* Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. Brighton. Printedfor the Author's friends, 1881. We should add to our list ofhooks Mr. O. Follet's two able pamphlets on the Baconiantheory. Sandusky, Ohio, 1880.
Mr. Phillips brings much learning to prove that William may have been "pre-contracted" to Anne Hathaway—that his death may have been from malarial feverrather than inebriation—which have nothing at all to do with the question or the practical difficulties cited by the anti-Shakespeareans, one way or the other. But as to those practical difficulties, he brings no light and has no word to say.
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F a matter so indifferent as the number of pebbles in Demosthenes' mouth when he practiced oratory on the beach, no effort of credulity can be predicated. But when a proposition is historical and capable of proving itself, it is, indeed, the skeptic who believes the most. It would be interesting, for example, to compile a catalogue of the reasons why A, B, and C, and their friends, doubt the real Shakespeare story, and cling to the manufactured tradition. A will tell us he believes it because somebody else (Bacon will do as well as anybody) wrote enough as it was, and was not the sort of man who would surrender any of the glory to which he was himself entitled, to another. B, because, when somebody else wrote poetry (for example, Bacon's "Paraphrase of the Psalms"), his style was quite another than the style of the dramas. C, because he is satisfied that William Shakespeare spent some terms at Stratford school, and was any thing but unkind to his wife. D, because the presumption is too old to be disturbed; as if we should always go on believing in William Tell and the man in the moon, because our ancestors believed in them! And so on, through the alphabet. It is so much easier, for instance, to believe that miracles should appear by the page, or that universal wisdom should spring fullyarmed from the brain of a Warwickshire clown, than that Francis Bacon, or somebody else, should write anonymously, or in two hands, or use as a nomme de plume the name of a living man, instead of inventing one de novo.
Now, say the New Theorists, if at about that time, a living nomme de plume should happened to be wanted, whose name was more cheaply purchasable than that of a young "Johannes Factotum," of the Blackfriars, who, by doing any thing and every thing that was wanted, and saving every honest penny he turned, actually became able to buy himself a coat-of-arms (the first luxury he ever appears to have allowed himself out of his increasing prosperity) * and a county seat?
Four or five years before our historical William Shakespeare had bethought himself of wandering to London, one James Burbage, father of Richard, the actor, had built the Blackfriars Theater, a plain, rough building on the site of the present publishing office of the "Times."
* We happen on traces of the fact that WilliamShakespeare's particular weakness was his "noble descent"very often, in exploring the annals of these times, and thathis fellow actors by no means spared his weakness. "It wasthen a current joke to identify Shakespeare with 'theConqueror,' or 'Rufus,' as if his pretensions to descentfrom the Norman dukes were known" ("Ben Jonson's Quarrelwith Shakspeare,""North British Review," July, 1870). And certain lines inthe "Poetaster" are supposed to be a fling at this weaknessof Shakespeare, as the whole play is believed to be a hit atMarlow (id.). We shall see how this weakness was fostered bythe new set into which circumstances forced Shakespeare,later on.
Before its door (for the Blackfriars will answer as well as the Globe) we may, perhaps,imagine a rustic lad—fresh from Stratford, and footsore from his long tramp, attracted by the crowd and the lights, standing idle and agape. Possibly, then, riding up, some gallant threw young William his horse's bridle, and William Shakespeare had found employment in London. By attention to business, William, in time, may have, as Rowe thinks, come to control the horse-holding business, and take his predecessors into his pay; until they became known as "Shakespeare's boys," and the young speculator's name penetrated to the inside of the theater. In course of time he becomes a "servitour" (what we now call a "super," i. e., supernumerary) inside, and ultimately (according to Rowe, an actor himself, and the nearest in point of time to William Shakespeare to write his biography) "the reader" * of the establishment; and naturally, therefore, stage editor of whatever is offered. He has no royal road to learning at his command, nor does he want one. The "knack at speech-making," which had delighted the rustic youth of Stratford, mellowed by the new experiences which surround him, is all he needs. Not only the plays of Greene and others, which he now remodeled (and improved, no doubt), but essays of his own, became popular. The audience (we shall see more of them further on) called for "Shakespeare's plays," and his name came to possess a market value.
