THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

By Appleton Morgan

Author Of "The Law Of Literature,"
"Notes To Best's Principles Of Evidence," Etc., Etc

[Original]

Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves;

Sic vos non vobis vellera fertis oves;

Sic vos non vobis melliflcatus apes;

Sic vos non vobis fertis aratra boves.

—P. Virgil. Maro

Cincinnati, Robert Clarke & Co
1881

TO D. T. MORGAN, ESQ.,

OF WHIP'S CROSS, WALTHAMSTOW, ESSEX, ENGLAND.

My Dear Sir:

I do not know your opinion on the matter treated in these pages. Very possibly you will disagree with every line of my Brief. But it gives me pleasure to connect my name with yours on this page, and to subscribe myself

Very faithfully, your kinsman,

APPLETON MORGAN.

October, 1881.

CONTENTS

[ PREFACE. ]

[ THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. ]

[ PART I. THE MYSTERY. ]

[ PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. ]

[ PART III. THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. ]

[ PART IV. EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES: THE DELIA BACON THEORY. ]

[ PART V. THE BACONIAN THEORY. ]

[ PART VI. THE NEW THEORY—THE SONNETS—CONCLUSION. ]

[ INDEX ]

PREFACE.

M. Guizot, in his History of England, states the Shakespearean problem in a few words, when he says: "Let us finally mention the great comedian, the great tragedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, who was in his lifetime butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William Shakespeare. In twenty years, amid the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed the thirty-two tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequaled power of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience and for ever remaining the treasure of the age—all this being accomplished, Shakespeare left the theater and the busy world, at the age of forty-five, to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing and never returning to the stage—ignored and unknown if his works had not forever marked out his place in the world—a strange example of an imagination so powerful, suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing, once for all, the door to the efforts of genius."

But M. Guizot is very far from suggesting any prima facie inconsistency in this statement as it stands.

Since every man reads the Shakespearean pages for himself and between the lines, much of what we are expected to accept as Shakespearean criticism must fail of universal appreciation and sympathy. But none who read the English tongue can well be unconcerned with the question as to who wrote those pages; and it would be affectation to deny that the intense realism of our day is offering some startling contributions to the solution of that question.

For instance, the gentlemen of the "New Shakespeare Society" (whom Mr. Swinburne rather mercilessly burlesques in his recent "Studies of Shakespeare") submit these dramas to a quantitative analysis; and, by deliberately counting the "male," "female," "weak," and "stopped" endings, and the Alexandrines and catalectics (just as a mineralogist counts the degrees and minutes in the angles of his crystals), insist on their ability to pronounce didatically and infallibly what was written by William Shakespeare, and at what age; what was composed by Dekker, Fletcher, Marlowe, or anybody else; what was originally theirs, touched up by William Shakespeare or vice versa, etc. It is curious to observe how this process invariably gives all the admirable sentiments to William Shakespeare, and all the questionable ones to somebody else; but at least these New Shakespearean gentlemen have surrendered somewhat of the "cast-iron" theory of our childhood—that every page, line, and word of the immortal Shakespearean Drama was written by William Shakespeare demi-god, and by none other—perhaps, even opened a path through which the unbelievers may become, in due time, orthodox.

There are still, however, a great many persons who are disposed to wave the whole question behind them, much as Mr. Podsnap disposed of the social evil or a famine in India. It is only a "Historic Doubt," they say, and "Historic Doubts" are not rare, are mainly contrived to exhibit syllogistic ingenuity in the teeth of facts, etc., etc. The French, they say, have the same set of problems about Molière. Was he a lawyer? was he a doctor? etc.—and they all find their material in internal evidence—e. g., an accurate handling of the technique of this or that profession or science: parallelism, practical coincidence, or something of that sort.

The present work is an attempt to examine, for the benefit of these latter, from purely external evidence, a question which, dating only within the current quarter century, is constantly recurring to confront investigation, and, like Banquo's troublesome shade, seems altogether indisposed to "down."

I have to add my acknowledgments to Mr. Julian Norris, for his careful preparation of the Index to these pages.

Grandview-on-Hudson, October 2, 1881.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH.

PART I. THE MYSTERY.

[Original]

HE thirty-seven plays called, collectively, "Shakespeare," are a phenomenon, not only in English letters, but in human experience. The literature of the country to which they belong, had, up to the date of their appearance, failed to furnish, and has been utterly powerless since, to produce any type, likeness, or formative trace of them; while the literature of other nations possesses not even a corresponding type. The history of a century on either side of their era discloses, within the precints of their birth, no resources upon which levy could have been made for their creation. They came and went like a meteor; neither borrowing of what they found, nor loaning to what they left, their own peculiar and unapproachable magnificence.

The unremitting researches of two centuries have only been able to assign their authorship (where it rested at first) to an hiatus in the life of a wayward village lad named William Shakespeare—who fled his native town penniless and before the constable, to return, in a few years, a well-to-do esquire—with a coat of arms and money in his pocket. We have the history of the boy, and certain items as to the wealthy squire, who left behind him two or three exceedingly common-place and conventional epitaphs (said to be his handiwork) and a remarkable will; but, between them, no hint of history, chronicle, or record. Still, within this unknown period of this man's career, these matchless dramas came from somewhere, and passed current under his name.

The death of their reputed author attracted no contemporary attention, and for many years thereafter the dramas remained unnoticed. Although written in an idiom singularly open to the comprehension of all classes and periods of English-speaking men, no sooner did they begin to be remarked, than a cloud of what are politely called "commentators" bore down upon them; any one who could spell feeling at liberty to furnish a "reading;" and any one who supposed himself able to understand one of these "readings," to add a barnacle in the shape of a "note." From these "commentators" the stately text is even now in peril, and rarely, even to-day, can it be perused, except one line at a time, across the top of a dreary page of microscopic and exasperating annotation. But, up to within a very few years, hardly a handful of Shakespearean students had arisen with courage to admit—what scarcely any one of the "commentators" even, could have failed to perceive—the utterly inadequate source ascribed to the plays themselves.

It is not yet thirty years since an American lady was supposed to have gone crazy because she declared that William Shakespeare, of the Globe and Black-friars theaters in London, in the days of Elizabeth, was not the author of these certain dramas and poems for which—for almost three hundred years—he has stood sponsor.

Miss Bacon's "madness," indeed, has been rapidly contageous. Now-a-days, men make books to prove, not that William Shakespeare did not write these works, but that Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, or some other Elizabethan, did not. And we even find, now and then, a treatise written to prove that William Shakespeare was, after all, their author; an admission, at least, that the ancient presumption to that effect no longer covers the case. And, doubtless, the correct view is within this admission. For, probably, if permitted to examine this presumption by the tests which would be applied to any other question of fact, namely, the tests of contemporary history, muniments, and circumstantial evidence, it will be found to be quite as well established and proved that William Shakespeare was not the author of the plays that go by his name, as any other fact, occurring in London between the years 1585 and 1616, not recorded in history or handed down by tradition, could be established and proved in 1881.

If a doubt as to the authorship of the plays had arisen at any time during or between those years, and had been kept open thereafter, the probability is that it would have been settled by this time. But, as it is, we may be pretty certain that no such doubt did arise, and that no such question was asked, during the years when those who could have dispelled the doubt or answered the question were living. When we are about to visit a theater in these days, what we ask and concern ourselves with is: Is the play entertaining? Does it "draw?" And, when we witness it, the question is: Do we enjoy it—or does it bore us? Will we recommend our friends to come that they may be entertained, too, and that we may discuss it with them? or will we warn them to keep away? We very speedily settle these questions for ourselves. Doubtless we may and do inquire who the author is. But we do not enter into any discussion upon the subject, or charge our minds enough with the matter to doubt it when we are told. The author's name is, not unusually, printed on the play-bill before us; we glance at it indifferently, take what is told us for granted, and think no more about it. If the name happens to be assumed, we may possibly see its identity discussed in the dramatic columns of our newspapers next morning, or we may not. If the play entertains us, we commend it. If it drags, we sneer at it, get up and go off. That is all the concern we give it. The evening has slipped away; and, with it, any idle speculations as to the playwright who has essayed to amuse us for an hour.

If, three hundred years hence, a question as to who wrote the play we saw at Mr. Daly's theater or Mr. Wallack's theater last evening should come up, there would be very little evidence, not any records, and scarcely an exhibit to refer to in the matter. Copies of the play-bill or the newspapers of the day might chance to be discovered; but these—the internal testimony of the play itself, if any, and a sort of tacit presumption growing out of a statement it was nobody's cue to inquire into at the time it was made, and had been nobody's business to scrutinize since—would constitute all the evidence at hand. How this supposititious case is precisely all-fours with the facts in the matter of the dramatic works which we call, collectively, Shakespeare's. Precisely: except that, on the evenings when those plays were acted, there were no play-bills, and, on the succeeding morning, no daily newspaper. We have, therefore, in 1881, much fewer facilities for setting ourselves right as to their authorship than those living three hundred years after us could possess in the case we have supposed. The audiences who witnessed a certain class of plays at Shakespeare's theaters, in the years between 1585 and 1606, were entertained. The plays "drew." People talked of them about town, and they become valuable to their proprietors. The mimic lords and ladies were acceptable to the best seats; the rabble loved the show and glitter and the alarum of drums; and all were Britons who gloated over rehearsal of the prowess of their own kings and heroes, and to be told that their countrymen at Agincourt had slain ten thousand Frenchmen at an expense of but five and twenty of themselves. But, if M. Taine's description of the Shakespearean theaters and the audience therein wont to assemble may be relied upon, we can pretty safely conclude that they troubled themselves very little as to who fashioned the dialogue the counterfeit kings and queens, soldiers, lords, and ladies spoke; or that they saw any thing in that dialogue to make such speculation appear worth their while. Nor can we discover any evidence, even among the cultured courtiers who listened to them—or in the case of Elizabeth herself, who is said to have loved them (which we may as well admit for the argument's sake)—that any recognition of the plays as works worthy of any other than a stage-manager, occurred. Even if it should appear that these plays thus performed were the plays we now call Shakespeare's; had any of this audience suspected that these plays were not written for them, but for all time; that, three hundred years later—when the plays should not only be extant, but more loved and admired than ever—the thinking world should set itself seriously to probe the mystery of their origin; there might have been some interest as to their producer manifested, and we might have had some testimony competent to the exact point to-day.

But it is evident enough that no such prophetic vision was vouchsafed to them, and no such prophetic judgment passed. Nor is the phenomenon exceptional. The critic, does not live, even to-day, however learned or cultured or shrewd, who would take the responsibility of affirming upon his own judgment, or even upon the universal judgment of his age and race, that any literary composition would be, after a lapse of three hundred years, not only extant, but immortal, hugged as its birthright by a whole world. Such a statement would have been contrary to experience, beyond the prophecy of criticism, and therefore only to be known—if known at all—as a Fact. Moreover, it could only be known as a fact at the expiration of the three hundred years. Doubtless, few critics would care, in any case, to commit themselves upon record one way or the other in a matter so hypothetical and speculative as the judgment of posterity upon a literary performance, and certainly nothing of the sort occurred in Shakespeare's day, even if there were any dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the subject. There can be no doubt—and it must be conceded —that certain acted plays did pass with their first audiences, and that certain printed plays, both contemporaneously and for years thereafter, did pass with the public who read them, as the compositions of Mr. Manager Shakespeare; and that probably even the manager's pot companions, who had better call to know him than any others, saw nothing to shake their heads at in his claim to be their author (provided he ever made any such claim; which, by the way, does not appear from any record of his life, and which nobody ever asserted as a fact). If they did—with the exception only of Robert Greene—they certainly kept their own counsel. On the one hand, then, the question of the authorship was never raised, and, on the other hand, if it had been, the scholars and critics who studied the plays (supposing that there were any such in those days) could not possibly have recognized them as immortal. If they had so recognized them, they would doubtless have left us something more satisfactory as to the authorship of the compositions than the mere "impression that they were informed" that the manager of the theater where they were produced wrote them; that they supposed he was clever enough to have done so, and they therefore took it for granted that he did. That is all there is of the evidence of Shakespeare's own day, as to the question—if it still is a question—before us.

But how about the presumption—the legal presumption, arising from such lapse of time as that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary—the presumption springing from tradition and common report—that William Shakespeare composed the Shakespearean plays? It is, of course, understood that one presumption is as good as another until it is disturbed. It is never safe to underrate an existing presumption; as long as it stands at all, it stands as conclusive; once overthrown, however, it is as if it had never existed.

A presumption three hundred years old may be a strong one to overthrow. But if its age is all there is of it—if it be only strong in years—it can yet be toppled over. Once overthrown, it is no more venerable because it is three hundred years old than if it were only three. An egg-shell will toss upon the crest of an angry surf, and, for very frailty, outride breakers when the mightiest ship man ever framed could not survive an instant. But it is only an egg-shell, for all that, and a touch of the finger will crush and destroy it. And so, formidable as it was in age, the presumption as to William Shakespeare's authorship of the great dramas which for three hundred years had gone by his name, had only to be touched by the thumb and finger of common sense to crackle and shrivel like the egg that sat on the wall in the Kindergarten rhyme, which all the king's army and all the king's men could not set up again, once it had tumbled over.

But as the world advanced and culture increased, why did not the question arise before? Simply because the times were not ripe for it. This is the age and generation for the explosion of myths, and, as one after another of them falls to pieces and disappears, who does not wonder that they have not fallen sooner? For how many years has the myth of William Tell been cherished as history! And yet there is no element of absolute impossibility or even of improbability—much less of miracle—in the story of an archer with a sure eye and a steady aim. Or, in the case of physical myths—which only required an exploration by physical sense for their explosion—the maps of two centuries or so ago represented all inaccessible seas as swarming with krakens and ship-devouring reptiles. And it is not twenty years since children were taught in their geographies that upon the coast of Norway there was a whirlpool which sucked down ships prow foremost. And here, in our midst, a cannon-shot from where we sit and write these lines, there was believed to be and exist a Hell Gate which was a very portal of death and slaughter to hapless mariners. But there are no krakens, and not much of a Maelstrom; and, for twenty years before General Newton blew up a few rocks at Hell Gate, people had laughed at the myth of its ferocity. And again: nothing is easier than to invent a story so utterly unimportant and immaterial that it will be taken for granted, without controversy, and circulate with absolute immunity from examination, simply because worth nobody's while to contradict it. For example, it is likely enough that Demosthenes, in practicing oratory, stood on a sea-beach and drilled his voice to outroar the waves. The story is always told, however, with the rider, that Demosthenes did this with his mouth filled with pebble-stones; and, as nobody cares whether he did or not, nobody troubles himself to ascertain by experiment that the thing is impossible, and that nobody can roar with a mouth full of pebble-stones. And not even then would he succeed in removing the impression obtaining with the great mass of the world, that a thing is proven sufficiently if it gets into "print." Charles II. set the Royal Society of his day at work to find the reason why a dead fish weighed more than a live one—and it was only when they gave it up, that the playful monarch assured them that the fact they were searching for the reason of was not a fact at all. It is not impossible to demonstrate from experience, that the human mind will be found—as a rule—to prefer wasting laborious days in accounting for, rather than take the very simplest pains to verify even a proposition or alleged fact, which, if a fact at all, is of value beyond itself. It was objected to the system of Copernicus, when first brought forward, that, if the earth turned on its axis as he represented, a stone dropped from the summit of a tower would not fall at the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west, in the same manner that a stone dropped from the masthead of a ship in full sail does not fall at the foot of the mast, but toward the stern. To this it was answered that a stone, being a part of the earth, obeys the same laws and moves with it, whereas it is no part of the ship, of which, consequently, its motion is independent. This solution was admitted by some and opposed by others, and the controversy went on with spirit; nor was it till one hundred years after the death of Copernicus that, the experiment being tried, it was ascertained that the stone thus dropped from the head of the mast does fall at the foot of it. And so, if, in the case of the Shakespearean authorship, the day has come for truth to dispel fiction, and reason to scout organic miracle, why should we decline to look into an alleged Shakespearean myth simply because it happens to be a little tardy in coming to the surface?

But, most of all, it is to be remembered that it is, practically, only our own century that has comprehended the masterliness and matchlessness of the "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," and the rest of those transcripts of nature, the prophetic insight of whose author "spanned the ages that were to roll up after him, mastered the highest wave of modern learning and discovery, and touched the heart of all time, not through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting mankind up ont of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity; who so wrote that to his all-seeing vision schools and libraries, sciences and philosophies, were unnecessary, because his own marvelous intuition had grasped all the past and seen through all his present and all his future, and because, before his superhuman power, time and space had vanished and disappeared." * The age for which the dramas were written had not come, in that Elizabethan era.

