Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem
Terra tegit, populus mæret, Olympus habet:
“Earth covers, Olympus” (heaven? or the Muses’ Hill?) “holds him who was a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art, a Virgil; a Socrates for his Dæmon” (“Genius”). As for the “Genius,” or dæmon of Socrates, and the permitted false quantity in making the first syllable of Socrates short; and the use of Olympus for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient to consult the learning of Mr. Elton. [186b] The poet who made such notable false quantities in his plays had no cause to object to another on his monument. We do not know who erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) “a clayver man.” The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare’s daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall. They exhibit a taste for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription. Mrs. Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. [187a] It opens like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of Christian mysticism. Mr. Hall possesses, perhaps arranged for himself, a few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph.
The famous “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear,” and so on, on the stone in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first of “the last lines written, we are told,” [187b] “by the author of Hamlet.” Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel? Is it conceivable that the authority for Shakespeare’s authorship of the doggerel is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen’s in 1693, from a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says,—criticism makes the clerk twenty years younger. [187c] For Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William Shakspere of Stratford.
Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will’s daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father’s intelligence.
“Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of Him with whom she’s now in bliss.” [187d]
Thirty-three years after Shakespeare’s death he was still thought “witty” in Stratford. But what could Stratford know? Milton and Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of the generation after Shakespeare. But they did not know, how should they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the plays and poems. The secret, perhaps, so widely spread among “the friends of the Muses” in 1616, was singularly well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a general rule.
I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about his monument and his grave, and asks if he “died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might move his bones? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!” [188a] And the authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon his lips?
About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost after Shakespeare’s death, W. Hall, a Queen’s man, Oxford (the W. Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare’s signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford, and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow of Queen’s. Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author of the mean and vulgar curse. He adds that there was a great ossuary or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug up were piled, “they would load a great number of waggons.” Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style intelligible to clerks and sextons, “for the most part a very ignorant sort of people.”
If Shakespeare did, that accommodation of himself to his audience was the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. [189a] Of course there is no evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse: that he did is only the pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.
Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot enter. Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio, but Ben, as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio “a good send-off.” The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait, if from any, it was executed. Richard Burbage is known to have amused himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand on a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor. If so, he may have succeeded no better than Mary Stuart’s embroiderer, Oudry, in his copy of the portrait of her Majesty.