* In this capacity he read and accepted Ben Jonson's "EveryMan in his Humour," which was the beginning of the intimacywhich ended with their lives.
The dramas we now call "Shakespearean" surely did appear in his lifetime, and under his name. Werethey ever performed at his theater? Let us glance at the probabilities.
The "theaters" of this day are barely more than inclosures, with a raised platform for the performers, and straw for the audience to stand or go to sleep in, as they prefer. Votton, in a letter to Bacon, * says that the fire that destroyed the Globe theater burned up nothing but "a little wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks." Sir Philip Sidney, writing in 1583, ridicules the poverty of the scenic effects and properties of the day in an often-quoted passage: "You shall have Asia of the one side and Afrieke of the other, and so many other under kingdomes that the plaier, when hee comes in, must ever begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now, you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then you must believe the stage to be a garden: by-and-by we have news of a shipwreck in the same place; and we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, and the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave, while, in the mean time, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field!" **
* Smith's "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 74.** "The Defence of Poesie," edition 1626, p. 592.
And M. Taine has drawn a life-like picture of the audience which applauded this performance: "The poor could enter as well as the rich; there were sixpenny, twopenny, even penny seats.... If it rained, and it often rained in London, the people inthe pit, botchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices, receive the streaming rain on their heads... they did not trouble themselves about it. While waiting for the pieces they... drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then resort to their lists: they have been known to fall upon the actors, and turn the theater upside down. At other times they were dissatisfied and went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding or toss him in a blanket,... When the beer took effect there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a receptacle for general use. The smell arises, and then comes the cry, 'Burn the juniper!' They burn some in a plate in the stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there assembled could scarcely get disgusted at any thing, and can not have had sensitive noses. In the time of Rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of. Remember that they were hardly out of the middle age, and that, in the middle age, man lived on a dunghill." Mr. White assures us further, that pickpockets were apt to be plentiful among this audience, and when discovered, were borne upon the stage, pilloried in full view, * and there left, the play going on meanwhile around them; and, moreover, that the best seats sold were on the stage itself; where any of the audience, who could pay the price, could sit, recline, walk, or converse with the actors engaged in the performance," while pages brought them rushes to stretch upon, and——
* "Kempe, the actor, in his 'Nine Days' Wonder,' a. d. 1600, compares a man to 'such an one as we tye to a poast on our stage for all the people to wonder at when they are taken pilfering.'" ("Shakespeare," by Richard Grant White, Vol. I., p. 183.)pipes of tobacco with which to regale themselves. * "Practicable" scenery of any sort, even the rudest, was utterly unknown, ** and it is thought that the actors relied on barely more than the written action of the piece for their guidance. In the plays of this period we come continually on such stage directions as "Here they two talke and rayle what they list;" "All speak "Here they all talke," etc., *** which proves that much of the dialogue was trusted to the inspiration of the moment—to which inspiration the gallants and pickpockets may not unnaturally have contributed.
* Ibid.** Whenever we come on a stage direction, therefore, whichsupposes "practicable" scenery in a play, we may assert withconfidence, that the same was written in or after 1662, upto which date there was no such thing as practicablemachinery. In the original edition of "The Tempest," forinstance, there is no intimation, by way of stage direction,that the first scene occurs on shipboard. In the firstedition of "As You Like It" there is no mention of a forestin the stage direction. Nor in the early quartos of "Romeoand Juliet" is there any intimation that Juliet makes lovein a balcony. "What child is there, that, coming to a play,and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door,doth believe that it is Thebes?" says Sidney, in his"Defence of Poesie."—(R. G. White's "Shakespeare'sScholar," p. 489, note.) Trap-doors, however, were probablyin very early use; at least, we find in a comedy byMiddleton and Dekkar a character called "Trap-door." Thereseems, also, to have been pillars that turned about, and awriter in the times of James I. mentions that "the stagevaried three times in one tragedy."*** These stage directions are taken from Greene's "TuQuoque," a. d. 1614, two years before Shakespeare died, andlong after, according to the commentators, he had ceasedwriting for the stage.