* Jean Paul Frederich Richter. deed, why our question
did not arise sooner. Nobody asked, "Who wrote Shakespeare?"
because nobody seemed to consider "Shakespeare" as any thing
worth speculating about. Let us pause right here to
demonstrate this.

The tongues of the actors were tied, the ears of the audience were deaf to syllables whose burden was for the centuries that were to come after. The time for the question, "Who wrote them?" was not yet. For two hundred years more—from the day of William Shakespeare's death down to years within the memory of those now living—down to at least the date of Lord Byron (who admits that it is the perfectly correct thing to call Shakespeare "god-like," "mighty," and the like, but very unfashionable to read him),—we may ransack the records of scholarship and criticism, and unearth scarcely a hint of what is now their every-where conceded superiority, to say nothing of their immortality. In short, we can not rise from such a search without understanding, very clearly in Fuller, in 1622, chronicles that William Shakespeare's "genius was jocular," his comedies merry, and his tragedies wonderful; his wit quick, but that his learning was very little. Evelyn notes that, in 1661, he saw "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," played: "but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since His Majesty has been so long abroad." * Pepys, his contemporary, says that the "'Midsummer-Night's Dream' was the most insipid, ridiculous play he had ever seen.... and, but having lately read the 'Adventures of Five Hours,' 'Othello' seemed a mean thing," though he liked Davenant's opera of "Macbeth," with its music and dancing. ** When spending some money in books he looks over Shakespeare, but chooses "'Hudibras,' the book now in the greatest fashion for drollery," instead. It is doubtful if Milton ever read the Shakespearean plays, in spite of the eloquent verses, "What needs my Shakespeare," etc.; since, in "L'Allegro," he speaks of his (Shakespeare's) "native wood-notes wild." ***

* Amenities of Authors—Shakespeare," p. 210.
** Ibid., p. 211.
*** Dr. Maginn, in his Shakespearean papers ("Learning of
Shakespeare"), endeavors to explain what Milton meant by
"native wood-notes wild."

Surely if there is any thing in letters that is not "native wood-notes," it is the stately Shakespearean verse, full of camps and courts, but very rarely of woodlands and pastures; besides, whatever Milton might say of the book called "Shakespeare" in poetry—like Ben Jon-son—he showed unmitigated contempt for its writer in prose: about the worst thing he could say about his king in "The Iconoclast," was that Charles I. kept an edition of Shakespeare for his closet companion. * "Other stuff of this sort," cries the blind poet, "may be read throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the poet used much license in departing from the truth of history." **

In 1681, one Nahum Tate, supposed to be a poet (a delusion so widespread that he was actually created "poet laureate") stumbled upon "a thing called Lear," assigned to one William Shakespeare, and, after much labor, congratulated himself upon having "been able to make a play out of it." ***

* "Amenities of Authors—Shakespeare," vol. ii, p. 208.
Ibid., p. 209, note.
** It is fair to say that "stuff" may only have meant
"matter," but it is indisputable that the passage was meant
as a slur on one who would read "Shakespeare."
*** The "play" he did make out of it is to be found in W.
H. Smith's "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 129. so meanly
written that the comedy neither caused your mirth nor the
serious part your concernment....

John Dryden, in or about 1700, in his "Defence of the Epilogue," a postscript to his tragedy "The Conquest of Granada," says: "Let any man who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; and yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven." He denounces "the lameness of their plots," made up of some "ridiculous incoherent story,... either grounded on impossibilities, or, at least, he writes, in many places, below the dullest writers of our own or any precedent age." Of the audiences who could tolerate such matter, he says: "They knew no better, and therefore were satisfied with what they brought. Those who call theirs the 'Golden Age of Poetry,' have only this reason for it: that they were then content with acorns before they knew the use of bread," etc. * To show the world how William Shakespeare should have written, Mr. Dryden publishes his own improved version of "Troilus and Cressida," "with an abjectly fulsome dedication to the Earl of Sunderland, and a Preface," ** in which he is obliging enough to say that the style of Shakespeare being "so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure;" that, though "the author seems to have began it with some fire, the characters of 'Pandarus' and 'Troilus' are promising enough, but, as if he grew weary of his task, after an entrance or two, he lets 'em fall, and the latter part of the tragedy is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms. The chief persons who give name to the tragedy are left alive. 'Cressida' is left alive and is not punished."

* "Works," edited by Malone, vol. ii, p. 252.
** "Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late." Written
by John Dryden, servant to his Majesty, London (4to) printed
for Abel Small, at the Unicorn at the West End of St.
Paul's, and Jacob Tonson, at the Judge's Head, in Chancery
Lane, near Fleet street. 1679.

"I have undertaken to remove that heap of rubbish.... I new-modelled the plot; threw out many unnecessary persons, improved those characters which were begun and left unfinished,... made, with no small trouble, an order and connection of the scenes, and... so ordered them that there is a coherence of 'em with one another,... a due proportion of time allowed for every motion,... have refined the language, etc."

The same thing was done in 1672, by Ravenscroft, who produced an adaptation of "Titus Andronicus," and boasted "that none in all the author's works ever received greater alterations or additions; the language not only refined, but many scenes entirely new, besides most of the principal characters heightened, and the plot much increased." John Dennis, a critic of that day, declares that Shakespeare "knew nothing about the ancients, set all propriety at defiance,... was neither master of time enough to consider, correct, and polish what he had written,... his lines are utterly void of celestial fire," and his verses "frequently harsh and unmusical." He was, however, so interested in the erratic and friendless poet that he kindly altered "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and touched up "Coriolanus," which he brought out in 1720, under the title of "The Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Resentment." The play, however, did not prosper, and he attributed it to the fact that it was played on a Wednesday. Dean Swift, in his "The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris, concerning the Strange and Deplorable Frenzy of John Dennis," relates how the said Dennis, being in company with Lintot, the bookseller, and Shakespeare being mentioned as of a contrary opinion to Mr. Dennis, the latter "swore the said Shakespeare was a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which gave Mr. Lintot a very ill opinion of the said Shakespeare." Lord Shaftesbury complains, at about the same date, of Shakespeare's "rude and unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit." *

* Mr. De Quincy's painful effort to demonstrate that
neither Dryden nor Shaftesbury meant what he said is amusing
reading. See his "Shakespeare" in the "Encyclopaedia
Britannica." Also Knight, "Studies of Shakespeare," p. 510,
as to Dr. Johnson.

Thomas Rymer knows exactly how Othello, which he calls "a bloody farce, the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief," ought to have been done. In the first place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a-moor, and that the army should be insulted by his being a soldier. Of "Desdemona" he says: "There is nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen-maid—no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly." Speaking of expression, he writes that "in the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, I may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." He is indignant that the catastrophe of the play should turn on a handkerchief. He would have liked it to have been folded neatly on the bridal couch, and, when Othello was killing Desde-mona, "the fairy napkin might have started up to disarm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth. Then might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for dead; then might he, believing her dead, and touched with remorse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and truly represented in the theater. Then for the unraveling, of the plot, as they call it, never was old deputy recorder in a country town, with his spectacles on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so blundered and be doltified as is our poet to have a good riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. What can remain with the audience to carry home with them? How can it work but to delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt our appetite, and till our head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what all the parish clerks in London could ever pretend to?" He then hopes the audience will go to the play as they go to church, namely, "sit still, look on one another, make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they would a sermon." With regard to "Julius Cæsar," he is displeased that Shakespeare should have meddled with the Romans. He might be "familiar with Othello and Iago as his own natural acquaintances, but Cæsar and Brutus were above his conversation." To put them "in gulls' coats and make them Jack-puddens," is more than public decency should tolerate—in Mr. Rymer's eyes. Of the well-known scene between Brutus and Cassius, this critic remarks: "They are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. They are to play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reckoning." Rymer calls his book "A Short View of Tragedy, with Some Reflections on Shakespeare and Other Practitioners for the Stage." Hume thought that both Bacon and Shakespeare showed "a want of simplicity and purity of diction with defective taste and elegance," and that "a reasonable propriety of thoughts he (Shakespeare) can not at any time uphold." Voltaire thought the Shakespearean kings "not completely royal." Pope (who declared that Rymer, just quoted, was "a learned and strict critic"), to show that he was not insensible to the occasional merits of the plays, was good enough to distinguish, by inverted commas, such passages as he thought might be safely admired by the rest of mankind; while Richard Steele, in "The Tatler," * borrows the story of the "Taming of the Shrew," and narrates it as "an incident occurring in Lincolnshire," feeling, no doubt, that he did a good deed in rescuing whatever was worth preserving from the clutches of such obscure and obsolete literature!

And then came the period when scholars and men of taste were ravished with Addison's stilted rhymes, and the six-footed platitudes of Pope, and the sesquepedalian derivatives dealt out by old Samuel Johnson. The Shakespearean plays are pronounced by Mr. Addison ** "very faulty in hard metaphors and forced expressions," and he joins them with "Xat. Lee," as "instances of the false sublime."

* Vol. vi, No. 31. He complains, in number 42, that the
female characters in the play make "so small a figure."
** Spectator, 30; p. 235.

Samuel Johnson is reported as saying that William Shakespeare never wrote six consecutive lines (he subsequently made it seven) without "making an ass of himself," (in which speech he seems to have followed his namesake without the "h," old Ben, in the "Discoveries")—backing up his assertion with some very choice specimens of literary criticism. Let any one, interested enough in the matter to see for himself, take down Dr. Johnson's own edition of Shakespeare, and read his commentaries on the Shakespearean text. Let him turn, for example, to where he says of "Hamlet":

We must allow to the tragedy of "Hamlet" the praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous that the argument of the play would make a long tale. The scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity,... that includes judicious and instructive observations.... New characters appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth;... the catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the dagger and Laertes with the bowl.

Again, of "Macbeth":

This play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fiction, and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action, but it has no nice discriminations of character.... I know not whether it may not be said in defense of some parts which now seem improbable, that in Shakespeare's time it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions.

Again, of "Julius Cæsar":

Of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated. But I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc.

Was "Hamlet" a low comedy part, in the days when all England bowed at the feet of an unkempt and mannerless old man, awed by the brilliancy of his literary judgment? And did Hamlet's "pretended madness" cause "much mirth" to the age, or only to Samuel Johnson? People now-a-days do not sit and giggle over "the pretended madness of Hamlet." But, waiving these questions, let him turn to the "Rambler," * of this excellent lexicographer, and read him (patiently, if he can), citing the magnificent lines—

Come thick night

And pall thee in the dun nest smoke of hell;

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry "hold, hold!"

as an example of "poetry debased by mean expressions;" because "dun" is a "low" expression," seldom heard but in the stable;" "knife" an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employment; and asking "who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt peeping through the blanket of the dark!"

* No. 168.

Let the reader look on a little further, and find this fossil-scanning machine telling off the spondees and dactyls in the dramas (to ascertain if the cæsura was exactly in the middle) on his fingers and thumbs, and counting the unities up to three, to see if he could approve of what the ages after him were to worship! if, haply, this Shakespeare (although he might have devised a scheme to kill Laertes with the bowl and Hamlet with the dagger, or might have thrown a little more fire into the quarrel with Brutus and Cassius) could be admitted to sit at the feet of Addison, with his sleepy and dreary "Campaign;" or Pope, with his metrical proverbs about "Man;" or even the aforesaid Samuel Johnson himself, with his rhymed dictionaries about the "vanity of human wishes," and so on. Let him find the old lexicographer admitting, in his gracious condescension, that "The Tempest" "is sufficiently regular;" of "Measure for Measure" that "the unities are sufficiently preserved;" that the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was "well written;" that the style of the "Merchant of Venice" was "easy:" but that in "As you Like It" "an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson" is unhappily lost. The "Winter's Tale" is "entertaining;" in "King John" he finds "a pleasing interchange of incidents and characters," remarking that "the lady's grief is very affecting." Of "Troilus and Cressida" the old formalist says, that it "is one of the most correctly written of Shakespeare's plays;" of "Coriolanus," that it "is one of the most amusing." But, he says, that "Antony and Cleopatra" is "low" and "without any art of connection or care of disposition." he dismisses "Cymbeline" with the remark that he does not care "to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility; upon faults too evident for detection and too gross for aggravation." He is pleased to approve of "Romeo and Juliet," because "the incidents are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as tragedy requires" and, while on the whole, approving of "Othello," he can not help remarking that, "had the scene opened in Cyprus, and the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity." And so on every-where! Let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these mighty and deathless monographs to-day! Let him imagine a better illustration, if he can, of what our Johnson's friend Pope called—in long meter—"fools rushing; in where angels feared to tread!" And let him confess to himself that these were not the times nor the men to raise the question.

Is it not the fact that, until our own century, the eyes of the world were darkened, and men saw in these Shakespearean dramas only such stage plays, satisfying the acting necessities of almost any theater, as might have been written—not by "the soul" of any age; not by a man "myriad-minded" not by a "morning-star of song," or a "dear son of memory," but—by a clever playwright? The sort of days when an Addison could have been pensioned for his dreary and innocent "Campaign," and a Mr. Pye made poet-laureate of the laud where an unknown pen had once written "Hamlet were, consequently, not the days for the discovery with which this century has crowned itself—namely, the discovery that the great first of poets lived in the age when England and America were one world by themselves, and that they must now draw together again to search for the master "who came"—to use, with all reverence, the words of Judge Holmes—"upon our earth, knowing all past, all present, and all future, to be leader, guide, and second gospel of mankind." But the fullness of time has come, and we now know that, whoever was the poet that he "kept," he was of quite another kidney than the manager of the theater, "William Shakespeare, who employed him to write Plays, and who wrote Revelations and Gospels instead.

If we were interested to inquire what manner of man Mr. Manager Shakespeare was, we have only to look about us among the managers of theaters in this latter half of our nineteenth century. Let us take Mr. Wallack or Mr. Daly, both of whom arrange plays for the stages of their own theaters, for example; or, better yet, take Mr. Lion Boucieault, who is an actor as well as a manager, and is, moreover, as successful in his day as was William Shakespeare in his. Mr. Boucieault has, so far, produced about one hundred and thirty-seven successful plays. Mr. William Shakespeare produced about a hundred less. All of Mr. Boucicault's plays show that gentleman's skillful hand in cutting, expanding, arranging, and setting for the stage; and in the representation of them, Mr. Boucieault has himself often participated. In like manner, Mr. Shakespeare, the manager, we are told by tradition, often assisted at the representation of the dramas produced on his boards, playing the Ghost in "Hamlet," * and the King in "Henry VI," which indicate very readily that his place in the "stock" was that of a "walking (or utility) gentleman."

* And played it, it is thought by some, so wretchedly that
he made "the gods" hoot. At any rate, in a pamphlet
published by Lodge, in 1593, "Witt's Miserie and the World's
Madness; Discovering the Devil's Incarnate of this age," a
devil named "Hate-Vertue" is described as looking "as pale
as the vizard of the ghost, which cried so miserably at the
theatre like an oister-wife, 'Hamlet—Revenge.'" But perhaps
Shakespeare did not play the ghost that night. Shakespeare
also played "Old Knowell," Jonson's "Every Man in his
Humor," "Adam," in "As You Like It," and, according to
Jonson, apart in the latter's "Legacies," in 1603.

We happen to know, also, that Mr. Shakespeare rewrote for the stage what his unknown poet, poets, or friends composed, from the tolerable hearsay testimony of his fellow actor, Ben Jonson, who tells us that he remembers to have heard the players say that the stage copies of the plays were written in Shakespeare's autograph, and were all the more available on that account, because he (Shakespeare), was a good penman, in that "whatever he penned, he never blotted line." * Mr. Boucicault, while claiming the full credit to which he is entitled, is quite too clever, as well as too conscientious to set up for an original author or a poet, as well as a playwright. Neither does Shakespeare (as we have already said), anywhere appear to have ever claimed to be a poet, or even to have taken to himself—what we may, however, venture to ascribe to him—the merit of the stage-setting of the dramatic works, which, having been played at his theater, we collectively call the "Shakespearean plays" to-day. Why, then, to begin with, should we not conceive of Mr. Manager Shakespeare discharging the same duties as Mr. Wal-lack, Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault? as very much—from the necessities of his vocation—the same sort of man as either of them?

* Post, part III, the Jonsonian Testimony.

There is scarcely any evidence either way; but the fact that the actors were in the habit of receiving their fair copy of these plays from the manager's—William Shakespeare's—own hand, seems to make it evident that he did not originally compose them. Indeed, if Shakespeare had been their author, well-to-do and bustling manager as he was, he would probably have intrusted their transcription to some subordinate or supernumerary; or, better yet, would have kept a playwright of experience to set his compositions for the stage, to put in the necessary localisms, "gags," and allusions to catch the ear of the penny seats. Such a division of labor is imperative to-day, and was imperative then—or at least to suppose that it was not, is to suppose that of his dozen or so of co-managers, William Shakespeare was the one who did all the work, while the others looked on.

