The Shakespearean Myth: William Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence

by Appleton Morgan

ON THE KING.

Crown have their compass, length of days their date,

Triumphs their tomb, Felicity her fate;

Of naught but earth can earth make us partaker,

But knowledge makes a king most like his maker.

But gives no other authority for it than "a coeval manuscript."

The world has, very regrettingly, come to look with such suspicion on Mr. Jollier's discoveries, that this relic, until confirmed, will hardly be accepted as genuine.

ANOTHER VERSION OF THE LAMPOON. *

A Parliament member, a justice of peace,

At home a poor scarecrow, at London an asse;

If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,

Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it.

He thinks himself greate,

Yet an asse is his state:

We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.

If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it,

Sing, O lowsie Lucy, whate'er befalle it.

Some lampoon was affixed by young William to Sir Thomas Lucy's park gate, and enraged the baronet to such a degree that—according to Capell—he directed a lawyer at Warwick to commence a prosecution against the lad. The Lucy note, however, makes no mention of the lawyer, only stating that young Shakespeare deemed it prudent to quit Stratford, "at least for a time." The long ballad of six stanzas (which we give in the foot-note) was written by John Jordan, a harmless rustic who lived at Stratford in the days of Malone and Ireland, i. e. in the last years of the eighteenth century, and went about claiming to have inherited the mantle of Shakespeare. The "Piping Pebworth" verses, and perhaps the whole story was written by him.

* According to Capell, Oldys, and Grant White. (See Mr.
White's Shakespeare, Vol. I. p. xxxviii.) Oldys leaves out
the "O" in the fourth and eighth lines. Mr. Fullom (cited
above) declares this version to be spurious. (See note 3, p.
121.)

At any rate, he seems to have succeeded in obtaining immortality by mixing his own efforts so successfully with the Shakespearean remains as to make them all one in the local traditions. The above, with the

INSCRIPTION FOR HIS OWN TOMB.

Good frend, for Jesvs' sake forbeare,

To digg ye dust encloased here.

Blesse be ye man yt spares thes stones,

And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.

(which was originally placed on the stone over William Shakespeare's vault in the chancel of Trinity Church, Stratford—was recut in the new stone which was found necessary fifty years ago, and now appears with the verbal contractions as given above) are all the literary compositions which, according to the local traditions of Stratford, his home, where he was born, lived, and died—where alone, for a century or more after his death his reputation was cherished—William Shakespeare ever produced. There is nothing: in them inconsistent with the record of the man himself; and, so far as we know, have never been rejected by the Shakespeareans themselves. It certainly would not be honest, in our present appeal to history, to insert in this edition—we may fairly call it "The Stratford Edition"—of Master Shakespeare's poetry, all that he edited for the stage; or, worse yet, borrowed and dressed up, and—according to Robert Greene—passed for his own.

We are very far from desiring even to do justice to poor Robert Greene, if in so doing we shall detract a hair's weight from the merits of William Shakespeare. But it is not impossible to say a good word even for Greene. Although his language is not within such bounds of propriety as the Shakespeareans could wish, modern research has amply proved that he told the truth, and that William Shakespeare borrowed, or rather seized upon and adopted, without compensation, the work by which Greene earned his bread. For Greene's language, Chettle, Greene's editor, makes haste, sometime afterward, when William Shakespeare had been taken up by "divers of worship" to apologize, as far as an editor can apologize for an author. We shall see, further on, how William Shakespeare was shrewd enough to make himself useful to these "divers of worship," and in those days, and for a century after, no slavery was so abject as the slavery of letters to patronage. So, of course, Chettle hastened to make his peace with them too. But the truth remains, nevertheless, that poor Greene told only the truth. It is fashionable with the Shakespeareans to sneer at Greene, because he was "jealous" of Shakespeare. He appears to have had reason to be jealous! But no name is bad enough to bestow on him. Mr. Grant White says: "Robert Greene, writing from the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee, warns three of his literary companions to shun intercourse with," etc., "certain actors, Shakespeare among the rest." If Robert Greene died from over-debauch, it is no more than Shakespeare himself died of, according to the entry in the diary of the Rev. John Ward. "It is not impossible," says Mr. White, "even that this piece of gossiping tradition is true." Mr. White is right to call it "gossiping tradition," for it is piece and parcel of all the other mention of William Shakespeare of Stratford. If it were not for "gossiping tradition," we had never heard, and Mr. White had never written, of that personage. But Mr. White makes no reservation of "gossiping tradition" in the case of Robert Greene. Greene dies "on the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee," because he was jealous of William Shakespeare, and was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself as to call that "jack of all trades" an "upstart crowe, beautified with our feathers," etc. It seems that poor Robert Greene's dying words—if they were his dying words—were his ante-mortem legacy of warning and prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. But they have not been heeded. His "upstart crowe" has not only kept all his borrowed feathers, but is arrayed each passing day with somebody's richer and brighter plumage. If Robert Greene could speak from the dust, he doubtless could tell us—as Jonson and the rest might have told us in their lifetimes, if they only would—whose all this plumage really was and is. But all are dust and ashes together now—dust and ashes three centuries old—and, as Miss Bacon said, "Who loses any thing that does not find" the secret of that dust? However, not a Shakespearean stops to waste a sigh over the memory of poor Robert Greene, * who saw his bread snatched from his mouth by a scissorer of other men's brains, and who was too human to see

* "Robert Greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetry
or rhetoric than his fellows (Nash, Peele, and William
Shakespeare), was, from his miscellaneous and discursive
reading, a very useful man in his coterie." Dr. Latham
speaks of his book as "A Groats Worth of Rest, purchased
with a Million of Repentance," which certainly makes better
sense than "a groat's worth of wit," etc., as usually
written. Which is right? Greene died in 1592.

and hold his peace; but over the drunken grave of the Stratford pretender—who was vanquished in his cups at Bidford and Pebworth, and lay all night under the thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the last—they weep as for one cut off untimely, as Dame Quickly over the lazared and lecherous clay of Sir John Falstaff: "Nay, sure, he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur's bosom.'A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any Christom child." But let us not assume the appearance of unkindness to William Shakespeare. He lived a merry life; and, so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his own wife, poor Robert Greene, and perhaps the delinquent for malt delivered. He loved his own, but that is no wrong. And, we must not forget that, so far as the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save by his silence, the works a too flattering posterity has assigned him.

The appeal to history not only declines to set aside, but affirms, with costs, the verdict rendered upon the evidence. And the sum is briefly this: If William Shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle; every thing else being equal, the presumption is against a miracle; but, here, every thing else is not equal, for all the facts of history are reconcilable with history and irreconcilable with the miracle; if history is history, then miracle there was none—in other words, if there were one miracle, then there must have been two. If there had lived no such man as William Shakespeare, that "William Shakespeare" would be as good a name as any other to designate the authorship of the Shakespearean page, who will consider it worth while to question? But to credit the historical man with the living page demands, in our estimation, either a willful credulity, or an innocence that is almost physical blindness!

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