Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will, quoted by Mr. Greenwood [97b] from Mr. Morgan. [97c]
Genius, says Mr. Morgan, “did not guide Burns’s untaught pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.” No! that was not Burns’s lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote The Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his friend. The public of 1780–90 did not want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full of the mediæval legends of Troy and Athens. But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the mediæval legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, not of Homer, Will made his market. Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch’s Lives; of Homer, he (or the author of Troilus and Cressida) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman’s new translation (1598). For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton’s Destruction of Troy, still reprinted as a popular book as late as 1713. Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, “reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten. . . ” He bestowed the manners of mediæval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks. He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards. Look at his notion of “the very manners” of early post-Roman Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear! Concerning “the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings” the author of Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith’s bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends. The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of “matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!”
Mon Dieu! do historians not treat of “matters of curious research” and of statutes and of treaties? As for “old romances,” they were current and popular. The “occult” sources of King Lear are a popular tale attached to legendary “history” and a story in Sidney’s Arcadia. Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as “a letterless peasant lad,” or the Author, whoever he was, is not “invested with all the love” (sic, v.1. “lore”), “which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten.”
“Our friend’s style has flowery components,” Mr. Greenwood adds to this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author, “and yet Shakespeare who did all this,” et cætera. But Shakespeare did not do “all this”! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which “Delphos” is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North’s Plutarch, done out of the French; older plays, and the rest of it. Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-plays to the State Papers. Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up “clasped books, buried and forgotten.” There is no original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day. Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence. And the common Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.
But Mr. Greenwood asks “what was the poetic output?” in Burns’s case. [100a] It was what we know, and that was what suited his age and his circumstances. It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one winter in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.
Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre. I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all-pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet of the classics,—with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current popular Morte d’Arthur and Destruction of Troy.
I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that “Genius is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and what it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it is associated, and the opportunities that are open to it—in a word, on the circumstances of its environment.” [101a]
Of course by “moral qualities,” a character without spot or stain is not intended: we may take that for granted. Otherwise, I agree; and think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that what it produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it, and with “the circumstances of its environment.” Without the “environment,” no Jeanne d’Arc,—without the environment, no Shakespeare.
To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of “the light people,” the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the productions of their pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and, above all, the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers’ tales, the seamen’s company, the vision of the Court, the gallants, the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak in the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly was. Not as an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple literary man, William does not like, though he thoroughly understands, the mob. Like Alceste (in Le Misanthrope of Poquelin), he might say,
“L’Ami du genre humain n’est point du tout mon fait.”