But, it is surmised that Shakespeare was his own playwright; took the dramas and rewrote them for the actors; he inserted the requisite business, the exits, and entrances, and—when necessary—suited the reading to the actor who was to pronounce the dialogue, according as he happened to be fat or lean. *

* It may be noted that the line, "He's fat and scant of
breath," does not occur in the early and imperfect edition
of "Hamlet" of 1603. Was it added to suit Burbadge? And was
there a further change made also to suit Mr. Burbadge, the
leading tragedian of the time? In the edition of 1603, the
grave-digger says of Yorick's skull:
Looke you, here's a skull hath bin here this dozen year,
Let me see, ever since our last King Hamlet
Slew Fortenbrasse in combat, young Hamlet's father,
He that's mad.
But in all subsequent editions, the grave-digger says:
"Here's a skull now; this skull has lain i' the earth three
and twenty years." The effect of this alteration is to add
considerably to Hamlet's age. "Alas, poor Yorick!" he says,
"I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand
times; and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My
gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed,
I know not how oft," etc. How old, then, was Hamlet when
Yorick died? But Hamlet's age is even more distinctly fixed
by other lines which do not occur in the early edition of
1603:
Hamlet.—How long hast thou been a grave-maker?
First Clown.—Of all the days of the year, I came to 't that
day that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortenbras.
Hamlet.—How long is that since?
First Clown.—Can not tell that? Every fool can tell that;
it was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is
mad and sent to England.
And presently he adds: I have been sexton here, man and boy,
thirty years.
Mr. Marshall writes: "It would appear that Shakespeare added
these details, which tend to prove Hamlet to have been
thirty years old, for much the same reason as he inserted
the line, 'He's fat and scant of breath,' namely, in order
to render Hamlet's age and personal appearance more in
accordance with those of the great actor, Burbadge, who
personated him." The edition of 1603 is generally accounted
a piratical copy of the first sketch of the play.—All the
Year Found.

Such was the employment which fell to the part of William Shakespeare, in the division of labor among the management in which he was a partner, and the resulting manuscript was what Ben Jonson's friends told him of. For nobody, we fancy, quite supposes that the poet, whoever he was, produced "Hamlet" one evening, "Macbeth" on another, and "Julius Cæsar" on another, without blotting or erasing, changing, pruning or tiling a line, and then handed his original drafts to the players next morning to learn their parts from! This is not the way that poems are written (nor, we may add, the way theaters are managed). The greater the geniuses, the more they blotch and blot and dash their pens over the paper when the frenzy is in possession of them. And besides, the fact that there exist to-day, and always have existed, numerous and diverse readings of the Shakespearean text, does very clearly show that their author or authors did, at different times, vary and alter the construction of the text as taste or fancy dictated, and, therefore, that the manuscripts Ben Jonson's friends saw and told him of (and Heminges & Condell, as far as their testimony is of any value, confirm Jonson, for they assert that what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have received from him "scarce a blot in his papers", were the acting copies, and not the original manuscripts of the Shakespearean plays.

With the exception of Ben Jonson (to whose panegyric we devote a chapter in its place further on), the contemporaries of William Shakespeare, who celebrated his death in verse, nowhere assert him to have been the myriad-minded Oceanic (to use Coleridge's adjectives) genius which we conceive him now-a-days—which he must have been to have written the works now assigned to him. Let any one doubting this statement open the pages of Dr. Ingleby's "Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse," a work claimed by its compiler to be inclusive of every allusion to, comment or criticism on Shakespeare, which Dr. Ingleby has been able to unearth in print, dating anywhere within one hundred years of Shakespeare's death. We have industriously turned every page of this work, and will submit to any other who will do the same, the question whether it contains a line which exhibits William Shakespeare as any other than a wit, a successful actor, a poet of the day, a genial and generous friend, a writer of plays, or whether—when eulogistic of the plays called his seven years after his death (a very different list, by the way, than the one assigned him during his life), rather than biographical as to the man, they are of any more value as evidence than Gray's or Milton's magnificent apostrophes to a genius with whom their only familiarity was through report, rumor, or impression derived from the ever immortal works. For, like Gray, Coleridge, Emerson—all that John Milton knew about William Shakespeare was pure hearsay, derived from local report or perusal of the Shakespearean plays ("a book invalued," he calls them). Even if we were called upon to do so, we could hardly conceive Milton—a Puritan, and a blind Puritan at that—as much of a play-goer or boon companion of actors and managers. But we are not called upon to imagine any thing of the sort; for, as a matter of fact, John Milton was exactly seven years and four months old when William Shakespeare died. And so, what is called "the Milton testimony," upon examination, proves to be no testimony at all, but only hearsay—venerable, perhaps—but hearsay, nevertheless; * as utterly immaterial as his "Marbling his native wood notes wild"—a line that might be, not inaptly, applied to Robert Burns, but which suggests almost any thing except the stately and splendid pages of the Shakespearean opera—to which we have before alluded as justifying us, indeed, in wondering if the Puritan poet had ever gone so far, before formulating his opinion, as to open the book assigned to the Shakespeare he wrote of.

* Milton was the enemy of all the ilk. "This would make them
soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rimers
and playwriters be," he says in his essays "of Education,"
in 1634.

And so, in the first place, there was no great call or occasion for discussion as to the authorship of the Shakespearean dramas in the days when they first began to be known by the public; and, as for Mr. Manager Shakespeare's friends, and the actors of his company, they testified to what they had heard, and, if they knew any thing to the contrary, they kept it to themselves. If his friends, jealous of his reputation, they were not solicitous of heralding him a fraud; and if the "stock" upon his pay-roll, they held their bread at his hand, and were not eager to offend him. If—as we shall notice further on—a wise few did suspect the harmless imposition, either they had grounds for not mentioning it, or there were reasons why people did not credit them. And so, in the second place, the times were not ripe for the truth to be known, because there was nobody who cared about knowing it, and nobody to whom it could be a revelation.

To suppose that William Shakespeare wrote the plays which we call his, is to suppose that a miracle was vouchsafed to the race of man in London in the course of certain years of the reign of Elizabeth. If, however, instead of probing for miracles, we come to consider that men and managers and theaters in the age of Elizabeth were very much the same sort of creatures and places that we find them now; that, among the habitues of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in that reign, were certain young gentlemen of abundant leisure and elegant education who admitted managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange for the entre of the green-room; and that managers in those days as in these, were always on the alert for novelties, and drew their material—in the crude, if necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they were so fortunate—from wherever they could find it; if, in short, we find that among the curled darlings who frequented Master William Shakespeare's side doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, at least one ready writer who was so placed as to be eager to write anonymously for bread (and who, moreover, had access to the otherwise sealed and occult knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the giants of his day—to say nothing of the theater-managers—did not and could not dream)—if, we say, we consider all this, we need pin our faith to no miracles, but expect only the ordinary course of human events.

If William Shakespeare were an unknown quantity, like Homer, to be estimated only by certain masterly works assigned to him, this answer might, indeed, be different. For, just as Homer's writings are so magnificent as to justify ascribing to him—so far as mere power to produce them goes—any other contemporary literature to be discovered, so the works attributed to William Shakespeare are splendid enough to safely credit him with the compositions of any body else; of even so great a man as Bacon, for example. But William Shakespeare is no unknown quantity—except that we lose sight of him for the few years between his leaving Stratford, and (as part proprietor of the largest London play-house) accepting Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in His Humour"—we know pretty well all about him. There are half a hundred biographies extant—new ones being written every day—and any one of them may be consulted as to the manner of life William Shakespeare's was. The breakneck marriage bond, which waived all formalities, the consent of any body's parents, justification of sureties, three askings of banns, etc., so he could only be fast married; the beer-bouts, youthful and harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, Sir Thomas Lucy thought, to justify instructing a Warwick attorney to prosecute the lad before the law: all these are matter of record, amply photographing for-us William Shakespeare in Stratford. Then the hiatus—and this same lad appears, prosperous, and in the great town; sending home money to his impoverished family—part proprietor of a theater, purchasing freehold estates in London—a grant of arms for his father—the great house in his native village for his own homestead; investing in the tithings of his county, and beginning a chancery suit to recover lands which his father—in his poverty—had allowed himself to forfeit by foreclosure. Surely we will not go far astray if we set it down that some pretty hard work at what this rising lad found to do in London, and learned to do best, has filled up those unrecorded years! Was all this money made by writing plays for the Globe, or by working on Bacon's Novum Organum, or by other literary labor? Was that the hard work William Shakespeare found to do, and laid up money at, in the interval between his last crop of wild oats at Stratford, and the condescension of the man of affairs in London? If it were, it is curious that no rumor or tradition of it comes from Stratford. Nothing travels quite so fast in rural neighborhoods as a reputation for "book learning," while the local worthy, who has actually written a book of his own, is a landmark in his vicinage. Now, William Shakespeare died one of the richest men—if not the richest—in all Stratford. It is strange that the gossip and goodwives, who so loaded themselves with his boyish freaks and frailties, should never have troubled themselves about his manly pursuits and accomplishments. The only English compositions he is credited within Stratford gossip are one or two excessively conventional epitaphs on Elias James, John a Coombe, and others—the latter of which is only to be appreciated by a familiarity with Warwickshire patois. He sprang from a family so illiterate that they could not write their own name; and, moreover, lived and died utterly indifferent as to how anybody else wrote it—whether with an "x" or a "g," a "c" or a "ks." And as he found them, so he left them. For, although William Shakespeare enjoyed an income of $25,000 (present value of money) at his death, he never had his own children taught to read and write, and his daughter Judith signed her mark to her marriage bond.

That the rustic youth, whom local traditions variously represent as a scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's apprentice, and the like, but never as a school-boy, a student, a reader, a poet—as ever having been seen with a hook in his hand—driven by poverty to shift for himself, should at once (for the dates, as variously given by Mr. Malone and Mr. Grant White, are exceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman about town, Southampton, is almost incredible. But, it is no more incredible than that this ill-assorted friendship can be accounted for by the lad's superhuman literary talents. Southampton never was suspected, during his lifetime, of a devotion to literature, much less of an admiration for letters so rapt as to make him forget the gulf between his nobility and that of a peasant lad—who (even if we disbelieve his earliest biographers as to the holding horses and carrying links) must necessarily have been employed in the humblest pursuits at the outset of his London career. But yet, according to the various "chronologies" (which, in the endeavor to crowd these works into William Shakespeare's short life, so as to tally with the dates—when known—of their production, only vary inconsiderably after all), the Stratford boy hardly puts in his appearance in London before he presents Lord Southampton, as the "first heir of his invention," with—if not the most mature—at least the most carefully polished production that William Shakespeare's name was ever signed to; and, moreover, as polished, elegant, and sumptuous a piece of rhetoric as English letters has ever produced down to this very day.

Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all the Latin and Greek extant; this poem, dedicated to Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if not a miracle. The genius of Robert Burns found its expression in the idiom of his father and his mother, in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he was born. When he came to London, and tried to warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire; without schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace of that Warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke—the language of his own fireside! As a matter of fact, English, was a much rarer accomplishment in the days when Thomas Jenkins and Thomas Hunt were masters of Stratford Grammar School, than Greek and Latin. Children, in those days, were put at their hic, hæc, hoc at an age when we send them to kindergartens. But no master dreamed of drilling them in their own vernacular. Admitting William Shakespeare to have been born a poet, he must also have been born a master of the arbitrary rules of English rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and prosody, as well, to have written that one poem. But, say the Shakespeareans, even if William did not study English at the Stratford Grammar School, or read it in those crowded days when earning his bread by menial employment in stranger London, he had an opportunity to study Lyly, Nash, Greene, Peele, Chettle, and the rest. But the Shakespearean vocabulary—like the whole canon of the plays—is a thing apart—unborrowed, unimitated, and unlearned from any of these. These were satisfied to write for the stages of the barns called "play-houses," and for their audiences, which—according to all reports—were decidedly indifferent as to scholarship. These might introduce a Frenchman, but they never troubled themselves to make him French; or a Scotchman, but they never stopped to make him Scotch. But even if William Shakespeare, in the immersions of the management, was author of that intellectual Dane, over-refined in a German university of metaphysics, he called Hamlet; or of that crafty Italian, named Iago; or of that Roman iceberg, Brutus—it is quite as difficult to conceive either the skylarking boy in Stratford, where there were no libraries, and his father too poor (not daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest for debt) to buy books; or the self-made man toiling from the bottom rung of poverty to the top of fortune—with leisure to study the characteristics of race and nationality—as acquiring all the grandeur of diction, insight into the human heart (which, at least, is not guess-work), knowledge and philosophy, we call his to-day. Even if we go no further than the "Venus and Adonis"—appearing at a date preluding a drill that, for the sake of the argument, we might even assume—how could that poem have been written by the peasant who only knew his native dialect, or the penniless lad earning his bread in stranger London, at the first shift at hand—with no entre to the great libraries, and no leisure to use one if he had it? Ben Jonson spent some years at Cambridge before he was taken away and set at brickmaking—he is said to have been a very studious brickmaker, working, according to Fuller, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other. As to his career as a soldier—a soldier, when not actually in the field or on the march, may find considerable opportunity for rumination; and, when lying in jail, he would certainly have ample leisure for his Greek and Roman. But Jonson wrote for the Elizabethan theaters; he lived and died hungry and poor, a borrower, over his ears in debt to the last. William Shakespeare, his contemporary, loaned Ben Jonson money; rose rapidly from penury to affluence; made his father rich, and a gentleman with an escutcheon; bought himself the most splendid house in Stratford (so splendid as to be deemed worthy a royal residence by Queen Henrietta); invested in outlying lands; speculated in tithes, and lived, until his death—according to Dominie Ward—at the rate of $25,000 a year. We are familiar enough with these stories of self-made men (so-called) in our daily newspapers. Let those who will, believe that William Shakespeare accumulated this splendid fortune, not by the successful management of the best appointed and affected theater in London, but by writing plays for its stage! and—at the same time—conceived, evolved from his own inner consciousness, all the learning which other playwrights (like Ben Jonson and the rest) were obliged—like ordinary mortals—to get out of books!

The only efforts made to account for this wealth flowing into the coffers of a poet, have been mere surmises, like the story of Southampton's munificence, and of the royal favor of King James, who wrote the manager a letter with his own hand. But neither of these stories happens to be contemporary with William Shakespeare himself. The first was an afterthought of Davenant, who was ten years old when Shakespeare died; and who is not accepted as an authority, even as to his own pedigree, by the very commentators who most eagerly seize upon and swear to his Southampton fiction. The other is not even hearsay, but the bold invention of Bernard Lintot, who published an edition of the plays in 1710. Doubtless, as has been the ambition of all the commentators, before Mr. Collier and since, Lintot was bound to be at least one fact ahead of his rivals, even if he had to invent that fact himself, he vouchsafes, as authority for this tale of the royal letter, however, the statement of "a credible person now living," who saw the letter itself in the possession of Davenant: in the teeth of the certainty that, had Davenant ever possessed such a letter, Davenant would have taken good care that the world should never hear the last of it: and coyly preserves the incognito of the "credible person," whom, however, Oldys conjectures must have been, if any body, the Duke of Buckingham. But, miracles aside, to consider William Shakespeare as the author of the Shakespearean drama—for that he has christened it, and that it will go forever by his name, we concede—involves us in certain difficulties that seem altogether insurmountable. In the first place, scholars and thinkers, whose hearts have been open to the matchless message of the Shakespearean text, and who found themselves drawn to conclude that such a man as William Shakespeare once lived, were amazed to discover that the very evidence which forced them to that conclusion, also proved conclusively that that individual could not have written the dramas since known by his name. Coleridge, Schlegel, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Hallam, Delia Bacon, Gervinus, and, doubtless, many more, clearly saw that the real Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare we have described. "In spite of all the biographies, 'ask your own hearts,' says Coleridge—'ask your own common sense to conceive the possibility of this man being... the anomalous, the wild, the irregular genius of our daily criticism. What! are we to have miracles in sport? or (I speak reverently) does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?'"

"If there was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect," says Hallam—alluding to the fact that all the commentators told him of the man Shakespeare, inferred him as anything but the master he was cited—"there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to learn more." * **

* "Notes to Shakespeare's Works," iv., 56.—Holmes
"Authorship of Shakespeare," 598.
** "Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 26.

