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—