The principal burden of entertaining the audience rested with the clown, who, unembarrassed by anyreference to the subject-matter of the play, popped in and out at will, cracked his jokes, danced and sung and made himself familiar with the outsiders upon the stage. Before an audience satisfied with this rudimentary setting, upon a stage crowded with smirking gallants and flirting maids of honor, we are assured that Hamlet and Wolsey delivered their soliloquies, Anthony his impassioned oratory, and Isabella her pious strains; while the clowns and pot-wrestlers discoursed among themselves of Athens and Troy, and Hecuba and Althea, of Galen and Paracelus, of "writs of detainer," and "fine and recovery," and "præmunire," and of the secrets of the pharmacopoeia! "At this public theater," says Mr. Smith, "to which every one could obtain access, and the lowest of the people ordinarily resorted... we are called upon to believe that the wonderful works which we so greatly admire and feel we can only appreciate by careful private study—that not only Englishmen like Coleridge confess, in forty years of admiring study of Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, and German philosophers, literature, and manners, to have found bursting upon him with increased power, wisdom, and beauty in every step," * but foreigners like Schlegel, Jean Paul, and Gervinus, "have fallen down before in all but heathen adoration"—were performed. In 1880, when we force a common-school education at state expense upon the people, the Shakespearean plays are disastrous to managers.
* Bacon and Shakespeare, p. 91.
They "lose money on Shakespeare," and unless "carpentry and French"—unless ballet and spectacle are liberally resorted to, aredraped down to desolate houses and financial ruin. "Shakespeare" is "over the heads" of ———— in these days of compulsory education. And yet we are calmly asked to credit the astounding statement that in and about the year 1600, in London, these grave, intellectual, and stately dialogues are taking by storm the rabble of the Bankside, and entrancing the tradesmen and burghers of the days when to read was quite as rare an accomplishment as serpent-charming is today—when, if sovereigns wrote their own names, it was all they could do—and when the government could not afford to hang a man who could actually write his name. * "And yet," to quote Mr. Smith again, "it was from the profit arising from this wretched place of amusement that Shakespeare realized the far from inconsiderable fortune with which in a few years he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon." If not actual intellectual giants, the rabble of that day must have been the superiors in literary perception of some very eminent gentlemen who were to come after them, like, for example, Fuller, Evelyn, Pepys, Dryden, Dennis, Kymer, Hume, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Jonson, whose comments on our immortal drama we have set forth in the First Part of this work. ** Only we happen to know they were not.
* Benefit of clergy was only abolished in England by acts7 and 8, George IV., c. 28, sec. 3, In 1827, fifty-threeyears ago; in the United States it had been disposed of(though it had never been availed of) by act of Congress,April 30, 1790.** Ante, pp. 20-29.
As an alternative to believing that these pearls, over which this nineteenth century gloats, were cast before the swine of the sixteenth; the theory we are now considering offers, as less violent an attack upon common sense, the supposition that what we now possess under the name of "Shakespeare's plays" werenotproduced upon the stage of any play-house in those days, but wereprintedinstead, the name of William Shakespeare having been attached to them as surety for a certain circulation. The well-attested fact that William Shakespeare was a play-writer is not ignored by this supposition; for the new theorists believe that, although no fragment of the Shakespeare work now survives, its character can be readily determined. From what knowledge we possess of the tone and quality of the audiences of those days, it is not difficult to imagine the rudeness and crudity of the plays.