This evidence was of three sorts: 1. Official records and documents; 2. The testimony of contemporaries; and, 3. That general belief, reputation, and tradition, which, left to itself in the manner we have indicated, has grown into the presumption of nearly three hundred years. We will not recapitulate the well-thumbed records, nor recite the dog's-eared testimony, which together gave rise to the presumption. But the dilemma presented to the student was in this wise: By the parish records it appeared that a man child was christened in Stratford Church April 26th, (old style) 1564, by the name William. He was the son of one John Shakespeare, a worthy man, who lived by either, or all, the trades of butcher, wool-comber, or glover—three not incompatible pursuits variously assigned him—was, at different times, a man of some means, even of local importance, (becoming, on one occasion, even ale-taster for the town,) and, at his son's birth, owner in freehold of two plots of ground in Stratford village, on one of which plots a low-raftered house now stands, which has come to be a Mecca to which pilgrims from the whole world reverently repair. The next official record of the son so born to John Shakespeare is the marriage-bond to the Bishop of Worcester; enabling this son to wed one Anne Hathaway, his senior in years, which bond remains to this day on file in the office of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.

Later on, the son, having become a person of means, purchases for his father a grant of arms; and (the name being Shakespeare) the heralds allot him an escutcheon on which is represented a shaking spear (symbolically treated)—a device which, under the circumstances, did not tax the heralds' ingenuity, or commit them to any theory about ancestors at Hastings or among the Saracens. The increasing wealth of the son leaves its traces in the title-deeds to and records of purchase of freehold and leasehold possessions, of the investment in meadow-lands, and tithes, and of sundry law suits incidental to these. Local tradition—which in like cases is perforce admitted as evidence—supplements all this record, and, so far as it can, confirms it, until we have an all but complete biography.

This biography the world knows by heart. It does not esteem the boy William Shakespeare the less because he was a boy—because—in the age and period reserved for that crop—he sowed and garnered his "wild oats." It has reason to believe him to have been much more than a mere wayward youth. Aubrey ("old Aubrey," "arch-gossip Aubrey," the Shakespeareans call him, probably because he wrote his sketch fifty years after his subject's death, instead of two hundred and fifty), says that he was the village prodigy, that "he exercised his father's trade—but, when he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech," etc., etc. Nor is there anything in the record of his mature and latter years—of his investments in tithes, and messuages, and homesteads—of his foreclosures and suits for money loaned and malt delivered—of his begetting children and dying; leaving—still with finical detail and nice and exact economy—an elaborate testament, in which he disposes, item by item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down to the second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he tenderly bestows upon the wife of his youth and the mother of his children—any thing at which the world should sneer.

If he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he shows no especial anxiety that posterity shall hear of it. Besides such contracts and business papers as he must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the theaters, and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his name to nothing except a declaration of debt against a poor neighbor who is behind-hand with his account, footed at one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence, and a not over-creditable last Will and Testament. This is his own business, and who has any thing to say? But, when our biographers go a step further and demand that we shall accept this as the record of a demigod; of the creator of a "Hamlet" and an "Othello;" and this practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to London—worked himself up (as he must have worked himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater; and, in that business and calling earned money and kept it—as the identical man who singly and alone wrote the "Hamlet," the ".Julius Cæsar," the "Othello," and all the splendid pages of the Shakespearean drama—some of us have been heard to demur! The scholar's dilemma is how to reconcile the internal evidence of the plays, which is spread before them undimmed by age, with these records, which are as authentic and beyond question as the internal evidence itself. And, once stated, the dilemma of the scholar becomes the dilemma of the whole world. Let any one try to conceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employment to-day—when the theater is at its best, and half the world play-goers—precarious for capital and industry; but in those days an experiment, in every sense of the word), who succeeded by vigilance, exact accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in securing and saving not only a competency, but a fair fortune; in the mean time—while engaged in this engrossment of business—writing Isabella's magnificent appeal to the duke's deputy, Angelo; or Cardinal Wolsey's last soliloquy! Or conceive of the man who gave the wife of his youth an old bedstead, and sued a neighbor for malt delivered, penning Antony's oration above Cæsar, or the soliloquy of Macbeth debating the murder of Duncan, the invocation to sleep in "King Henry IV.," or the speech of Prospero, or the myriad sweet, or noble, or tender passages that nothing but a human heart could utter! Let him try to conceive this, we say, and his eyes will open to the absurdity of the belief that these lines were written by the lessee and joint-manager of a theater, and he will examine the evidence thereafter for corroboration, and not for conviction; satisfied in his own mind, at least, that no such phenomenon is reasonable, probable, or safe to have presented itself.

Then, last and greatest difficulty of all, is the Will. This is by far the completest and best authenticated record we have of the man William Shakespeare, testifying not only to his undoubtedly having lived, but to his character as a man; and—most important of all to our investigation—to his exact worldly condition. Here we have his own careful and ante-mortem schedule of his possessions, his chattels real and chattels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety bedstead under his roof. And we may be pretty sure that it is an accurate and exhaustive list. But if he were—as well as a late theater-manager and country gentleman—an author and the proprietor of dramas that had been produced and found valuable, how about these plays? Were they not of as much value, to say the least, as a damaged bedstead? Were they not, as a matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual source of his wealth? How does he dispose of them? Does our thrifty Shakespeare forget that he has written them? Is it not the fact, and is it not reason and common sense to conceive, that, not having written them, they have passed out of his possession along with the rest of his theatrical property, along with the theater whose copyrights they were, and into the hands of others? This is the greatest difficulty and stumbling-block for the Shakespeareans. If their hero had written these plays, of which the age of Elizabeth was so fond, and in whose production he had amassed a fortune—that he should have left a will, in items, in which absolutely no mention or hint of them whatever should be made, even their most zealous pundits can not step over, and so are scrupulous not to allude to it at all. This piece of evidence is unimpeachable and conclusive as to what worldly goods, chattels, chattel-interests, or things in action, William Shakespeare supposed that he would die possessed of. Tradition is gossip. Records are scant and niggardly. Contemporary testimony is conflicting and shallow, but here, attested in due and sacred form, clothed with the foreshadowed solemnity of another world, is the calm, deliberate, ante mortem statement of the man himself. We perceive what becomes of his secondhand bedstead. What becomes of his plays? Is it possible that, after all these years' experience of their value—in the disposition of a fortune of which they had been the source and foundation—he should have forgotten their very existence?

But if, diverging from the scanty records, we go to the testimony of contemporaries, what do we find there? Very little more of the man William Shakespeare, but precisely the same dilemma as to his alleged authorship of the plays. We find that the country lad William, the village prodigy with whom the gossips concerned themselves, was no milksop and no Joseph; that he was hail-fellow with his fellows of equal age; that he poached—shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned their owner when punished for the offense; went on drinking-bouts with his equals of the neighboring villages; and, finally—-just as any clever, country lad, who had made his fellows merry with mock eulogies over the calves he slaughtered might and probably would do to-day, and which is precisely what his earliest and, therefore, safest biographer, Howe, asserts that he did do—wound up with following a company of strolling players to the metropolis; where he began his prosperous career by holding gentlemen's horses at the theater door, while the gentlemen themselves went inside to witness the performance. We turn to the stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting, and the beer-drinking, with relief. It is pleasant to think that the pennywise old man was—at least in his youth—human. A little poaching and a little beer do nobody any harm, and it is, at all events, more cheerful reading than the record of a parsimonious freeholder taking the law of his poorer neighbor who defaults in the payment of a few shillings for a handful of malt. There is a village school in Stratford, and Mr. De-Quincy, and all his predecessors and successors who have preferred to construct pretty romances, and call them "lives of William Shakespeare," rather than to accept his known and recorded youth, boldly unite in making their hero attend its sessions. Their assertions are bravely seconded by the cicerones and local guides of Stratford, who, for a sixpence, will show you the identical desk which Shakespeare, the lad, occupied at that grammar school; and at Shottery, the same guides show us the chair in which our hero sat while courting Mistress Anne; just as, in Wittemburg, these same gentry point out the house where Hamlet lived when a student in the University there; or, in Scotland, the spot where Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu fought. But, William could not have attended this school very perseveringly, since he turns up in London at about the age that country lads first go to school. In London, he seems to have risen from nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of co-manager, along with a dozen others, of a theater. Here, just as young lords and swells take theater managers into their acquaintance to-day, he became intimate with greater men than himself, and so enlarged his skirts and his patronage, as it was the part of a thrifty man to do. At this time there were no circulating libraries in London, no libraries, accessible to the general public, of any sort, in fact; no booksellers at every corner, no magazines or reviews; no public educators, and no schools or colleges swarming with needy students; even the literature of the age was a bound-up book to all except professional readers. But, for all that, this William Shakes-peare—this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a term at Stratford school (admitting that he went where the romancers put him), cuts off to London at the heels of a crew of strolling players—who begins business for himself somewhere (perhaps as "link-boy" at a theater door, but we may be sure, at an humble end of some employment) and, by saving his pence, works up to be actually a part-proprietor in two theaters, and ultimately a rich man—begins to possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the Past which, even to-day, with all our libraries, lyceums, serials, and booksellers, it would need a lifetime to acquire.

He did the work of a lifetime. Like Mr. Stewart, in New York, he began penniless, and by vigilance, shrewdness, and economy, rose to respectability, affluence, and fortune.

But, as we could not imagine Mr. Stewart, gentleman as he was, writing all the tags and labels on his goods or making with his own hand every pen-stroke necessary in the carrying on of his immense trade; or poems or philosophical essays on the manufacture of the silks and linens and cottons he handled while slowly coining his fortune, and revolving poetry in his overworked brain while overseeing the business that was evolving that fortune; so do we fail to conceive of William Shakespeare doing all the pen-work on the dramas he coins his money by producing on his boards. How much less can we conceive of this man composing, not only poems of his own, but a Literature of his own—drawing his material from the classic writers (and notably from those Greek plays not at that time translated, and only accessible in the originals and in manuscript), from legal works, "caviare to the general;" from philosophical treatises not known to have been available even for reference; writing of the circulation of the blood in the human system—a fact not discovered until years after his own death! Let us find him, too, setting down, in writing, epitomes of all known wisdom; ascertaining the past, prophesying of the future; laying down off-hand the philosopher's, the lawyer's, the leech's, the soldier's, the scholar's craft and art, which only these themselves, by long years of study, might attain to—and all this while coining a fortune in the management of two theaters; to have solved, in short, the riddle of the sphinx and all the as yet unspinning whirligigs of time! Verily, a greater riddle than the sphinx's is this the riddle of the boy—Master Shakespeare. Thomas Chatterton found his wealth in a musty chest in an old muniment room. But here the chest and imminent room were not in existence till years after the boy Shakespeare has been a man, and traveled on to his grave. It is no solution of this riddle to say the lad was a genius, and that genius is that which soars, while education plods. *

* This class of evidence can not be recapitulated in the
space of a foot note, but the curious reader will do well to
refer to the chapter on the attainments of the author of
Shakespeare, at pages 56-65 Holmes's "Authorship of
Shakespeare," 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," allusion
is made to a custom obtaining among a certain undiscussable
class of Cyprians, which it is fair to say could not be
found mentioned in a dozen books of which we know the names
to-day, and which, from its very nature, is treated of in no
encyclopaedia or manual of information, or of popular
antiquities. 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 Shakespeare did live, 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 they did come 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, and Johannes 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 Medical
Knowledge. 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 Shakespeare
wrote 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 human
generation you shall find Many, nay, almost any ("The
Tempest," iii. 3),
are taken from the following:
In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of
the island, whose name was Publius; who received us, and
lodged us three days courteously,... who also honored us
with many honors; and when we departed, they laded us with
such things as were necessary.—(Acts xxviii. 7-10.
In which—unless it be in the fact that one of these
passages is in an act and the other in Acts—the reader must
find the parallelism for himself, without assistance from
Mr. Rees.
Shakespeare, Mr. Rees tells us, never neglected his Bible,
because (p. 28) "he was indebted to one whose love added a
bright charm to the holy passages she taught him to read and
study—to his mother was Shakespeare indebted for early
lessons of piety, and a reverence for a book from whose
passages in afterlife he wove himself a mantle of undying
fame!"

It is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his latest authority has truth for his color and testimony for 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 did this," and "it is likely he did that."

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's banks, 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.

PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY.

[Original]

UT, having taken the liberty of doubting whether—as matter of record—one William Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, sometime part-proprietor of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in London, could have very well been himself and the author of what are known popularly to-day as "the plays of Shakespeare," although there seemed to be ground for supposing that he might have cast them into something of the acting form they possess as preserved to us; and having come to the conclusion that—once this presumption is lifted—all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of the actual William Shakespeare is actually evidence cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the record: let us proceed to inquire whether—on review—a case rested on this evidence can be rebutted by those certain considerations and matters, by way of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to the surface whenever these waters are troubled—which whoever ventures to canvass the possibilities of an extra Shakesperean authorship of the dramas can so infallibly anticipate.

Granted that the Shakespeare Will does not prove the testator oblivious of his own copyrights or rights in the nature of copyrights; granted that the story of the deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely rejected by the Shakespereans, because conceived to be unworthy of the image they set up; granted that the fact of the circulation of the blood was a familiar fact in the days of William Shakespeare; that the "Menæchmi" of Plautus; that Iago's speech in "Othello" and the stanza of Berni's Orlando Innamorato were mere coincidences; or, better yet, admit that there was an English version of the Italian poem in Shakespeare's day *—admit, if required—that the "Hamlet" of Saxo, had been translated; that the law in "The

* When Iago utters the often quoted lines, "who steals my
purse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with little
variation, this stanza of the Orlando Innamorato of which
poem, to this day, there is no English version.
"Chi ruba un corno un cavallo, un anello E simil cose, ha
qualcha discrezione,
E patrebbe chimarsi ladroneello;
Ma quel ehe ruba la reputazione E de l'altrai patiehe si fa
bello,
Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone;
E tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno?"
As no English translation has been made of the Orlando
Innamorato, I must ask the reader who can not command the
original to be content with this rendering of the above
stanza:
"The man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring,
Or such a trifle, thieves with moderation,
And may be justly called a robberling;
But he who takes away a reputation And pranks in feathers
from another's wing His deed is robbery—assassination,
And merits punishment so much the greater As he to right and
truth is more a traitor."
Shakespeare, by R. G. White, vol. I, p. 23.
** Of Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian from whom the
plot of the "Hamlet" was taken, Whalley says, writing in
1748, that "no translation hath yet been made," must have
been read by the writer of "Hamlet" in the original. "An
Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare," etc. By Peter
Whalley, A. B.,
Fellow of St. John's College, London. Printed for J. Waller
at the Crown and Mitre, 1748—And see a suggestion that the
"Hamlet" came from Germany, in a pamphlet "On the Double
Personality of the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet of
Shakespeare. Its Relation to the German Hamlet." By Dr.
Latham, Royal Society of Literature Transactions. 1878.
Also, "Shakespeare in Germany. Alfred Cohn. Berlin and
London. 1874.

"Merchant of Venice" was "Venetian" instead of "crowner's quest" Jaw; admit that William Shakespeare "had the advantages in school of something more than the mere rudiments of learning;" admit that "his devotion to his family drove him forth from the rural seclusion of Stratford into the battle of the great world;" that the immortal gift of the second-best bed was, (we quote from Mr. Grant White, who is apparently willing to sacrifice anybody's reputation if he can thereby prove his William to have been a prodigy of virtue no less than of genius), explained by the fact that, at the time of the hurried marriage, a husband had to be provided for Mistress Hathaway without loss of time, and that little Susannah was as much of a surprise to William as to any body—in other words, that Anne was "no better than she should be," (oblivious of the fact that "the premature Susannah" was William Shakespeare's favorite child; that he, at least, never doubted her paternity, for he left her the bulk of his fortune in his will);or even that—according to Steevens, that testamentary second thought was actually "a mark of rare confidence and devotion;" granted all these—if they have anything to do with the question—and a dozen more, and we only attenuate, by the exact value of these, the mountain of probability, nothing less than the complete dilapidation and disappearance of which could leave room for substitution, In the stead of the probability, the possibility of such a suspension of the laws of nature as is required by the Shakespearean theorists. For, as we have said, the evidence is cumulative, and, therefore, no more to be waived or disposed of by doubts as to, or even the dispelment of, this or that or the other item—or disintegration of this or that or the other block—of evidence than the Coliseum has been wiped away and disposed of because its coping has crumbled, or because, for some centuries, the petty Roman princes built their palaces from its debris.

And we may as well remark that, just here, it is always in order to mention Archbishop Whately's "Historic Doubts." We wish some of the gentlemen who cite it so glibly, would take the trouble to read that clever little book. It is a logical, not a whimsical effort. It was intended by its author as an answer to "Hume's Essay on Miracles." Hume's argument being, in the opinion of the Archbishop, reducible to the proposition that miracles were impossible because they were improbable, his lordship wrote his little work to show that the history of Napoleon was actually most improbable, and, written of feigned characters, would read like the most extravagant fable. Surely it can not be necessary to reiterate the difference between the Archbishop's brochure and the proposition of "The Shakspearean Myth!" The one was the argument from improbability, applied to facts in order to show its dangerous and altogether vicious character. The other is the demonstration that history—that the record—when consulted, is directly fatal to a popular impression, and directly contradictory of a presumption, born of mere carelessness and accident, and allowed to gather weight by mere years and lapse of time.

