At any rate, we have seen the circumstantial evidence has been corroborated by the experts (for so, to borrow a figure, let us call them) Aubrey, Cartwright, Digges, Denham, Fuller, *** and Ben Jonson.
* Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton & Co. Riverside Press,
1859
** Id, p. 100.
*** See the quotation from his "Worthies of England," in
the foot-note, ante, this chapter.
All these assure us (Ben Jonson twice, once in writing and once in conversation) that William Shakespeare was a natural wit—a wag in the crude—but that he wanted art. Old Dominie Ward made a note "to read Shakespeare's plays to post him," but even he had heard that he was a wit, but that he wanted art. * This testimony may not compel conviction, but it is all we have; we must take it, or go without any testimony at all. At any rate, it sustains and is sustained by the circumstances, and these seven different witnesses, at least, testify, without procurement, collusion, or knowledge of the use to be made of their testimony, and opposed to them all is only the little elegiac rhyme by one of themselves:
"Yet must I not give nature all thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare must enjoy a part."
Only one single scrap of mortuary effusion on which to hang the fame of centuries! And if we exclude the circumstantial evidence and the expert testimony as false, and admit the one little rhyme as true, then our reason, judgment, and inner consciousness must accept as the author of the learned, laborious, accurate, eloquent, and majestic Sheakespearean pages, a wag—a funny fellow whose "wit (to quote Jonson again) was in his own power," but not "the rule of it," so much so, "that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."
* Ante, page 68.
Surely it is a much less violent supposition that this funny Mr. Shakespeare—who happened to be employed in the theater where certain masterpieces were taken to be cut up into plays to copy out of them each actor's parts—that this waggish penman, as he wrote out the parts in big, round hand, improved on or interpolated a palpable hit, a merry speech, the last popular song, or sketched entire a role with a name familiar to his boyish ear—the village butt, or sot, or justice of the peace, * may he; or, why not some fellow scapegrace of olden times by Avon banks? He did it with a swift touch and a mellow humor that relieved and refreshed the stately speeches, making the play all the more available and the copyist all the more valuable to the management. But, all the same, how this witty Mr. Shakespeare would have roared at a suggestion that the centuries after him should christen by his—the copyist's—name all the might and majesty and splendor, all the philosophy and pathos and poetry, every word that he wrote out, unblotting a line, for the players!
* He had not failed to see Dogberry and Shallow in the
little villages of Warwickshire—and the wonderful "Watch."
The "Watch" of those days was indeed something to wonder at.
In a letter of Lord Burleigh to Sir Francis Walsingham,
written in 1586, the writer says that he once saw certain of
them standing "so openly in pumps" in a public place, that
"no suspected person would come nigh them;" and, on his
asking them what they stood there for, they answered that
they were put there to apprehend three men, the only
description they had of them was that one of them had a
hooked nose. "If they be no better instructed but to find
three persons by one of them having a hooked nose, they may
miss thereof," reflects Burghley, with much reason. Mr.
Halliwell Phillips, in his "Outline of the Life of William
Shakespeare" (Brighton, 1881), page 66, thinks that this is
unlikely, because the magistrate mentioned by Aubrey would
have been too old in 1642, if he had been the model sought.
It must be conceded, say the new theorists: