as "A Groats Worth of Rest, purchasedwith a Million of Repentance," which certainly makes bettersense than "a groat's worth of wit," etc., as usuallywritten. Which is right? Greene died in 1592.
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.
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 toquestion? 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!