These were the formative days of audiences, and, therefore, the formative days of plays. Sir Henry Wotton, in a letter from which we have just quoted, written to Lord Bacon in 1631, refers to one of these plays called "The Hog hath lost its Pearl." Says this letter: "Now it is strange to hear how sharp-witted the city is; for they will needs have Sir Thomas Swinnerton, the Lord Mayor, be meant by the hog, and the late Lord Treasurer by the pearl." There is no disputing the fact, at least, that the plays we call "Shakespeare's" are cast in a mold by themselves, and have no contemporary exemplar. The student of these days knows the fact that Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Jonson, or any other who wrote in periods that are counted "literature," made no fortunes at their work. That such as this one alluded to by Wotton—and one example will suffice—were what the town ran to see in those days, mere local sketches—lampoons on yesterday's events; coarse parables, the allusions in which could be met and enjoyed by the actors themselves (were to the popular taste, that is to say), is much easier to conceive than that the "Hamlet" and the "Lear" were to the popular taste. One Dr. Ileywood (who, it is to be noted, is sometimes called the "prose Shakespeare") is understood to have produced some two hundred and twenty of this sort of sketches alone; and, possibly, this was the sort of "early essays at dramatic poetry" which Aubrey speaks of: this "the facetious grace in writing that approves his wit" which Chettle assigns to William Shakespeare—mere sketches in silhouette of the town's doings, such as would appeal, as this sort still do in cities, to a popular and local audience. There is some curious testimony on the subject, which looks to that effect.
Cartwright, * in his lines on Fletcher, says:
"Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies
I' th' ladies' questions, and the fools' replies,
Old-fashioned wit, which walked from town to town
In turned hose, which our fathers called the clown;
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call,
And which made bawdry pass for comical.
Naturk was all his art: thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility."
* Poems, 1651, p. 273.
One Leonard Ditrges—who, Farmer says (in his essay on "The Learning of Shakespeare"), was "a wit of the town" in the days of Shakespeare—wrote some verses laudatory of William Shakespeare, which (Farmer says again) "were printed along with a spurious edition of Shakespeare" in 1640. In this copy of verses occur such lines as—
"Nature only led him, for look thorough
This whole book, thou shalt find he doth not borrow
One phrase from Greeks, nor Latins imitate,
Nor once from vulgar languages translate."
A startling declaration to find made, even in poetry, concerning compositions which Judge Holmes has demonstrated are crowded with classical borrowings, imitations drawn from works untranslated from their originals at the date when quoted; so that it would be impossible to say that the quoter found them in English works and took them with no knowledge of their original source! * "Nature itself was all his art," says Fuller, and Denham, again, asserts that "all he [Shakespeare] has was from old mother witt." ** And Dominie Ward says, to the same effect, in his diary, "I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural witt, without any art at all;" *** though, of course, this was, and could have been, nothing more than matter of report.
* See Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition,p. 5.** Farmer, p. 13.*** "Diary of Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, extendingfrom 1648 to 1679," p. 183; London, 1839, p. 30.Shakespeare took his "Taming of the Shrew" from Greene's"Taming of A Shrew," there being no copyright to prevent.
It is probable that, in the production of these plays, 'William Shakespeare was not always scrupulous to compose "without blotting out a line" himself. That he was a reckless borrower, and scissored unconscionably from Robert Greene and others (so much so thatGreene wrote a whole book in protest), we have Greene's book itself to testify. From its almost unintelligible pages we can glean some idea of the turgid English of the day. It was, of course, in the composition of this popular English that Shakespeare, by surpassing Greene, awakened the latter's jealousy. Otherwise, there would have been no superiority in Shakespeare over Greene which Greene could have perceived: or, at least, no cutting into Greene's profits wherein Greene could have found cause for jealousy. For, if Greene had continued to earn money indifferently to whether Shakespeare carried on his trade or not, he would not have been "jealous." But so fluent and clever a fellow as this William Shakespeare of Stratford, who could hold, when a mere boy, his rustic audience with a speech over a calf-sticking, was a dangerous rival among the hackney stock-playwrights of London, and would easily have made himself invaluable to his management by dashing off scores of such local sketches as "The Hog hath lost his Pearl," suggested by the current events of the day.
But, even if "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear," "Macbeth," and "Julius Cæsar" could have been produced by machinery, and engrossed currente calamo, (so that the author's first draft should be the acting copy for the players), they could have hardly been composed, nowadays, without a library. And even had William Shakespeare possessed an encyclopaedia (such as were first invented two hundred years or so after his funeral) he would not have found it inclusive of all the reference he needed for those five plays alone. They can not be studied as they are capable of beingstudied—as they were found capable of being studied by Coleridge and Gervinus—without a library. And yet are we to be asked to believe they were composed without one?—in the days when such a thing as a dictionary even was unknown! Who ever heard of William Shakespeare in his library, pulling down volumes, dipping into folios, peering into manuscripts, his brain in throe and his pen in labor, weaving the warp and woof of his poetry and his philosophy, at the expense of Greece and Rome and Egypt; pillaging alike from tomes of Norseman lore and Southern romance—for the pastime of the rabble that sang bawdy songs and swallowed beer amid the straw of his pit, and burned juniper and tossed his journey-actors in blankets?
