Then yet another finds this “dark lady” in the person of the wife of an Oxford Inn Keeper, with whom, forsooth, player Shakspere had an intrigue, on his way from Stratford to London, or vice versa, and laborious investigations are undertaken, and many learned letters are written to the Press about this other imaginary “dark lady”—“that woman colour’d ill”[5]—and all the family history of the Davenants is exploited in this foolish quest. Then, again, another makes the discovery that William Shakspere, the Stratford player, had conceived a feeling of violent hatred against “Resolute John Florio,” the translator of Montaigne (who was, by the way, so far as we know, a good worthy man), so he caricatures this hateful person in the hateful (!) character of Jack Falstaff—the Falstaff of King Henry IV! But we don’t hate Jack Falstaff! On the contrary we all love old Jack Falstaff, in spite of his many faults and failings. We can’t help loving him, for his unfailing good humour and his unrivalled wit! “Oh, that is nothing, nothing,” says our critic from across the Atlantic—one Mr. Acheson of New York—who has made this grand discovery. “Will Shakspere of Stratford hated Florio, so he has lampooned him and ridiculed him in this hateful character of Falstaff! Of that there is no possible doubt. I am Sir Oracle, and when I speak let no dog bark![6]”
And so I might go on to multiply the examples of this “Stratfordian” folly. And we, who see the absurdity of all this, are called “Fanatics!” But what is “Fanaticism”? It is the madness which possesses the worshippers at the shrine. These men have bowed themselves down at the traditional Stratfordian Shrine; they have accepted without thinking the dogmas of the Stratfordian faith; they are impervious to reasoning and to common sense; they have surrendered their judgment; “their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their hearts, and should be converted” to truth and reason. Verily, these are the real “fanatics.”
Let me for a moment, before passing on, call attention to some words written by those distinguished “Shakespearean” critics Dr. Richard Garnett, and Dr. Edmund Gosse, in their Illustrated English Literature. They speak of “that knowledge of good society, and that easy and confident attitude towards mankind which appears in Shakespeare’s plays from the first, and which are so unlike what might have been expected from a Stratford rustic.... The first of his plays were undoubtedly the three early comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which must have appeared in 1590-1591, or perhaps in the latter year only. The question of priority among them is hard to settle, but we may concur with Mr. [now Sir Sidney] Lee in awarding precedence to Love’s Labour’s Lost. All three indicate that the runaway Stratford youth had, within five or six years, made himself the perfect gentleman, master of the manners and language of the best society of his day, and able to hold his own with any contemporary writer.”[7]
Now this miraculous “runaway Stratford youth,” came to London “a Stratford rustic,” in the year 1587,[8] and, according to his biographers, being a penniless adventurer, had to seek for a living in “very mean employments,” as Dr. Johnson says, whether as horse-holder, or “call boy,” or “super” on the stage, or what you will. His parents were entirely illiterate, and he left his two daughters in the same darkness of ignorance. We may assume that he had attended for a few years at the “Free School” at Stratford (as Rowe, his earliest biographer, calls it), although there is really no evidence in support of that assumption, but it is admitted even by the most zealous and orthodox Stratfordians that he “had received only an imperfect education.”[9] But I will not again recapitulate the facts (real or supposed) of this mean and vulgar life. Let the reader, I say again, study it in the pages of Halliwell-Phillipps, and Sir Sidney Lee.[10]
And now let us consider for a moment that extraordinary play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, which, as we have seen, “appeared” in 1590 or 1591, according to Messrs. Garnett and Gosse, but of which Mr. Fleay writes: “The date of the original production cannot well be put later than 1589.” It was, as the “authorities” are all agreed, Shakespeare’s first drama, and it is remarkable for this fact, among other things, that unlike other Shakespearean plays it is not an old play re-written, nor is the plot taken from some other writer. The plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost is an original one.
And now let us see what Professor Lefranc, who has made a very special study of this play, has to tell us about it, premising that I do not cite his remarks as “authoritative,” but merely as a clear statement of the facts of the case by one who has exceptional knowledge of the history of the time in which the action of the play is supposed to take place.
