The legion of Shakespearean plays of date before 1593 has vanished. The miracle is very considerably abated. In place of introducing the airy hosts of plays before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been, perhaps, more instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate, Shakespeare’s earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be placed about 1591–3. There would then have been no specious appearance of miracles to be credited by Stratfordians to Will. But even so, we have sufficient to “give us pause,” says Mr. Greenwood, with justice. It gives me “pause,” if I am to believe that, between 1587 and 1592, Will wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. There is a limit even to my gullibility, and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we now possess them, before 1593, I do not suppose that Will was the man. But the dates, in fact, are unknown: the miracle is apocryphal.
VI
THE COURTLY PLAYS: “LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST”
We now come to consider another “miracle” discovered in the plays,—a miracle if the actor be the author. The new portent is the courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen and ladies in the plays. To be sure the refinement in the jests is often conspicuously absent. How could the rude actor learn his quips and pretty phrases, and farfetched conceits? This question I have tried to answer already,—the whole of these fashions abound in the literature of the day.
Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not make the ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do converse, whether in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier style, unless he himself frequented their society. Marlowe did not frequent the best society; he was no courtier, but there is the high courtly style in the speeches of the great and noble in Edward II. Courtiers and kings never did speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in blank verse. The style is a poetical convention, while the quips and conceits, the airs and graces, ran riot through the literature of the age of Lyly and his Euphues and his comedies, the age of the Arcadia.
A cheap and probable source of Will’s courtliness is to be found in the courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were separately printed between 1584 and 1592. Lyly’s “real significance is that he was the first to bring together on the English stage the elements of high comedy, thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It” (and Love’s Labour’s Lost, one may add). “Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can hardly miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly’s plays almost as closely as Lyly had read Pliny’s Natural History. . . . One could hardly imagine Love’s Labour’s Lost as existent in the period from 1590 to 1600, had not Lyly’s work just preceded it.” [120a]
“It is to Lyly’s plays,” writes Dr. Landmann, “that Shakespeare owes so much in the liveliness of his dialogues, in smartness of expression, and especially in that predilection for witticisms, quibbles, and playing upon words which he shows in his comedies as well as in his tragedies.” There follows a dissertation on the affected styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the Pléiade in France, and generally of the artificial manner in Europe, till in England we reach Lyly, “in whose comedies,” says Dr. Furness, “I think we should look for motives which appeared later in Shakespeare.” [121a]
The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and court plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in literature than at Court, decide that the poet of Love’s Labour’s Lost was not Will, but the courtly “concealed poet.” No doubt Baconians may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald [121b] that “Bacon wrote Marlowe,” and, by parity of reasoning many urge, though Mr. Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring into Lyly’s comedies the grace and wit, the quips and conceits of his own courtly youth. “What for no?” The hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses, “Bacon wrote Marlowe,” “Bacon wrote Shakespeare.”
The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and are noted even in short educational histories of English literature. Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls, to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly’s plays, and read the poems of the time. I am taking him not to be a dullard but a poet. It was not hard for him, if he were a poet of genius, not only to catch the manner of Lyly’s Court comedies, and “Marlowe’s mighty line” (Marlowe was not “brought up on the knees of Marchionesses”!), but to improve on them. People did not commonly talk in the poetical way, heaven knows; people did not write in the poetic convention. Certainly Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth talked and wrote, as a rule (we have abundance of their letters), like women of this world. There is a curious exception in Letter VIII of the Casket Letters from Mary to Bothwell. In this (we have a copy of the original French), Mary plunges into the affected and figured style already practised by Les Précieuses of her day; and expands into symbolisms in a fantastic jargon. If courtiers of both sexes conversed in the style of Euphues (which is improbable), they learned the trick of it from Euphues; not the author of Euphues from them. Lyly’s most popular prose was accessible to Shakespeare. The whole convention as to how the great should speak and bear themselves was accessible in poetry and the drama. A man of genius naturally made his ladies and courtiers more witty, more “conceited,” more eloquent, more gracious than any human beings ever were anywhere, in daily life.
It seems scarcely credible that one should be obliged to urge facts so obvious against the Baconian argument that only a Bacon, intimately familiar with the society of the great, could make the great speak as, in the plays, they do—and as in real life they probably did not!
We now look at Love’s Labour’s Lost, published in quarto, in 1598, as “corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere.” The date of composition is unknown, but the many varieties of versification, with some allusions, mark it as among the earliest of the dramas. Supposing that Shakespeare obtained his knowledge of fine manners and speech, and of the tedious quips and conceits which he satirises, from the contemporary poems, plays, and novels which abounded in them, and from précieux and précieuses who imitated them, as I suggest, even then Love’s Labour’s Lost is an extremely eccentric piece. I cannot imagine how a man who knew the foreign politics of his age as Bacon did, could have dreamed of writing anything so eccentric, that is, if it has any connection with foreign politics of the time.