It is always interesting to read of the habitudes of authors—of paper-saving Pope scribbling his "Iliad" on the backs of old correspondence, of Spenser by his fireside in his library at Kilcolman Castle, of Scott among his dogs, of Gibbon biting at the peaches that hung on the trees in his garden at Lausanne, of Schiller declaiming by mountain brook-sides and in forest paths, of Goldsmith in his garrets and his jails. Even of Chaucer, dead and buried before Shakespeare saw the light, we read of his studies at Cambridge, his call to the bar, and his chambers in the Middle Temple. But of William Shakespeare—after ransacking tradition, gossip, and the record—save and except the statement of Ben Jonson how he had heard the actor's anecdote about his never blotting his lines—not a word, not a breath, can be found to connect him with, or surprise him in any agency or employment as to the composition of the plays weinsist upon calling his—much less to the possession of a single book! Did William Shakespeare own a library? Had we found this massive draught upon antiquity in the remains of an immortal Milton or a mortal Tupper, or in all the range of letters between, we should not have failed to presume a library. Why should we believe that William Shakespeare needed none?—that, as his pen ran, he never paused to lift volume from the shelf to refresh or verify his marvelously retentive recollection? There was no Astor or Mercantile Library around the corner from the Globe or the Blackfriars, in those days. And, as for his own possessions, he leaves in his Will no hint of book or library, much less of the literature the booksellers had taken the liberty of christening with his name! Where is the scholar who glories not in his scholarship? By universal testimony, the highest pleasure which an author draws from his own completed work, the pride of the poet in his own poem, is their chiefest payment. The simple fact—which stands out so prominently in the life of this man that nobody can gainsay it—that William Shakespeare took neither pride nor pleasure in any of the works which passed current with the rest of the world as his, might well make the most casual student of those days suspicious of a claim that, among his other accomplishments, William Shakespeare was an author at all.
Just here we are referred to a passage in Fuller's "Worthies:"
"Many were the wit combats," says Fuller, "between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson;... I beheld them," etc. But Fuller was only eight years old when Shakespeare died, and possibly spoke from hearsay, as it is hardly probable that an infant of suchtender years was permitted to spend his nights in "The Mermaid." Besides, these "wit combats" at "The Mermaid" are now said to be "wetcombats," i. e. drinking-bouts, by a long-adopted misprint.
As a matter of fact, unless we are misled by a typographical error in the edition before us, * what Fullerdid actually say was, not "wit combats," but "wet combats." But even if they were "wit combats," and not friendly contests at ale-guzzling, like the early tournament at "Piping Pebworth" and "Drunken Bidford," the "wit" could not have been colossal, if we may judge from one example preserved in the Ashmolean manuscripts at Oxford, as stated by Capell. "Ben" (Jonson) and "Bill"' (Shakespeare) propose a joint epitaph.
* The History of the Worthies of England. Endeavored byThomas Fuller, D.D. Two volumes. (First printed in 1622.) Anew edition, with a few Explanatory Notes by John Nichols,F. A.S. London, Edinburgh, and Perth. Printed for F. C. & J.Rivington and others. The reference to William Shakespeareis at page 414 of volume II., and is as follows:"WARWICKSHIRE"WRITERS SINCE THE REFORMATION."William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in thiscounty, in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort tobe compounded. 1. Martial in the warlike sound of hissurname (whence some may conjecture him of a militaryextraction), Hasli-vibrans or Shake-speare. 2. Ovid, themost naturall and witty of Poets; and hence it was thatQueen Elizabeth, coming into a grammar school, made thisextemporary verse—"Persius a Crab-Staffe, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine Wag."3. Plautus who was an exact Commedian, yet never anyScholar, as one Shakespeare (if alive) would confesshimself. Adde to all these that, though his genius generallywas jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could(when so disposed) be solemn and serious, as appears by hisTragedies; so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret andunseen) might afford to smile at his Comedies, they were somerry; and Democritus scarce forbear to sigh at histragedies, they were so mournfull."He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, Poetanon fit sed nascitur, 'One is not made but born a poet.'Indeed, his learning was very little, so that as Cornishdiamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointedand smoothed even as they are taken out of the earth, sonature itself was all the Art which was used upon him. Manywere the wet-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson; which twoI beheld like a Spanish great gallion and an English man ofwar, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn withall tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, bythe quickness of his wit and invention. He died AnnoDomini... and was buried at Stratford-upon-Avon, the town ofhis nativity."