But, for the sake of the argument, let us leave the discussion, for the moment, just where it stands, and take still bolder ground. Instead of sifting evidence and counting witnesses, let us assume that, when we painted William Shakspeare—who lived between the years 1564 and 1616—as an easy-going rural wag, with a rural wit, thereafter to be sharpened by catering to the "gods" of a city theater; a poacher on occasion, and scapegrace generally in his youth, who chose the life of "a vagabond by statute"—i. e. a strolling player—but who turned up in London, and found his way into more profitable connection with a permanent play-house; and, in his advancing years, became thrifty, finally sordid—we had only taken the liberty of conceiving, like every other who ever wrote on a Shakespearean theme, yet one more William Shakespeare; so that, instead of ten thousand William Shakespeares, no two of which were identical, there were now ten thousand and one! Admitting that, the next question would of necessity be—and such an investigation as the present must become utterly valueless if prosecuted with bias or with substitution of personal opinion for historical fact—whose William Shakespeare is probably most a likeness of the true William Shakespeare, who did wander from Stratford to London, who did sojourn there, and who did wander back again to Stratford, and there was gathered to his fathers, in the year 1616?

The popular William Shakespeare, built to fit the plays, is a masterless philosopher, a matchless poet, a student of Greek manuscripts and classic manners, of southern romance and northern sagas, a traveler and a citizen of the world, a scientist, a moralist, a master of statecraft, and skilled in all the graces and amenities of courtly society! Which of these two portraits is nearest to the life? Let us take an appeal to History.

There appears to be but one way to go about to discover; that way is to appeal to the truth of history; to go as nearly back as we can get to the lifetime of the actual man we are after, and inquire, wherever a trace of him can be touched, what manner of man he was. How, it happens that the very nearest we can come to an eye-witness as to the personnel of William Shakespeare is the Reverend John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, who wrote in that town a diary or memoranda, between February, 1662, and April, 1663, say forty-seven years after William Shakespeare's death. The following meager references to his late fellow-townsman are all (except an entry to the effect that he had two daughters, etc.; and another memorandum, "Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays, etc.,) thought worth while by Dominie Ward, viz:

"I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days he lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for that he had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year, as I have heard."

"Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merrie meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feaver there contracted."

Next, chronologically, we come to a gentleman named Aubrey. This Mr. Aubrey was himself a native of Warwickshire; was born in 1627—that is, eleven years after Shakespeare died. He entered gentleman commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, and so, presumably, was no Puritan. He was considerable of a scholar himself, and was esteemed, we are told, a Latin poet of no mean abilities, he was admitted a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1646; and so, a scholar, a poet, and a lawyer, might presumably know the difference between a wag and a genius. His manuscripts are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. He gives an account of his fellow-countyman, and, coming as it does, next to Dominie Ward's, nearer to the lifetime of William Shakespeare than any chronicle extant, (Malone admits it was not written later than 1680), we give it entire:

"Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. There was, at this time, another butcher's son in that towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young. This Wm. being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson never was a good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at that time was very lowe, and his plays took well. He was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a verie redie and pleasant smooth witt. The humour of the Constable in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' he happened to take at Gremlon, in Bucks, * which is the road from London to Stratford, and there was living that Constable, about 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that parish, and knew him.

* Aubrey says, in a note at this place: "I think it was a
midsummer's night that he happened there. But there is no
Constable in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'" Aubrey probably
intended reference to Dogberry, in the "Much Ado."

Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came. One time, as he was at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, an old rich usurer, was to be buryed; he makes there this extemporary epitaph:

Ten in the hundred the Devil allows,

But Combes will have twelve, he swears and vows.

If any one asks who lies in this tomb,

"Hoh," quoth the Devil, "'tis my John a Combe!"

He was wont to go to his native country once a year. I think I have been told that he left £200 or £300 a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell (who is counted the best comedian we have now) say that he had a most prodigious witt, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramaticall writers. He was wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life; says Ben Jonson, 'I wish he had blotted out a thousand.' His comedies will remain witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum: How our present writers reflect much upon particular persons and coxcombites that twenty years hence they will not be understood. Though, as Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little Latin and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been, in his younger days, a school-master in the country." *

* Aubrey's MSS. was called "Minutes of Lives," and was
addressed to his "worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquary
of Oxford." A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680,
accompanied it, in which Aubrey says: "'T is a task that I
never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon
me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general
acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century
of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up
and down in it, which hath made me so well known. Besides
the modern advantage of coffee-houses, before which men knew
not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or
societies, I might add that I come of a long-aevious race,
by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings of
time for several generations, which does reach high."

Imagine this as the record of a real "Shakespeare!" Could we imagine it as the record of a Milton? Let us conceive of a fellow-countryman of John Milton's, a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the author of "Paradise Lost;" "He was a goodish-looking sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secretary, or something to Cromwell, or some of his gang; had some trouble with his wife; was blind, as I have heard; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." And conceive of this, a few years after Milton's death being actually all the information accessible concerning him!

But to continue our search in the vicinage. On the 10th day of April, 1693 (thirteen years later), a visitor to Warwickshire wrote a letter to his cousin, describing, among other points of interest, the village and church of Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as the letter was discovered among the papers of a well-known nobleman, addressed to a person known to have lived, and indorsed by this latter, "From Mr. Dowdall; description of several places in Warwickshire"—as it bears on its face evidence of its genuineness, and, above all, mentions William Shakespeare, precisely in the same strain that it alludes to other worthies of the county—the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, etc.—it has always been accepted as authentic. After a description of the tomb and resting place of "our English tragedian, Mr. Shakespeare," the writer continues:

"The clerk that showed me this church was above eighty years old. * He says that this Shakespeare was formerly of this town, bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he ran from his master to London, and there was received into the play-house as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of his family, but the male line is extinguished. Not one, for fear of the curse abovesaid, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him."

* I.e. (more than "above" three years old when she died.)
This letter was among the papers of Lord DeClifford, which
were sold by auction—and was purchased by Mr. Rodd, a well-
known antiquarian bookseller, of Great Newport Street,
London, in 1834. Mr. Rodd printed it in pamphlet form in
1838 (at least the copy we have bears imprint of that year).
It is dated "Butler's Merston in Warwickshire, April, the
10th, 1693;" is signed, "Your very faithful kinsman and most
aff'te humble serv't till death, John at Stiles," and is
addressed, "These for Mr. Southwell, pr. serv't." This is
Mr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed in his
handwriting, "From Mr. Dowdall. Description of several
places in Warwickshire." Mr. Rodd says that the writer was
"an Inns'-of-Court-Man."

Next, chronologically, comes the contribution preserved to us by a Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of Sapperton, * in Gloucestershire. The Reverend William Fulman, who died in 1688, bequeathed certain of his biographical collections to this Reverend Davies. Davies died in 1708, leaving many annotations to his friend's manuscripts. Among these annotations he writes the following of William Shakespeare: "William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon, in Warwickshire, about 1563-4, much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and some times imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement. But his revenge was so great that he is his 'Justice Clodpate' ** and calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his name, bore three lowses rampant for his arms. From an actor he became a composer. He died April 23, 1616, aetat fifty-three, probably at Stratford—for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd.)

* His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Rev. William Fulman
(in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all in
the library of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford.
** Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in "Merry Wives
of Windsor." p. 520.

on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one who shall remove his bones. He died a papist. Whatever these may be worth—for, of course, like the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay—it is fair to include them in a collection of what the law calls "general reputation," "general report," or "common fame," and it is fair to offset this collection, at least, against that "common fame" and "common reputation" which has grown up during the last hundred years or so concerning William Shakespeare, which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. Much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with a tradition, related by one John Jordan, a townsman of Stratford, (who was known in the days of Malone and the Ireland forgeries as "the Stratford poet,") who claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent to a tradition of an alleged drinking-bout of Shakespeare and others (as representing Stratford) against the champions of Pebworth, Marston, Hillborough, Grafton, Wixford, Broom, and Bidford, in which William was so worsted that his legs refused to carry him farther homeward than a certain thorn-tree, thereafter to come in for its share of worshipful adoration from the Shakespearean sticklers. But the tradition is of no value except as additional testimony to the impression of his boon companions, associates, and contemporaries, that William Shakespeare was a jolly dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his wench—was almost any thing, in short, except the student of history, antiquity, and classic manners, no less than the scholar of his own times, that he has been created since by those who knew him not. Nothing travels faster in rural communities, as we have remarked, than a reputation for "book-learning;" let us continue our search for Shakespeare's.

When an interest in the Shakespearean drama began to assert itself, and people began to inquire who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At the outset they ran full against this village "ne'er-do-weel" and rustic wag, who worked down into a man of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and properties in London, and spent it royally in Stratford, drinking himself into his grave some seven years before the first collection of what the world in time was to credit him with, (but improved and enlarged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes-perean drama—first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie Ward may have been dazzled by the open house of the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes and outlying lands in Stratford, than by the "two plays a year," in and about the days when from four to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (according to Philip Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. The prodigality which dazed the simple Stratford dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something less than the income named; and such an income, too, would tally with William Shakespeare's own estimate of his worldly goods in his Will.

But the statement is the nearest and best evidence we have at hand, and so let it he accepted. And so, running up against this William Shakespeare, these commentators were obliged to stop. But there were the dramas, and there was the name "William Shakespeare" tacked to them; it was William Shakespeare they were searching for; and, since the William Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the one they wanted, they straightway began to construct one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history and local tradition only stimulated them, They must either confess that there was no such man, or make one; they preferred to make one.

First (for Rowe has only—in his eight honest pages of biographical notice—narrated certain gossip or facts, on the authority, perhaps, of Betterton, and does not claim to be an explorer, and Heminges and Condell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical allusion whatever) came Edmund Malone. With the nicest and most painstaking care he sifted every morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories, chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report—but in vain. The nearer he came to the Stratford "Shaughraun," the further away he got from a matchless poet and an all-mastering student. But, like those that were to come after him, instead of accepting the situation, and confessing the William Shakespeare who lived at Stratford not mentionable in the same breath with the producer of the august text which had inspired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at the stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the chroniclers who could so overlook prodigies. Far from concluding that—because he finds no such name as William Shakespeare in the national Walhalla—therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes, rather, that the Walhalla builders do not understand their business. He says:

"That almost a century should have elapsed from the time of his [William Shakespeare's] death, without a single attempt having been made to discover any circumstance which could throw a light on the history of his life or literary career,... are circumstances which can not be contemplated without astonishment. *... Sir William Dugdale, born in 1605, and educated at the school of Coventry, twenty miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, and whose work, 'The Antiquities of Warwickshire,' appeared in 1646, only thirty years after the death of our poet, we might have expected to give some curious memorials of his illustrious countryman. But he has not given us a single particular of his private life, contenting himself with a very slight mention of him in his account of the church and tombs of Stratford-upon-Avon.

* Malone's "Life:" "Plays and Poems," London, 1821, vol.
ii, p. 4.
* Ibid., p. 5.

The next biographical printed notice that I have found is in Fuller's 'Worthies,' folio, 1662; in 'Warwickshire,' page 116—where there is a short account of our poet, furnishing very little information concerning him. And again, neither Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 8vo, 1687; Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 1699—add anything to the meager accounts of Bug-dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was himself a native of Oxford, and was born but fourteen years after the death of our author, should not have collected any anecdotes of Shakespeare, has always appeared to me extraordinary. Though Shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the 'Athenæ Oxoniensis,' that diligent antiquary could easily have found a niche for his life as he has done for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of Davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for such an insertion."

The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching among the poets for one by the name of William Shakespeare, when there was no such name among the poets; he found him not, because he was not there. He might with as much propriety have searched for the name of Grimaldi in the Poets' Corner, or for Homer's on the books of the Worshipful Society of Patten-makers. To be sure, in writing up Stratford Church, Sir William Dugdale can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakespeare, any more than a writer who should set out to make a guide-book of Westminster Abbey could omit description of the magnificent tomb of John Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in that of the cicerone of the Abbey is the merit of the tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, and contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans would have us accept—would have us to swallow, or rather bolt, with our eyes shut—namely, the spectacle (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out among his fellows in a crowded city of some two hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were certain master spirits whose history we have intact to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of with no difficulty—without making any impression on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen years he is forgotten as if he had never been; and—except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village church, finds his name on a stone—passed beyond the memory of a man in less than the years of a babe! The blind old Homer at least was known as a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities which competed for the tradition of his birth when criticism revealed the merit of his song—though he might have begged his bread in their streets—at least did not take him for a tinker! It is not that the Shakespearean dramas were not recognized as immortal by the generation of their composer that is the miracle; neither were the songs of Homer. Perhaps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule than the exception. The miracle is, that in all the world of London and of England nobody knew that there was any Shakespeare, in the very days when the Drama we hold so priceless now was being publicly rendered in a play-house, and printed—as we shall come to consider further on—for the benefit of non-theater-goers!

But, it is said, the great fire of London intervened and burned up all the records—that is how we happen to have no records of the immortal Shakespeare. Then, again, there is the lapse of time—the ordinary wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes of the commercial center of the world. But how about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about Chaucer? Did the great fire of London affect his chronicle and his labors? The records of Horace, and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had more than a great fire of London to contend with. But they have survived the ruin of empires and the crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and might of the Shakespearean page, how greater than Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and Terence! If it all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not a riddle. It is the simplest of facts—the simple fact that the compilers of the Shakespearean pages worked anonymously, and concealed their identity so successfully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the research of this nineteenth century.

But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not deterred by his failure to find a poet of the name of Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that name there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds—and he has the credit of being the first to undertake the task—to construct an immortal bard. And a very pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too!—one that, with such minor variations as have, from time to time, suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative turn of mind, has been a standard immortal William all along. For they who seek will find. Had Mr. Malone searched for the Stratford "shaughraun," who ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a profession as any other, for the man makes the profession, and not the profession the man); who revisited his native haunts—on the lookout, not for king's and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes—but for clowns and drunkards and misers to dovetail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that passed under his adapting pen; * had he searched for the Stratford' butcher's son, who was the Stratford wag as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep without making a speech to his admiring fellow-villagers, here he was at his hand.

* It is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue
and choruses of the "Henry V." and "Henry VIII." are
apologies for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly
of the multitude they catered to. As to the internal
testimony of the authorship of these compositions, any
reader can judge for himself. We have expressed our own
opinion as being that William Shakespeare might be credited
with the characters of Nym and Bar-dolph; especially of the
Corporal, whose part consists of the phrase, "There's the
humor of it," intruded at each convenient interval; and it
is possible that Shakespeare, in fitting up the matter in
hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the
moment. There seems to be reason for believing that this
expression did happen to be a favorite at about that time;
and that Shakespeare was not the only one who rang the
changes on it as a season to stage material. Witness the
following:
Cob. Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as
another, sir!
Cash. Thy rheum, Cob? Thy humor, thy humor! Thou mistak'st.
Cob. Humor? Mack, I think it be so indeed! What is that
humor? Some rare thing, I warrant.
Cash. Marry, I tell thee, Cob, it is a gentlemanlike
monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time by
affectation, and fed by folly.
Cob. How must it be fed?
Cash. Oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. Didst thou
never hear that? It's a common phrase, "Feed thy humor."
Every Man in his Humor, iii. 4.
Couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable Chiefly to such
as had the happiness Daily to see how the poor innocent word
Was racked and tortured.
Every Man Out of his Humor.
"Humor" was, it would seem by this, the over-used and abused
word of these times; just as for example "awful" might be
said to be an over-used and abused word during our own
times.

But he was searching, not for a butcher's son, but for a poet—for a courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mold of form,

The observed of all observers"—

for "an amazing genius which could pervade all nature at a glance, and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared to be unknown;" * and his instinct should have assured him that.—however the works which such a genius had left behind him might travel under the name of the butcher's boy—it was not the pen of the butcher-boy that had written them; that the composer of pages "from which, were all the arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered," ** was no "jack-of-all-trades," and could not have lived and publicly presented his compositions nightly, year in and year out, in the glare of a metropolis crowded with courtiers, play-goers, and students—in the age and days of Bacon and Raleigh and Elizabeth—unknown save to a handful of his pot-fellows, and faded out of the world, unknown and unnoticed, fading from the memory of men, without the passing of an item in their mouths!