“Everybody knows,” he writes, “that the scene of this very original comedy is laid at the Court of Navarre, at a date nearly contemporaneous with the play, when Henri de Bourbon was the reigning sovereign of this little kingdom, before he became Henri IV of France.... That the author of Love’s Labour’s Lost knew and had visited the Court of Navarre is at once obvious to anyone who will study the play without any preconceived hypothesis and who takes the trouble to learn something about the history of this little Kingdom of Nérac.... All the explanations which have been given of this play, the first of the Shakespearean dramas, in order to bolster up the theory of its composition by Shakspere the player at the very outset of his career as a playwright, as also every element of the comedy itself, and every known incident in the life of the Stratford player, prove the impossibility of his being the author of it. All these theories and hypotheses put forward during the last 120 years are of such total improbability, indeed of such miserable tenuity, that some day people will wonder how they could possibly find acceptance for so long.”
M. Lefranc cites Montegut, a French Shakespearean scholar and a critic of noted insight and perspicacity, who writes: “It is extraordinary to see how Shakespeare is faithful even in the most minute details to historical truth and to local colour,” and he proceeds to demonstrate that many allusions in this wonderful play of Love’s Labour’s Lost cannot be properly understood or appreciated without reference to the memoirs of the celebrated Marguerite de Valois, who is herself the “Princess of France” of the comedy (in the original edition called “The Queen”[11]), who comes with her suite to visit Henri at his Court of Nérac. The Princess of France, then, was originally Queen Marguerite of Navarre, and this comedy represents her as coming to rejoin her husband at Nérac to endeavour to regain his love, and to settle many questions relative to her dowry of Aquitaine. That this journey actually took place, that Marguerite paid a long visit to the Court of Navarre where a series of entertainments were held in her honour, and that the question of her dowry in Aquitaine was then discussed at length is established by the Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois.[12] The author, then, had in his mind events of contemporaneous history which had taken place at the Court of Navarre, and with which he appears to have been personally familiar. The memoirs, too, throw light on several passages of the drama which would be obscure without them. Take (e.g.) Act II, Sc. 1, where Biron asks Rosaline, “Did not I dance with you at Brabant once?” Here we have an allusion to the visit of Marguerite to Spa in 1577, of which a full account is given in her Memoirs, where she tells of balls at Mons, Namur, and Liege, all in a country which was at that time constantly spoken of as Brabant. Again, in Act V, Sc. 2, there is an obscure allusion, which seems to be satisfactorily explained by a reference to the story of the unfortunate Hélène de Tournon, related by Marguerite in her Memoirs. Further, in Act V, Sc. 2, we have an allusion to the manner in which Henri of Navarre, the “Vert Galant,” wrote, prepared, and sealed his love letters, as though the author was familiar with the amorous King’s poetical letter addressed by him to the “Charmante Gabrielle” d’Estrés; while the circumstances described in Act I, Sc. 1, are explained in the light of fact by a letter from Cobham to Walsingham dated from Paris in June, 1583.
But it would take far too much time to dilate further upon this, the first of the Shakespearean plays. I can only refer my readers, for further light, to Professor Lefranc’s work Sous le Masque de William Shakespeare.[13]
Yet we are required to believe—nay, we are “fanatics” if we do not believe—that this extraordinary play was composed by the “Stratford rustic” some two years after he had “run away” from Stratford, and, further, that he composed two other remarkable comedies, The Comedy of Errors, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, just about the same time! Verily this is a faith which does not remove mountains, but simply swallows them whole—a faith which appears to me more worthy of Bedlam than of the intelligence of rational human beings. On the other hand, there is no difficulty whatever in believing that this unique play—which shows that the author of it was not only a “perfect gentleman, master of the manners and language of the best society of the day,” but also one familiar with the doings, and “happenings” and amusements and entourage of the Court of Henri of Navarre at Nérac on the occasion of the visit of Marguerite de Valois to that Court—was written by a man who lived and moved in a very different sphere of society from that in which Shakspere of Stratford lived and moved, but who was desirous of concealing his identity as a playwright under a convenient mask-name.