Ben begins:
"Here lies Ben Jonson,
Who was once one—"
Shakespeare concludes:
"That while he lived, was a slow thing,
And now, being dead, is no-thing."
This being the sort of literature which William Shakespeare's pen turned out during his residence in London, he could manage very well without a library. And it was the most natural thing in the world that, after retiring to the shade of Stratford, it should have produced, on occasion, the famous epitaphs on his friends Elias James and "Thinbeard." At all events, this is a simpler explanation than the "deterioration of power," for which no one has assigned a sufficient reason," which Halliwell * was driven to assume in orderto account for this drivel from the pen which had written "Hamlet."
* "Life of Shakespeare," p. 270. London, 1848.
And, moreover, it is a satisfactory explanation of what can not be explained in any other way (and which no Shakespearean has ever yet attempted to explain at all), of the fact that William Shakespeare, making his last Will and Testament at Stratford, in 1515, utterly ignored the existence of any literary property among his assets, or of his having used his pen, at any period, in accumulating the competency of which he died possessed. Had William Shakespeare been the courtly favorite of two sovereigns (which Mr. Hallam doubts * ), it is curious that he never was selected to write a Masque. Masques were the standard holiday diversions of the nobles of the day, to which royalty was so devoted that it is said the famous Inigo Jones was maintained for some years in the employment of devising the trappings for them alone (though, of course, it is no evidence, either way, as to the matter we have in hand). But if William Shakespeare was the shrewd and prosperous tradesman that we have record of (and, that he came to London poor and left it rich, everybody knows), was he not shrewd enough, as well, to see that his audiences did not require philosophical essays and historical treatises; that he need not waste his midnight oil to verify the customs of the early Cyprians, or pause to explore for them the secrets of nature? We may assert him to be a "great moral teacher" to-day; but, had he been a "great moral teacher" then, he would have set his stage to empty houses. He could have earned the same money with much less trouble tohimself.
* "Literature of Europe," vol. iii., p. 77 (note).
The gallants would have resorted to his stage daily (as they would have gone to the baths if they had been in old Home); and the ha'penny seats have enjoyed themselves quite as much had he given them the school of "The Hog hath lost his Pearl," or "The Devil is an Ass," or the tumbles of a clown. Why should this thrifty manager have ransacked Greek and Latin and Italian letters, the romance of Italy and the Sagas of the Horth (or, according to Dr. Farmer, rummaged the cloisters of all England, to get these at second hand)? Had these all been collected in a public library, would he have had leisure to sit down and pull them over for this precious audience of his, these gallants and groundlings—when his money was quite as safe if he merely reached out and took the nearest spectacle at hand (as he took his "Taming of the Shrew," "Winter's Tale," "sea-coast of Bohemia," and all—from Robert Greene)? But, if we may be allowed to conceive that it was theaction(that is to say, the "business") of the Shakespearean plays that delighted this Shakespearean audience (that filled the cockpit, galleries, and boxes, while poor Ben Jonson's, according to Digges, would hardly bring money enough to pay for a sea-coal fire), and that certain greater than the manager used this action thereafter as a dress for the mighty transcripts caused to be printed under voucher of the popular manager's name—if we may be allowed to conceive this—however exceptional, it is at least an accounting for the Shakespearean plays as we possess them to-day, without doing violence to human experience and the laws of nature.
Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery are young noblemen of wealth and leisure,who "pass away the time merely in going to plays every day." * We have seen that the best seats were on the stage, and these, of course, the young noblemen occupied. There were no actresses in those days—the female parts were taken by boys—but titled ladies and maids of honor were admitted to seats on the stage as well as the gallants, and a thrifty stage manager might easily make himself useful to both. If my Lord Southampton was bosom friend to William Shakespeare (as rumor has it), their intimacy arose probably through some such service. A noble youth of nineteen, of proverbial gallantry and sufficient wealth (though, it must be remembered, as among the fortunes of his day, a comparatively poor man; not able to give away $25,000 at a time, for instance), was not at so great a loss for a friend and alter ego in London in 1593 (the date at which the "Venus and Adonis" is dedicated to him) as to be forced to forget the social gulf that separated him from an economical commoner (lately a butcher in the provinces), however popular a stage manager, except for cause; and it takes considerable credulity to believe that he did forget it (if he did), through being dazzled by the transcendent literary abilities of the economical commoner aforesaid.
* "My Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland come not to thecourt, the one but very seldom; they pass away the timemerely in going to plays every day."—(Letter from RowlandWhite to Sir Robert Sidney, dated October 11, 1599, quotedby Kenny, "Life and Genius of Shakespeare." London:Longmans, 1864. p. 34, note.) But it may be noted thatSouthampton and Raleigh were opposed to each other inpolitics.
For Southampton lived and died without ever being suspected of a devotion to literature or literary pursuits; and, besides, the economical commoner had not then written (if he ever did write) the "Hamlet" and "Lear," and those other evidences of the transcendent literary ability which could seduce a peer outside his caste. That the gallants and stage managers of the day understood each other, just as they perhaps do today, there is reason to believe. Dekker, in his "Gull's Horn-Book," says that, "after the play was over, poets adjourned to supper with knights, where they in private unfolded the secret parts of their dramas to them." By "poets" in this extract is meant, as appears from the context, the writers of dramas for the stage; such as, perhaps, William Shakespeare was. But whether these suppers after the play were devoted to intellectual and philosophical criticism is a question for each one's experience to aid him in answering. Whether William Shakespeare was admitted to this noble companionship, or was only emulous of the honor, we have no means of conjecture, as either might account for the fact that with his first savings he purchased a grant of arms for his father, thus obtaining not only an escutcheon, but one whole generation of ancestry; a transaction which involved, says Dr. Farmer, the falsehood aud venality of the father, the son and two kings at arms, and did not escape protest; * for if ever a coat was "cut from whole cloth," we may be sure that this coat-of-arms was the one.
* A complaint must have been made from some quarter thatthis application had no sufficient foundation, for we have,in the Herald's college, a manuscript which purports to be"the answer of Garter and Clarencieux, kings of arms, to alibellous scrowl against certain arms supposed to bewrongfully given in which the writers state, under the head"Shakespeare," that "the person to whom it was granted hadborne magistracy, and was justice of peace, at Stratford-upon-Avon; he married the daughter and heir of Arden, andwas able to maintain that estate." The whole of thistransaction is involved in considerable, and, perhaps, to agreat extent, intentional obscurity; and it still seemsdoubtful whether any grant was actually made in the year1596. In the year 1599, the application must have beenrenewed in a somewhat altered form. Under that date, thereexists a draft of another grant, by which John Shakespearewas further to be allowed to impale the ancient arms ofArden. In this document a statement was originally insertedto the effect that "John Shakespeare showed and produced hisancient coat-of-arms, heretofore assigned to him whilst hewas her Majesty's officer and bailiff of that town." But thewords "showed and produced" were afterward erased, and inthis unsatisfactory manner the matter appears to haveterminated.It is manifest that the entries we have quoted contain anumber of exaggerations, one even of positive misstatements.The "parents and antecessors" of John Shakespeare were notadvanced and rewarded by Henry VII.; but the maternalancestors, or, more probably, some more distant relatives ofWilliam Shakespeare, appear to have received some favors anddistinctions from that sovereign. The pattern of arms given,as it is stated, under the hand of Clareneieux (Cooke, whowas then dead), is not found in his records, and we canplace no faith in his allegation. John Shakespeare had beena justice of the peace, merely ex officio, and not bycommission, as is here insinuated; in all probability he didnot possess "lands and tenements of the value of fivehundred pounds;" and Robert Arden, of Wilmecote, was not a"gentleman of worship."—(Kenny, "Life and Genius ofShakespeare," p. 38. London: Longmans, 1854.)