* Whalley.
** Ibid. A curious instance of this familiarity—to be
found in the Shakespearean dramas—with the least noticed
facts of science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped
the critics, we might allude to here: In one of Jules
Verne's realistic stories wherein he springs his romantic
catastrophes upon scientific phenomena—"Michael Strogoff"—
he makes Michael fall among enemies who sentence him to be
blinded. The blinding is to be accomplished with a heated
iron, but Michael sees his mother at his side, and, tears
suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is neutralized, and
fails to destroy the sight. So, in "King John," Act IV.,
Scene 1, Arthur says to Hubert:
The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,
Approaching near these eyes would drink my tears And quench
his fiery indignation.
This may be mere coincidence, but the dramas are crowded
with such coincidences, and for that, if for that only, are
marvelous. In either case, according to the Shakespereans,
we have only to go on, for the rest of time, in discovering
new truths in nature and facts in science, only to find that
the Stratford butcher's boy knew all about them three
hundred years ago—was familiar with all that we have yet to
learn, and that to his unlettered genius our wisdom was to
be sheer foolishness.

Most wonderful of all, this utter ignoring of William Shakespeare among the poets, if unjust, provoked no remonstrance from the immediate family or any kin of the Stratford lad. Either the Shakespeares, Ardens, and Hathaways were wonderfully destitute of family pride, or else the obscurity accorded their connection was perfectly just and proper. No voice of kin or affinity of William Shakespeare (at least we may say this with confidence) ever claimed immortality for him; although it can not be said that they had no opportunity, had they wished to do so, for William Shakespeare's granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was alive until 1670; his sister, Joan Hart, till 1646; and his daughters, Susannah Hall and Judith Queeny, until 1662. So that Dugdale, at least, if not Wood and the rest of them, would not have had to go far to confirm any rumors they might have stumbled upon as to the acquirements and accomplishments of the man Shakespeare; but it seems that not even the partiality of his own kin, nor family fame, nor pride of ancestry, ever conceived the idea of palming off their progenitor upon futurity as a giant of any build. If there is any exception to this statement, it would appear to be as follows:

I. It is recorded by Oldys that, one of his (Shakespeare's) "younger brothers, who lived to a great age, when questioned, in his last days, about William, said he could remember nothing of his performance but seeing him 'act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried to a table at which he was seated among some company, and one of them sang a song.'" Mr. Fullom has demonstrated from the Shakespeare family records, that Oldys must have been mistaken as to any brother of William Shakespeare's having furnished this reminiscence; but, admitting it as the statement of a surviving brother, it stands for what it is, and it certainly is not the record or tradition of one whose popular memory in men's minds was that of an immortal prodigy. *

* We take this quotation from Mr. Grant White's article on
Shakespeare in Appleton's "American Cyclopoedia." Mr.
White's admirable contributions to our Shakespearean
literature entitle his opinion to great weight in any mooted
question as to William Shakespeare; and we must confess
that, in some portions, his paper we have just mentioned
almost suggests him as agreeing with us as to his subject.
Mr. White says, in another place: "Young lawyers and poets
produced plays rapidly. Each theatrical company not only
'kept a poet,' but had three or four, in its pay. At the
time of his leaving Stratford the drama was rising rapidly
in favor with all classes in London, where actors were made
much of in a certain way. And where there was a constant
demand for new plays, ill-provided younger sons of the
gentry, and others who had been bred at the universities and
the inns-of-court, sought to mend their fortunes by
supplying this demand." And again: "We are tolerably well
informed by contemporary writers as to the performances of
the eminent actors of that time, but of Shakespeare's we
read nothing." Mr. White admits, a few lines below the
sentence just quoted, that Shakespeare's position in the
stock at the Blackfriars was "general utility." We should
rather call it, from the evidence, "first old man."

II. An epitaph was placed over the remains of Susannah Hall, presumably by one of the family, which read:

"Witty above her sex, but that's not all:

Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.

Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this

Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss."

Whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant that either William Shakespeare or Mistress Hall, or both, were "witty above their sex" or "wise to salvation," cannot, at this date, be determined: but it would seem that this is all the immediate family of William Shakespeare have ever contributed to our knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contemporaries.

But Mr. Malone—and, being the first investigator, he would, doubtless, have been followed, as he has been, whatever the result of his inquiries—Mr. Malone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to whose pages he had recourse, not only assumed all he could not find authority for, but undertook to tell us the precise dates at which his Stratford lad composed the plays themselves. Among other achievements he constructed an admirable "chronology" of the Shakespearean plays; which—with such fanciful variations as have been made to it from time to time since—is an authority with the Sliakespeareans even to this day. To be sure, Mr. Malone did not rely entirely upon external evidence for this apochrypha. He often appeals to the text, as when, for example, he settles the date at which the "Merchant of Venice" was composed—as 1594, because Portia says:

"Even as a flourish when true subjects bow

To a new crowned monarch,"

referring of course, says Mr. Malone, (and this guesswork he not only called "commentary," but has actually succeeded in making all his successor "commentators" accept him as final) to the coronation of Henry IV., of France! Again, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" he finds the words, (Act I, scene iii) "Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores."

"This shows," says Mr. Malone, "that this comedy must have been written after Sir Walter Raleigh's return from Guinia, in 1696. And so on."

We will not rehearse the scope and burden of Mr. Malone's painstaking and wonderful labors, but, from one instance of the credulity which, once it has overmastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and silly search, we can judge of the calm historical value of his "discoveries." In 1808, Mr. Malone published a pamphlet—"An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of 'The Tempest' were derived, and the Date ascertained." *

* By Edmond Malone. London: printed by C. & R. Baldwin,
Newbridge street, 1808.
The "Tempest" is the most purely fanciful and poetical of
the Shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to
show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it;
that it is all real: the "Magic Island," a real island; the
magician Prospero, a real portrait; the "monster," a real,
living curiosity, which happened to be on exhibition in
England in the days when the play either was written or
about to be written, (it makes no difference to these
gentlemen which) and the storm at sea—as if the brain which
conceived the play could not have conceived—what is not,
now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon thing in the world—
a storm at sea!—a real historical hurricane!
In 1839, the Reverend Joseph Hunter, following in the Malone
footsteps, published "A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin.
Date, etc., of Shakespeare's Tempest," in which the Magic
Island is the island of Lampedusa: first, because it is
uninhabited; secondly, because it is small; thirdly, because
it lies on the route between Naples and the coast of Africa,
so that had a prince been traveling from one to the other,
and wrecked on an island between, he could have been
conveniently wrecked on this one without going out of his
course; fourthly, because it bore the reputation (Mr. Hunter
does not say with whom) of being haunted; fifthly, because
there was a cell upon it, which Pros-pero might have found
most opportune for his ghostly residence; and sixthly, that
the island of Malta gets fire-wood from it. This last fact
being strongest in the way of proof, because we are told
that Prospero impressed Ferdinand into his service and kept
him piling logs of wood.
But it was reserved for Mr. Edward Dowden, in 1881, to
locate the island beyond the necessity of further
conjecture, and to give us accurate sailing directions for
reaching it. "Prospero's Island," he tells us, "was imagined
by Shakespeare as within two days' quick sail of Naples,"
for "Ariel is promised his freedom after two days" (Act I,
scene ii). "Why two days? The time of the entire action of
the Tempest is only three hours. What was to be the
employment of Ariel during two days? To make the winds and
seas favorable during the voyage." (Dowden's Shakespeare's
Mind and Art. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1881. p. 373.)

It seems that Mr. Malone finds reference to a hurricane that once dispersed a certain fleet of a certain nobleman, one Sir George Somers, in July, 1609, on a passage, with provisions, for the Virginia Colony; the above nobleman, and a Sir Thomas Gates, having been wrecked on the island of Bermuda. This discovery is warranty enough for Mr. Malone, and he goes on gravely to argue that William Shakespeare not only wrote his "Tempest" to commemorate this particular tempest—and, as will be seen by an examination of the premises, the relation between the occurrence and the play is confined merely to the word "tempest" and goes no further—but that he (Shakespeare) did not place the scene of his shipwreck on the Bermudas, "because he could spread a greater glamour over the whole by not alluding to so well-known islands as the Bermudas." Mr. Malone further remarks naively that, "without having read Tacitus, he (Shakespeare) well knew that 'omne ignotum pro magnifico est'!" Without pausing to wonder how Mr. Malone knew that Shakespeare of Stratford had never read Tacitus—(a slander, by the way, on the omniscient Shakespeare, too—the man who studied Plautus in Greek manuscript, the author of "Julius Cæsar"—that he had not read a simple Latin historian!)—or to dwell on the most marvelous coincidence between the wreck of Sir George Somers and that of Prince Ferdinand (the coincidence, according to Malone, being, that one was wrecked on the Bermuda and the other wasn't); or ask if a storm at sea was so rare an occurrence as to be easily identified; or to note that "the tempest" in the play of that name is an episode which covers only about a dozen lines of text, and which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the argument—without pausing for this, or to remark that Mil Malone might have taken to himself the 'omne ignotum pro magnifico est' of Tacitus more appositely than heap-plied it either to Sir George Somers or the Bermudas, had he reflected as generously as he took it for granted—it is as well to take our leave of Mr. Malone and his labors at this point, with a compliment to their zeal and impressment which must be withheld from their results. *

* DeQuincy accepts this "origin" "with great alacrity."

And the world would doubtless be as well off could we also here take leave of the rest of the Shakespeare-makers. But we are not allowed to do so. From the time of Malone onward, the Shakespeare-making, Shakespeare-mending, and Shakespeare-cobbling have gone on without relaxation. Each fresh rencontre with an emergency in the Shakespearean text has necessitated at least one and often several new Shakes-peares. And they have been prepared and forthcoming as fast as wanted. Was it found that the bard had, of all his worldly goods, left the wife of his bosom no recognition save the devise of a ramshackle old bedstead? A score of gentlemen hurried to the front to prove that, by law, history, logic, custom, and every thing else, in those days a "second-best bed" was really the most priceless of possessions; of fabulous value, and a fortune in itself; and that in no other way could her immortal husband have so testified his tender regard and appreciation of Mrs. Shakespeare—the sweet Ann Hathaway of old, who had thrown herself away on a scapegrace butcher's son! The fact (as it appears, on inspection of the instrument itself, to be) that Mrs. Shakespeare was not even alluded to in the first draft of the testament—her name and the complimentary devise of the precious husband's precious "second-best bed" having been written in as "a poet's after-thought," and not appearing in the first draft at all—does not affect their statements in the least! They have even gone so far as to ascertain that William was no truant lord to willingly desert his lonesome lady. According to the very latest authority we are able to cite, the fault of the separation was wholly her own. We are assured by a very recent explorer that Mrs. Shakespeare "did not accompany her husband to London, objecting to the noise and turmoil of that city." *

* "Shakespeare and his Contemporaries." By William Tegg, F.
R. H. S. London: William Tegg & Co., 1879. Chapter I.,
"Sketch of the Life of Shakespeare," p. 4. As every
circumstance connected with William Shakespeare and
Stratford is of interest in the connection, we may as well
note that, according to Mr. Grant White, when William
Shakespeare first went to London, he went into the office of
a cousin of his, who was an attorney in that city. Like Mr.
Tegg, Mr. White gives himself as an authority for this item.
See his "Shakespeare" in Johnston's Encyclopaedia.

Unless it be assumed, therefore, that investigation is reliable in proportion to the distance from its subject at which it works, it would seem to appear that, even if the William Shakespeare we have portrayed were our own creation, the creation is actually a nearer resemblance to the William Shakespeare known to those nearest to him in residence and time; than the inspired genius of the Shakespeareans, who, from Malone downward, have rejected every shred of fact they found at hand, and weaved, instead, their warp and woof of fiction (and that it is charming and absorbing fiction, we are eager to admit) around a vision of their own.

Nor have the Shakespeareans rested their labors here. Having created a Shakespeare to fit the plays, it was necessary to proceed to create a face to fit the Shakespeare, and a cranial development wherein might lodge and whence might spring the magic of the works he ought to have written. This may, very fairly, be called "the young ladies' argument." * "Look on his portrait," say the Shakespeareans; "look at that magnificent head!"—and they point to the Chandos portrait—"is not that the head of a genius?"

* So the young ladies of New York were of opinion that
Stokes should not be hanged for the murder of Fisk, "because
he was so awfully good-looking." inspiration—the ideal
of the artist, who conceives, in every case, his own
"Shakespeare;" and if we were called upon for proof that
"Shakespeare" is quite as much of an ideal to the most of us
as a "Hamlet," or a "Lear," we could cite, perhaps, nothing
more convincing than the latitude which is allowed to
artists with any of the three—"Shakespeare,"

"Was there ever such a head?" We should say, yes, there might have been such another head created, even admitting the Chandos portrait to be the very counterfeit head of William Shakespeare. But it does not appear, on taking the trouble to look into the matter, either that the Chandos picture is a portrait, or that—with one exception—any other of the pictures, casts, masks, busts, or statues of William Shakespeare are any thing but works of art, embodying the individual "Hamlet," or "Lear," and the elaborate criticism to which a new "portrait" of either of them is subjected—criticism, which, in the case of a portrait of William Shakespeare, in no case pretends to be historical, but is always romantic, or sentimental, or picturesque: as to the proper pose of a poet, or the correct attitude for a man receiving efflatus directly from the gods; never as to the stage manager of the Blackfriars, or the husband of Anne Hathaway, or the son of John Shakespeare, of Stratford.

It appears that, as a matter of fact, there never was but one picture of the Elizabethan Manager which ever enjoyed any thing in the semblance of a certification to its authenticity; and that certification was in the very unsatisfactory form of rhyme, in the shape of a set of verses said to have been written by Ben Jonson (and, as we propose to show, are quite as likely to have been placed under the particular picture without Jonson's authority as with it); while, that they were written to fit the particular picture in question (for they are in the form of a sort of apostrophe to some picture or portrait, and will be hereafter quoted), there seems to be no information sufficient to form a belief either way. If they were written for that particular picture, and if that particular picture is a speaking likeness, then the phrenological, or at least the physiognomical, argument must droop away and die; for the person represented has as stupefied, stultified, and insignificant a human countenance as was ever put upon an engraver's surface; and, as a matter of fact, no Shakespearean has yet been found to admit it as the image of his dream. But, of course, this is mere matter of personal opinion, and entitled to no weight whatever in the discussion. The question is—Is there any authentic portrait of William Shakespeare, as there is of Elizabeth, Bacon, Raleigh, Southampton, and other more or less prominent characters of the age in which William Shakespeare is known to have lived and died? Let us do the best we can toward investigating this question.

We have before us a volume, "An Enquiry into the Authenticity of Various Pictures and Prints, which, from the Decease of the Poet to our own Times, have been offered to the Public as Portraits of Shakespeare. Containing a Careful Examination of the Evidence on which they claim to be received; by which the Pretended Portraits have been rejected, the Genuine confirmed and established," etc., etc. By James Boaden, Esq. * We must content ourselves with a simple review of Mr. Boaden's labors. He was a friend and disciple of Malone's, and a Shakespearean; a believer in the poet; and he writes under the shadow of the mighty name—the shadow out from under which we of this age have stepped, and so become able to inspect, not only the facts of history uncurtained by that shadow, but the shadow itself.

* London. Printed for Robert Triphook, 23 Old Bond Street,
1824.

But we will take every one of Mr. Boaden's statements for granted, nevertheless, and draw our opinions, when we venture on any, from the portraits which he has given in his book. At least Mr. Boaden is not a "Baconian," and not a "Raleigh man," and, whenever he finds it necessary to speak of Shakespeare's history, he follows Malone's own version. For convenience, we will change Mr. Boaden's numeration of the "portraits," preserving the designation, however, which he assigns them.

No. 1. William Shakespeare dies in Stratford in 1616. In 1623, appears, on the title-page of Heminges and Condell's first folio of the plays, the portrait by Martin Droeshout. It is an engraving, and, Mr. Boaden believes, a good engraving, of some original picture from which it must have been taken; "for," he says, "there were good engravers in those days; for Chapman's 'Homer' was published in that year, with a very tine engraving of Chapman."

Under this engraving is printed a copy of Jonson's lines, as follows:

TO THE READER.

This figure that thou here seest put,

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;

Wherein the graver had a strife *

With nature to outdo the life:

O, could he but have drawn his wit

As well in brasse as he hath hit

His face: the print would then surpasse

All that was ever done in brasse.

But, since he can not, reader, look,

Not on his picture, but his booke.

* Look, when a painter would surpasse the life,
His art's with nature's handiwork at strife.
Venus and Adonis.

In this picture the head of the subject is represented as rising out of an horizontal plain of collar appalling to behold. The hair is straight, combed down the sides of the face and bunched over the ears; the forehead is disproportionately high; the top of the head bald; the face has the wooden expression familiar in the Scotchmen and Indians used as signs by tobacconists' shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare that would be but a sorry advertisement for the humblest establishment in that trade; and which we would be quite as unlikely to look for in the Stratford scapegrace as in the immortal bard of the Shakespeareans. It is of this picture that Boaden quotes somebody's remark that "it is lucky these metrical commendations are not required to be delivered on oath." And Steevens says, on the supposition that Ben Jonson, and not the engraver, put the copy of verses on the title-page beneath the effigy: "Ben Jonson might know little about art, care less about the resemblance, and, never having compared the engraving from the picture, have rested satisfied with the recollection that the original was a faithful resemblance; and that, no doubt, the engraver had achieved all that his art could perform." No. 2. The edition of the plays of 1690 is accompanied with what is known as "Marshall's picture;" which so closely follows, as to face, forehead, hair, beard, and collar, the engraving above described, as to suggest that it was a copy either of that engraving, or of the unknown picture from which that was taken. But, if a copy, it is certainly, from a pictorial point of view, an improvement. It looks much more like a man. The simpleton stare around the eyes is toned down, and the wooden aspect is modified into something like life. Marshall has taken liberties with the dress of No. 1, throwing in a sort of tunic over the left shoulder, hitching on an arm with a gauntleted hand grasping a sprig of laurel, etc., etc.

No. 3. The Felton Head.—"In the catalogue of the fourth exhibition and sale by private contract," says Boaden, (page 81),"at the European Museum, King Street, St. James Square, 1792." this picture was announced to the public in the following words:

"No. 359—a curious portrait of Shakespeare, painted in 1597."

On the 31st of May, 1792, a Mr. Felton bought it for five guineas, and, on requiring its credentials, received the following letter:

To Mr. S. Felton, Drayton, Shropshire—Sir: The head of Shakespeare was purchased out of an old house, known by the sign of "The Boar," in Eastcheap, London, where Shakespeare and his friends used to resort; and report says was painted by a player of that time, but whose name I have not been able to learn.

This letter was signed "J. Wilson," who was the conductor of the European Museum. This "J. Wilson" appears to have been the original Barnum. Although Prince Hal and Falstaff are said in the play to have affected "The Boar's head in Eastcheap," it does not appear, except from Mr. "J. Wilson," that "Shakespeare and his friends" ever resorted thither. There was an old inn in Eastcheap, but it was not called "The Boar's Head." There was an inn by that name, however, in Blackfriars, near the theater, from which the manager might have borrowed it. Then, again, Mr. "J. Wilson" seemed to have forgotten the great fire in London in 1666, which, "in a few hours, in a strong east wind, left the whole of Eastcheap a mass of smoking ruins, and the wretched inhabitants could think of saving nothing but their lives." Mr. Wilson subsequently amended his story so as to read that "it was found between four and five years ago at a broker's shop at the Minories by a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed," etc., etc. Mr. Steevens, who scouted the other pictures as spurious, accepted this picture, for a time, as the original of the engravings we have called No. 1 and No. 2; but finally, the whole thing exploded and was forgotten.

No. 4. The Bust in Stratford Church.—This was carved by nobody knows whom, from nobody knows what, nobody knows when; for the statement that it was cut by "Gerard Johnson," an Amsterdam "tomb-maker," is invariably accepted, but can be traced to no historical source. Says Boaden (page 81), "The performance is not too good for a native sculptor." In 1623 Leonard Digges alludes to it in a few verses well known. It seems to have been originally colored, but there is no testimony as to the original colors. In 1748, one hundred and twenty-five years after Digges, John Hall, a Stratford artist, "restored" it, painting the eyes a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. This was "a good enough" Shakespeare for all practical purposes for the next half-hundred years or so. But in 1793 came Mr. Malone. He caused the bust—in deference, probably, to a purer taste and a sense of churchly propriety—to be covered completely with a thick coat of white paint. *

* While these pages are going through the press (April,
1879), however, we find a statement that within a year or
two (and since the writer of these pages visited it) one
Simon Colling has applied a bath to the bust—removing
Malone's whitewash, and revealing the identical auburn hair
and hazel eyes which tradition had asserted to be
underneath.

From this bust, Mr. Boaden says, a Mr. Bullock once took a cast, which is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of the plays, in which case it is entitled "Cast of the head of William Shakespeare, taken after death," which may or may not—for Mr. Boaden can not tell us who this "Mr. Bullock" was—be the German "Death Mask" noticed further on, (at any rate the statement "taken after death"—"William Shakespeare being unquestionably dead at the time—is literally true.)

The bust represents its subject as possessing a magnificent head, admirably proportioned, with no protruding "bumps." The face is represented as breaking into a smile. According to this effigy, Shakespeare must have had an extraordinarily long upper lip, the distance between the base of the nose and the mouth being remarkably out of proportion with the other facial developments; there seems to be a little difficulty, too, about the chin, which is pulled out into what appears to be a sort of extra nose; but, nevertheless, the Stratford bust represents a fine, soldierly-looking man, with a fierce military mustache cocked up at the ends, and a goatee. If Ben Jonson—knowing his friend William Shakespeare to have been the martial and altogether elegant-looking gentleman the Stratford bust represents him—authorized the verses we have already quoted to be placed under the "Droe-shout engraving," it was a deliberate libel on his part, and as gross as it was deliberate, and only perhaps to be explained by Jonson's alleged secret enmity to, or jealousy of, William Shakespeare, his rival playwright, which we shall be called to examine at length further on. *

* Post Part III. The Jonsonian testimony.

No. 5. "The Chandos Portrait." This picture, so termed because once the property of the Duke of Chandos, is the best known of all the so-called portraits—being, in fact, the one from which the popular idea of Shakespeare is derived; therefore, when a man is said to resemble Shakespeare, it is meant to be conveyed that he bears a likeness to the Chandos picture. Mr. Malone announced that it was painted in 1607, but never gave any other authority than his own ipse dixit for the statement, not even taking the trouble to refer, like Mr. J. Wilson, to "a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed." Mr. Boaden lays (page 42) that he once saw it, and compared it "with what had been termed a fine copy, I think by Piamberg, and found it utterly unlike."

"Indeed," he continues, "I never saw any thing that resembled it." He also says (pages 41-42) that "the copies by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr. Humphrey were not only unlike the original, but were unlike each other, one being smiling and the other grave." That is to say, that not only have the romancers constructed "biographies," but the artists have kept up with them; and we may, every one of us, select our own Shakespeare to-day—poet or potman, scholar or clown, tall or short, fair or dark; we may each suit our own tastes with a Shakespeare to our liking. Mr. Boaden continues (page 49): "It" (the Chandos) "was very probably painted by Burbage," the great tragedian, who is known to have handled the pencil; it is said to have been the property of Joseph Taylor, our poet's Hamlet, who, dying about 1653, at the advanced age of seventy, left the picture by will to Davenant. At the death of Davenant in 1663, it was bought by Betterton, the actor, and when he died Mr. Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, gave Mrs. Barry, the actress, forty guineas for it. From Mr. Keck it passed to Mr. Nichol, of Southgate, whose daughter married the Marquis of Caernarvon.

Steevens, whom Boaden quotes (page 43), declined to be convinced by this genealogy, and said, "Gossip rumor had given out that Davenant was more than Shakespeare's godson. * What folly, therefore, to suppose that he should possess a genuine portrait of the poet, when his lawful daughters had not one! Mrs. Barry was an actress of acknowledged gallantry; as she received forty guineas for the picture, something more animated might have been included though not specified in the bargain," etc., etc. Steevens was fond of calling this picture "the Davenantico Bettertono-Barryan-Keckian-Hicolsian-Chandosian portrait."

* There is a story that once, on the occasion of one of
Shakespeare's visits to Stratford, a villager, meeting young
Davenant in the street, asked him where he was going. "To
the inn, to see my godfather Shakespeare," said the lad.
"Beware how you take the name of God in vain, my lad," said
the other. The allusions to William's gallantries are
numerous. On the Stratford parish records there is entry of
the birth of one "Thomas Green, alias Shakespeare." The
tale of the interrupted amour, at the theater, of "Richard
the Third" and "William the Conqueror," as is apt to be the
case, is about the most widely familiar of the Shakespearean
stories, and unnecessary to be repeated here. But Davenant
was proud to claim the dishonor of his mother, and
Shakespeare for his father, to his dying day.

"There are," says Boaden (page 53), "a few circumstances relating to the picture of which some notice should be taken in this examination. There is, it seems, a tradition that, no original picture of Shakespeare existing, Sir Thomas Clarges caused a" (i. e., this) "portrait to be painted from a young man who had the good fortune to resemble him" (i. e., Shakespeare. Query: How did Sir Thomas know that the young man resembled Shakespeare?). Mr. Malone traced this story to "The Gentleman's Magazine" for August, 1759, and called on the writer for his authority; but the writer, whoever he was, never gave it, any more than Malone gave his authority for announcing its date to be 1607; but Malone himself says that "most reports of this kind are an adumbration of some fact, and indication of something in kind or degree similar or analogous."

No. 6. This is a portrait, so called, by Zuccharo, which need not detain us, since Mr. Boaden himself demonstrates very clearly that it was not in any event painted from life, and, not improbably, did not originally claim to have been intended for Shakespeare at all.

Mr. Boaden's No. 7 is the "Cornelius Jansen picture," and to this Mr. Boaden pins his earnest faith. He says this "is now in the collection of the Duke of Somerset;" but he appears to make no attempt to connect it with William Shakespeare except as follows: Cornelius Jansen is said to have painted the daughter of Southampton—ergo, he might have been Southampton's family painter, and Southampton might have been desirous to possess a portrait of his friend Shakespeare done by his own painter—ergo, Jansen might have had William Shakespeare for a sitter! This is all the authority for the authenticity. But that it is—judging from the engraving in Mr. Boaden's book—a magnificent picture, we think there can be no question.

On the supposition that the Chandos is an authentic likeness of Shakespeare, this Jansen certainly bears a strong Shakespearean resemblance. In it the hair is curling, as in the Chandos, not straight, as in the Droeshout and the Marshall engravings. The mustache, which is cut tight to the face without being shaved, as in the Droeshout, and strong and heavy, as in the bust, is lighter than the Chandos, while the beard is fuller. There is nothing of the tremendous upper lip represented in the bust.

Mr. Boaden (page 195) describes it as an eye-witness, he having had access to it for the purposes of the book before us. He says: "It is an early picture by Cornelius Jansen, tenderly and beautifully painted. Time seems to have treated it with infinite kindness, for it is quite pure, and exhibits its original surface.... The portrait is on panel, and attention will be required to prevent a splitting of the oak, in two places, if my eyes have not deceived me."

As for Earlom, who copied the picture, Boaden says: "He had lessened the amplitude of the forehead; he had altered the form of the skull; he had falsified the character of the mouth; and, though his engraving was still beautiful, and the most agreeable exhibition of the poet, I found it would be absolutely necessary to draw the head again, as if he had never exercised his talent upon it" (page 195). Mr. Boaden specifies further the picture laid to have once decorated the pair of bellows belonging to Queen Elizabeth's own private apartments, besides still one other, both of which he rejects as spurious.

Thus, it has taken an army of novelists, painters, engravers, and essayists to erect simple William Shakespeare of Stratford into the god he ought to have been; and, on the best examination we are enabled to make, and according to the Shakespeareans themselves, there is only one picture of William Shakespeare extant which has the even assumed advantage of having been pronounced a likeness by any one who ever saw William Shakespeare himself in his (William Shakespeare's) lifetime. Even if—as Mr. Steevens surmises—this eye witness never saw the engraving, but only the original portrait from which it was copied, the Droeshout still enjoys an authentication possessed by no other so-called likeness, and, if rejected—as it infallibly is by all devout Shakespeareans—there remains nothing of certitude, nothing even of the certitude of conjecture, as to the features of the Stratford boy, whoever he was, and whatever his works. One further effort was, however, made, so lately as 1849, to clinch this "young lady's argument," by yet one more genuine discovery. This time it was a "Becker 'death mask!'" A plaster mask of an anonymous dead face is found in a rubbish-shop in Mayence, in 1849. Regarded as a mask of William Shakespeare, it bears a certain resemblance to the Stratford bust; and, regarded as a mask of Count Bismarck (for example), it would be found to bear a very strong resemblance to Count Bismarck. (We write from an inspection of photographs only, never having seen the mask.) Having always been annoyed that a creature so immortal as they had created their Shakespeare left no death-mask, the Shakespeareans at once adopt this anonymous mask as taken from the face of the two-days defunct William Shakespeare, who died in 1616. Credat Judams! Either William Shakespeare, at his death, was known to be an immortal bard or he was not. If he was, how could the sole likeness moulded of departed greatness be smuggled away from the land that was pious to claim him as its most distinguished son and nobody miss it, or raise the hue and cry? If he was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask from the family who cared enough about the dead man's memory to go to the expense of it? But, at any rate, in 1849 it falls into the hands of jealous believers. They search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, and for the date of their hero's death, and they find both. Had they made up their minds to find a scrap of Shakespearean cuticle, we may be sure it would have been there. Professor Owen, of the British Museum, declared that, if the fact of the mask having originally come from England could be established, there was "hardly any sum of money which the Museum would not pay for the mask itself." But the missing testimony has not been supplied, though doubtless it is incubating. For now and then we see a newspaper paragraph to the effect that old paintings have turned up (in pawn-shops invariably) which "resemble the death-mask," thus accustoming us to the title, which, in time, we shall doubtless come to accept—as we have come to accept Shakespeare himself—from mere force of habit. The last of these discoveries is in Australia, farther off than even Mayence, "said to resemble the Becker death-mask." * The Stratford portrait of Shakespeare claims no authority further than a resemblance to the accepted ideal, and the terra-cotta bust in the possession of the Garrick club was "found to order," and represents a man who, it would seem, bore not even a resemblance to the accepted Shakespearean features.

* See the "Academy," London, May 31, 1879, p. 475, We
understand that the mask is at present in possession of the
British Museum.

We should, perhaps, mention that Mr. Boaden surmises that the Droeshout picture is a portrait of William Shakespeare the actor, in the character of "Old Ivnowell," and that the Stratford bust was caused to be executed by Dr. Hall, a son-in-law of its subject, and was the work of one Thomas Stanton, who followed a cast taken after death. But, as Mr. Boaden admits, this is his surmise only. However insuperable, therefore, in the run of cases, the "young ladies argument" to prove from the pictures that William Shakespeare was not author of the plays is quite weak enough; but, as an argument to prove that he was such author, it is weakness and impotence itself.

It now becomes necessary to ask the ordinary question which a court would be obliged to ask concerning any exhibit produced before it, and claimed as authentic or authoritative: namely, Where did the plays called Shakespeare's come from? how did they get into print? who, if anybody, delivered the "copy" to the printer, and vouched for its authorship? It is manifest that we have no business here with any question of criticism, or as to an authenticity between different editions of the same play; but the plays were written to be played; how did they come to be published so that millions of readers, who never entered a playhouse where they were performed, read and still read them?

In order to arrive at any supposition as to these considerations which would be of value to our purpose in these papers, it will be necessary to glance at the state of literary property in the days between 1585 and 1606. How, in those days, there was absolutely no legal protection for an author's manuscript. Once it had strayed beyond the writer's hand it was practically "publici juris"—any body's property. The first law of copyright enacted in England was the act of Anne, of April 10, 1710, more than one hundred years after the last date at which commentators claim the production of a Shakespearean play. Even the first authoritative pronunciation of a competent tribunal as to literary property at common law (which preceded, of course, all literary property definable by statute) was not made until 1769, fifty-nine years later. But the Court of Star Chamber (of obscure origin, but known to have been of powerful jurisdiction in the time of Henry VII.) was in the height of its ancient omnipotence in those years. And of the various matters of which it took cognizance, one of the earliest was the publishing, printing, and even the keeping and reading of books. Under date of June 23,1585—the year that many commentators assign as that in which William Shakespeare first turned up in London—this Star Chamber, which had already issued many such, issued a decree that none should "print any book, work, or copy, against the form or meaning of any restraint contained in any statute of laws of this realm," except, etc., etc. Twenty-nine years before—in 1556—Philip and Mary had erected ninety-seven booksellers into a body called "The Stationers' Company," who were to monopolize the printing of books, if they so chose. They had given them power and authority—and their second charter, in 1558, confirmed them in it—to print such books as they obtained, either from authors' manuscripts or translations, and to see very carefully that nobody else printed them. Their power was absolute—they had their "privilegium ad imprimendum solum," and in the pursuit of any body who interfered with it they were empowered to "break locks, search, seize," and, in short, to suppress any printed matter they did not choose to license, wherever they pleased. This the Worshipful Company of Stationers did not fail to do; they pursued, and the Star Chamber convicted. The disgraceful record of infamous and inhuman prosecutions and punishments for reading, keeping, selling, or making books might well detain us here, did our scope permit. * Whatever literature accomplished in those days it accomplished by stealth, in defiance of the implacable and omnipotent Star Chamber and its bloodhound, the Stationers' Company, who ran in its victims.