Whoever wrote Hamlet's soliloquy and Antony's oration might well have written the "Venus and Adonis" and the "Lucrece," and was quite equal to the bold stroke of describing the former (the most splendidly sensuous poem in any language—a poem thatbreathes in every line the blase and salacious exquisite), as the first heir of the invention of a busy London manager and whilom rustic Lothario among 'Warwickshire milkmaids. The question as to the authorship of the one hundred and fifty-four "Sonnets," which appeared (with the exception of two, printed in 1598, in a collection of verses called for some un-suggested reason "The Passionate Pilgrim") in 1609, need not enter into any anti-Shakespearean theory at all. Except that one Francis Meres, writing in 1598—eleven years before—had reported William Shakespeare to have circulated certain "sugared sonnets among his private friends;" * and that the one hundred and thirty-sixth of the series says the author's name is "Will" (the common nickname of a poet of those days), ** there is nothing to connect them with William Shakespeare except his name on the title-page—in the days when we have seen that printers put whatever name they pleased or thought most vendable, upon a title-page. (When the aforesaid "Passionate Pilgrim" was printed in 1598—also as by William Shakespeare—Dr. Ileywood recognized two of his own compositions incorporated in it, and promptly claimed them. "No evidence," says Mr. Grant White, *** in commenting on this performance, "of any public denial on Shakespeare's part is known to exist. It was not until the publication of the third edition of the poem, in 1612, that William Shakespeare's name was removed.")
* Hallam does not think these are the sonnets mentioned byMeres.—("Literature of Europe," vol. iii., p. 40, note.** See ante, p. 090, note.*** "Shakespeare's Works," vol. iii., p. 77.
But what involves the authorship of the sonnets in stilldeeper obscurity is the fact that their publisher, Thomas Thorpe, himself dedicates them to a friend of his own. He addresses his friend as "Mr. W. H.," and signs the dedication with his own initials "T. T." Perhaps it was just as the name "Shakespeare" was fastened to the title-page of "The Passionate Pilgrim," and the plays to which, as we shall notice the Shakespeareans declare it never belonged, that Mr. Thomas Thorpe calls his book "Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before imprinted," and makes in the pages of the Stationers' Company the entry: "20 May, 1609. Tho. Thorpe. A book called Shake-speare's Sonnets." They appear conjointly with a long poem entitled "A Lover's Complaint," and two of them (as we have said) had already been printed in "The Passionate Pilgrim," published by Jaggard in 1598. This unhappy dedication has been so twisted by the commentators to serve their turns, that the only safety is to print it as it stood in this first edition:
For a dedication composed in the turgid fashion of nearly three hundred years ago, the above would seem to be peculiarly intelligible. All publications were ventures in those days. The printer might get His money back and he might not. But, until he did, he was an adventurer. So Mr. Thorpe, in setting forth on his adventure, wishes well to his publication and to some unknown patron whom he desires—as was the custom—to compliment with wishes of long life and happiness. At least this would seem to be the reading on the face of it. To be sure, there is a slight uncertainty as to whether "Mr. W. H." is dedicator or dedicatee. But the moment the name of Shakespeare appears this little trouble becomes insignificant—and, as usual, difficulties begin to crowd and multiply.
The title reads: "Shake-speares Sonnets never before imprinted: at London, by G. Eld, for T. T. And are to be sold by William Apsley. 1609."
At that name the commentators appear, and swarm like eagles around a carcass.
Mr. Armitage Brown, who flourished in or about the year 1838, and appears to have been the first gentleman who ever took the trouble to read them, has demonstrated * that these sonnets are actually six poems of different lengths **—each poem having a consistent theme and argument (and he made this discovery by the simple process of reading them).