It can not, we think, be doubted, by a student of those times, * that whatever literary property existed at common law then existed in the shape of a license to print a work under permission of the Stationers' Company; that no estate or property obtained in anything except the types, ink, paper, in the license to use them all together to make a book, and in the resulting volume; and that what we understand by "copyright" to-day—namely, an author's or a proprietor's right to demand a royalty or percentage, or to exercise other control over the work when once printed and published—was altogether unconceived and unclaimed.

* See "Omitted Chapters of the History of England," by
Andrew Basset, 1864
** "The person who first resolved on printing a book, and
entered his design on that register, became thereby the
legal proprietor of that work, and had the sole right of
printing it."—Carte, quoted in "Reasons for a Further
Amendment of the Act 54, George III., c. 15," London, 1817.
John Camden Hotten, "Seven Letters, Etc., on Literary
Property," London, Hotten, 1871, describes the modern
Stationers' Company as entrusted with "a vested interest
over somebody else's property, a prescriptive right to
interfere with the future work of other people's hands."

We are aware that this statement as to the condition of authors' rights in the days of Elizabeth will not pass unchallenged; but a review of the reported cases, as well as the extant records of the Stationers' Company, will, we think, support our conclusion.

The first reported case of piracy was in 1735, when the Master of the Rolls enjoined publication of "The whole Duty of Man" (Morgan's "Law of Literature," vol. ii., p. 672).

Whatever compensation the author of a work was able to obtain, he doubtless obtained beforehand, by sale of his manuscript, and dreamed not of setting up a tangible property as against any one who had obtained the Stationers' Company's license to print it. The Stationers' Company, at the outset of their career, opened a record, in which it entered the name of every book it licensed—the date, and the name of the person authorized to print it. * It was not until 1644, twenty-eight years after William Shakespeare's death (so far as we can ever know) that John Milton, in his "Are-opagitica"—the greatest state paper in the republic of letters, the declaration of independence, and the bill of rights of the liberty of literature—asserted * ** for the first time "the right of every man" to "his several copy, which God forbid should be gainsayd."

* For the text of the "Areopagitica" and copious notes as
to the history of the days which called it out, see edition
of J. VV. Hale's, Clarendon Press Series, Macmillan & Co.,
Oxford, 1874.
** In a pamphlet, "The Prayse of the Red Herring" cited by
Farmer, in his "Learning of Shakespeare," page 45.

Once in their hands, printers did what they pleased with a manuscript; abridged it if they found it too long, and lengthened it if they found it too short. Thomas Nashe says, that, in a play of his, called "The Isle of Dogs," four acts, without his consent "or the least guesse of his drifte or scope," were added by the printers. * The printers also assigned the authorship of the work to any name they thought would help sell the book, and dedicated it to whom they pleased. (Just as the first printer of the sonnets we call Shakespeare's, dedicated them to "W. H.," which two initials have supplied the Shakespeareans with an excuse for at least as many dozen octavo volumes of conjecture as to who "W. H." was.) Sometimes the author thus despotically assigned to the work rebelled. Dr. Heywood recognized two of his own compositions in a collection of verses called "The Passionate Pilgrim," printed by one Jaggard, in 1599, upon the title-page to which, this Jaggard had placed the name of William Shakespeare as author. Hey-wood publicly claimed his own, but William Shakespeare never denied or affirmed; his name, however, was removed by the printer from the title-page of the third edition of the book, in 1612. * But, as a rule, the Stationers' Company were too powerful, and the author too poor, to bring the trick to exposure.

* Shakespeare, by R. G. White. Vol. 1., page lxxvii.

It was under these circumstances, and in times like these, that the Shakespearean plays began to appear in print. Where did they come from? They were written to be played. According to all accounts they were very valuable to the theater which produced them. Every personal and selfish interest of the proprietors, whether of the theater or of the manuscript plays, dictated that they should be kept in secret—least of all that they should be printed and made accessible to the public outside of the theater, who otherwise, to see them, must become patrons of the house where they were performed. That the author or authors of the plays could have made them of more profit by selling them to the printers than to the players is doubtful; that they personally entered them—or such of them as were entered—on the books of the Stationers' Company, is certainly not the fact; the only persons to whose interest it was to print them were the printers themselves, and, in all probability, it was the printers who did cause them to be printed. But where did these printers procure the "copy" from which to set up the plays they printed? The question will never be answered. The manuscripts might have been procured by bribing individual actors, each of whom could have easily furnished a copy of his individual part, and so the whole be made up for the press. The fact that the plays never were printed without more or less of the stage directions or "business" included, lends probability to this theory: but, as to whether a play made up in this fashion would have resulted in any thing like what we possess to-day, we have considered further on. Mr. Grant White admits, * as must everybody who examines into the matter, that whatever the printers printed was unauthorized and surreptitious. But, having admitted this much, Mr. White is too ardent a Shakespearean not to make some effort to throw a guise of authenticity around the text he has so lovingly followed. In the article we have just quoted from in our foot-note, he says, "It is not improbable that, in case of great and injurious misrepresentation of the text of a play by" this surreptitious method of publication, "fair copies were furnished by the theatrical people at the author's request in self-defence." Perhaps these plays might have found their way into print just as the comedy of "Play" found its way into print in 1868, ** or the play of "Mary Warner," *** at about the same date. At any rate the editors of the first folio speak of the "stolne and surreptitious copies" which had preceded them.

* "Such of his plays as were published during his lifetime
seem to have been given to the press entirely without his
agency; indeed, his interest was against their
publication.... It was the interest of all concerned,
whether as proprietors, or only as actors, or, like himself,
as both, that the theaters should have the entire benefit of
whatever favor they enjoyed with the public. But the
publishers, or stationers, as they were then called, eagerly
sought copies of them for publication, and obtained them
surreptitiously: sometimes, it would seem, by corrupting
persons connected with the theater, and sometimes, as the
text which they printed shows, by sending short-hand writers
to the performance."
** Palmer v. DeWitt, 47 New York R. 532.
*** Crowe v. Aiken. 2 Bissel R. 208.

The first and second editions of "Hamlet," says Mr. White, "in 1603 and 1604, might have been the result of such maneuvers on the part of the printers and the stenographers, or those who had access to the manuscripts of the author. However this may be, twenty of Shakespeare's plays were published by various stationers during his lifetime; they are known as the quartos, from the form in which they are printed. They are most of them full of errors.... Some of them seem to have been put in type from stage copies, or, not improbably, from an aggregation of the separate parts which were in the hands of the various actors." In other words, Shakespeare's works were so imperfectly printed, against his will, during his lifetime, that he himself authorized other imperfect—Mr. White says they were imperfect—versions to be likewise printed!

Mr. White might have looked nearer home to more purpose. Nobody knows, nobody can know better than he, that what is called the "accepted" or "received" text of Shakespeare (if there is, to speak minutely, any such to-day) has been arrived at and made up piecemeal, and in the course of time, by the commentators selecting from the folios, and other original editions, such "readings" as the judgment of scholarship or the taste of criticism has, on the whole, adopted; and any body who cares to take the trouble to examine these original editions can see as much for himself. To suppose that this text, as it stands to-day, is the text as its author or authors wrote it, is, it seems to us, to suppose at least ten thousand coincidences, every one of which is, to say the least, improbable.

Before proceeding any further, let us recapitulate the three historical certainties to which we have arrived. First, that the state of the law was favorable, (indeed, it would be impossible to conceive of a state more favorable), to literary imposture or incognito. Second, that nobody stands on record as claiming to know the authorship of these plays, except the printers, who were able to sell them by using the name of the manager of a popular theater; and, therefore, whose interest it was to affix that name to them; and, Third, that there was never a period in which it was so reasonably an author's interest to be anonymous, or preserve his incognito, as these very years covered by the lifetime of William Shakespeare; when, between the Stationers' Company and the Star Chamber, it was a fortunate author, printer or reader, who escaped hanging, disemboweling, and quartering, with only the loss of ears or liberty.

Who wrote these plays? London was full of playwrights, contemporary with William Shakespeare, many of them his friends and familiars; possibly, all of them submitting their manuscripts to his editorial eye. We have their works extant to-day.

Ben Jonson was a poet and a pedant; Greene, a university-bred man. And we may go through the list and verify the records of them all, and find in each some quality or training from which to reasonably expect fruitage. But nobody has ever ventured to hazard so wild a theory as that any of them wrote the anonymous immortal plays to which the best of their own acknowledged masterpieces are mere rubbish. But a butcher's boy, lately from Stratford, happens to be manager of a contemporary theater. He, therefore, must be the writer, and there can not be the slightest doubt of it. The story that this boy ever stole deer is rejected as resting on insufficient evidence. But no evidence is required to prove his authorship of the topmost works in the history or the literature of England. We have seen the monopoly that overruled the press. We have seen that the Stationers' Company insisted upon recording the name and ownership of every printed thing; and their record-books are still extant, and bear no trace of any such claimant as William Shakespeare. We have weighed the surmises of the Shakespeareans as to these times, and seen their probable value; and have found it just as impossible to connect the immortal fragments we call the Shakespearean plays to-day with William Shakespeare, of Stratford, as we have already found it to imagine him as having access to the material, the sealed records, and the hidden muniments employed in their construction. Is there any more evidence to be examined?

But were these plays, so printed outside, the same plays as those acted inside the theater? When we recall the style of audiences that assembled in those days (M. Taine says the spectators caroused and sang songs while the plays progressed; that they drank great draughts of beer; and, if they drank too much, burned juniper instead of retiring; anon, they would break upon the stage, toss in a blanket such performers as pleased them not, tear up the properties, etc., etc.)—when we recall this, it is not the easiest thing in the world to imagine this audience so very highly delighted, for instance, with Wolsey's long soliloquy (which the actor of to-day delivers in a dignified, low, and unimpassioned monotone, without gesture), or Hamlet's philosophical monologues, or Isabella's pious strains. Some plays were highly popular inside those theaters. Were these the ones? Mr. Grant White has all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, when he insists that the theater most jealously guarded the manuscripts of the plays that were making its fortune; and that it would have been suicide in it to have circulated them outside, in print. But may not the echo of the popularity of certain plays called "Hamlet," "King John," "Macbeth," etc., have induced others, outside the theater, to have circulated plays, christened with these names (or with and under the popular name of Shakespeare), for gain among the "unco guid" who would not, or the impecunious who could not, enter the theater door? There is no need of opening up so hopeless a speculation—a speculation pure and simple, that can never, in the nature of things, be confronted by data either way. But the fact does remain that these marvelous plays appeared in print contemporaneously with the professional career of an actor named William Shakespeare, and in the same town where he acted; that, if they were his, it would have been to his interest to have kept them out of print; and that their appearance in print he most certainly did not authorize; and who can claim that one guess is not as good as another, where history is silent, and tradition askew, and the truth buried under the dust of centuries, overtopped yy the rubbish of conjecture? We repeat, we have no warrant to intrude upon the domain of criticism. The Shakespearean text, as we possess it to-day, is too priceless, whatever its source, to be rudely touched. But, so far as is revealed by the record of its appearance among printed literature, there is no evidence, internal or external, as to William Shakespeare's production of it, and as to its origin we are as hopelessly in the dark as ever.

Dubious as is the chronicle of those days as to other matters, it is singularly clear as to what was printed and what was not. For those were the sort of days when men whose names were not written in the books of the Stationers' Company printed at the peril of clipped ears and slit noses, or worse; and those books are still extant. But, by the fatality which seems to follow and pervade the name of William Shakespeare, this record, like every other, national or local, yields nothing to the probe but disappointment and silence as to the man of Stratford and the actor of Blackfriars.

We will, presently, consider as to whether the same intellect composed the "Hamlet" at one sitting, and at another, located Bohemia on the sea-coast; and whether, on inspection, it might not be strongly suggested that the two conceptions indicated geniuses of quite different orders and not one and the same person; that one showed the hand-marks of a poet and the other the hand-marks of the stage-manager, etc. If the limits of this work permitted, we believe the same hand-marks might be collected from the treatment of the text of every play. For instance, the "Comedy of Errors" is supposed to occur during the days when Ephesus was ruled by a duke, and follows—as we have already shown—the unities of the Menæchmi of Plautus. But the ignoramus who doctored the paraphrase for the Blackfriars stage found it convenient, to bring on his stage effect, to introduce a Christian monastery into Ephesus at about that time, with a lady abbess who could refuse admission to the duke himself, so inviolable and sacred was the sanctuary of consecrated Christian walls! The monastery was as convenient to bringing all the befogged and befooled and sadly mixed up personages of the comedy face to face at the moment, as was the seashore and the bear, in "A Winter's Tale," to account for the princess Perdita among the shepherds, and so in they all go. These, and the like brummagem and ruses de convenances, are simple enough to understand, and detract in no degree whatever from the value of the plays: they can be retired or retained at pleasure, and no harm done, if we only remember to whom and to what they are assignable. But, if we forget that, and insist that the very same pen which wrote the dialogue wrote the setting—wrote every entrance, exit, and direction to the scene-shifters and stage-carpenters, and, therefore, that every dot and comma, every call and cue, every "gag" and localism, is as sacred as holy writ, no wonder the scholars of the text are puzzled!

For example, we find that Mr. Wilkes, and Mr. Harper, in the "American Catholic Review" for January, 1879—who otherwise believe the author of the Shakespearean plays to have been a roman catholic—are almost persuaded that he must have been a protestant, because he finds occasion to make mention of an "evening mass." But let us assure Messrs. Wilkes and Harper that they need neither abandon nor adopt a theory on rencontre with so trivial a phenomenon. If William Shakespeare felt the need of an "evening mass" at any time, we may be fairly sure, from our experience of that worthy, that he put one in. He had bolted too many camels in his day to hesitate at such a gnat as that! The creator of a convent in old Ephesus and of a sea-coast to Bohemia was not one to stick at a trifling "evening mass!"

The gentlemen above mentioned, believe the author of the plays to have been a romanist, not because the reverend Richard Davies, writing soon after 1685, distinctly says "he died a Papist," (for any statement made anywhere within a hundred years of William Shakespeare's lifetime is "mere gossip," and it is only the biographies we write now-a-days that are to be relied upon), but mainly because the liturgy and priesthood of that church are invariably treated with respect in the plays, while dissenting parsons are poked fun at without stint. Doubtless, in the modern drama the same rule will be perceived to obtain. The imperious liturgy and priesthood of the roman or of the stately anglican church appear to be beyond the attempts of travesty; while the snivel and preach of mere puritanism has always been too tempting an opportunity for "Aminadab Sleek" and his type—to be resisted, and such a fact would justify very little conclusion either way. Besides, there is no call to insist that the stage, in epitomizing life into the compass of an hour, shall preserve every detail; nothing less than a Chinese theater could answer a demand like that. There is a dramatic license even broader than the license accorded to poetry, and we would doubtless find the drama a sad bore if there were not. William Shakespeare, during his managerial career, appears to have understood this as well as any body; nor have the liberties he took with facts and chronology befogged any body, except the daily lessening throng of investigators, who believe him to be the original of the masterpieces he cut into play-hooks for his stage.

But did William Shakespeare ever try his hand at verse-making? There is considerable rumor to the effect that, during the leisure of his later life, no less than in the lampooning efforts of his vagrom youth, he did turn his pen to rhymes. And the future may yet bring forth a Shakespearean honest enough to collect these verses—as they follow here—and to entitle them—

THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS

OF

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

EPITAPH ON ELIAS JAMES. *

When God was pleased, the world unwilling yet,

Elias James to nature paid his debt,

And here reposeth; as he liv'd he dyde;

The saying in him strongly verified—

Such life, such death; then, the known truth to tell,

He lived a godly lyfe, and dyde as well.

EPITAPH ON SIR THOMAS STANLEY. **

Ask who lyes here, but do not weepe:

He is not dead, he doth but sleepe;

This stony register is for his bones,

His fame is more perpetual than these stones,

And his own goodness, with himself being gone,

Shall live when earthly monument is none.

* On the authority of "a MS. volume of poems by Herrick and
others, said to be in the handwriting of Charles I., in the
Bodleian Library.
** On the authority of Sir William Dugdale ("Visitation
Book"), who says, "The following verses were made by William
Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian." This appears to be
our author's longest and most ambitious work.

Not monumental stone preserves our fame

Nor skye aspyring pyramids our name;

The memory of him for whom this stands

Shall outlive marble and defacer's hands,

"When all to Time's consumption shall be given;

Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven.

EPITAPH OX TOM-A-COMBE, OTHERWISE THIXBEARD. *

Thin in beard and thick in purse,

Never man beloved worse;