There is scarcely any evidence either way; but the fact that the actors were in the habit of receiving their fair copy of these plays from the manager's—William Shakespeare's—own hand, seems to make it evident that he did not originally compose them. Indeed, if Shakespeare had been their author, well-to-do and bustling manager as he was, he would probably have intrusted their transcription to some subordinate or supernumerary; or, better yet, would have kept a playwright of experience to set his compositions for the stage, to put in the necessary localisms, "gags," and allusions to catch the ear of the penny seats. Such a division of labor is imperative to-day, and was imperative then—or at least to suppose that it was not, is to suppose that of his dozen or so of co-managers, William Shakespeare was the one who did all the work, while the others looked on.
But, it is surmised that Shakespeare was his own playwright; took the dramas and rewrote them for the actors; he inserted the requisite business, the exits, and entrances, and—when necessary—suited the reading to the actor who was to pronounce the dialogue, according as he happened to be fat or lean. *
* It may be noted that the line, "He's fat and scant of
breath," does not occur in the early and imperfect edition
of "Hamlet" of 1603. Was it added to suit Burbadge? And was
there a further change made also to suit Mr. Burbadge, the
leading tragedian of the time? In the edition of 1603, the
grave-digger says of Yorick's skull:
Looke you, here's a skull hath bin here this dozen year,
Let me see, ever since our last King Hamlet
Slew Fortenbrasse in combat, young Hamlet's father,
He that's mad.
But in all subsequent editions, the grave-digger says:
"Here's a skull now; this skull has lain i' the earth three
and twenty years." The effect of this alteration is to add
considerably to Hamlet's age. "Alas, poor Yorick!" he says,
"I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most
excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand
times; and now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My
gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed,
I know not how oft," etc. How old, then, was Hamlet when
Yorick died? But Hamlet's age is even more distinctly fixed
by other lines which do not occur in the early edition of
1603:
Hamlet.—How long hast thou been a grave-maker?
First Clown.—Of all the days of the year, I came to 't that
day that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortenbras.
Hamlet.—How long is that since?
First Clown.—Can not tell that? Every fool can tell that;
it was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is
mad and sent to England.
And presently he adds: I have been sexton here, man and boy,
thirty years.
Mr. Marshall writes: "It would appear that Shakespeare added
these details, which tend to prove Hamlet to have been
thirty years old, for much the same reason as he inserted
the line, 'He's fat and scant of breath,' namely, in order
to render Hamlet's age and personal appearance more in
accordance with those of the great actor, Burbadge, who
personated him." The edition of 1603 is generally accounted
a piratical copy of the first sketch of the play.—All the
Year Found.
Such was the employment which fell to the part of William Shakespeare, in the division of labor among the management in which he was a partner, and the resulting manuscript was what Ben Jonson's friends told him of. For nobody, we fancy, quite supposes that the poet, whoever he was, produced "Hamlet" one evening, "Macbeth" on another, and "Julius Cæsar" on another, without blotting or erasing, changing, pruning or tiling a line, and then handed his original drafts to the players next morning to learn their parts from! This is not the way that poems are written (nor, we may add, the way theaters are managed). The greater the geniuses, the more they blotch and blot and dash their pens over the paper when the frenzy is in possession of them. And besides, the fact that there exist to-day, and always have existed, numerous and diverse readings of the Shakespearean text, does very clearly show that their author or authors did, at different times, vary and alter the construction of the text as taste or fancy dictated, and, therefore, that the manuscripts Ben Jonson's friends saw and told him of (and Heminges & Condell, as far as their testimony is of any value, confirm Jonson, for they assert that what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have received from him "scarce a blot in his papers", were the acting copies, and not the original manuscripts of the Shakespearean plays.
With the exception of Ben Jonson (to whose panegyric we devote a chapter in its place further on), the contemporaries of William Shakespeare, who celebrated his death in verse, nowhere assert him to have been the myriad-minded Oceanic (to use Coleridge's adjectives) genius which we conceive him now-a-days—which he must have been to have written the works now assigned to him. Let any one doubting this statement open the pages of Dr. Ingleby's "Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse," a work claimed by its compiler to be inclusive of every allusion to, comment or criticism on Shakespeare, which Dr. Ingleby has been able to unearth in print, dating anywhere within one hundred years of Shakespeare's death. We have industriously turned every page of this work, and will submit to any other who will do the same, the question whether it contains a line which exhibits William Shakespeare as any other than a wit, a successful actor, a poet of the day, a genial and generous friend, a writer of plays, or whether—when eulogistic of the plays called his seven years after his death (a very different list, by the way, than the one assigned him during his life), rather than biographical as to the man, they are of any more value as evidence than Gray's or Milton's magnificent apostrophes to a genius with whom their only familiarity was through report, rumor, or impression derived from the ever immortal works. For, like Gray, Coleridge, Emerson—all that John Milton knew about William Shakespeare was pure hearsay, derived from local report or perusal of the Shakespearean plays ("a book invalued," he calls them). Even if we were called upon to do so, we could hardly conceive Milton—a Puritan, and a blind Puritan at that—as much of a play-goer or boon companion of actors and managers. But we are not called upon to imagine any thing of the sort; for, as a matter of fact, John Milton was exactly seven years and four months old when William Shakespeare died. And so, what is called "the Milton testimony," upon examination, proves to be no testimony at all, but only hearsay—venerable, perhaps—but hearsay, nevertheless; * as utterly immaterial as his "Marbling his native wood notes wild"—a line that might be, not inaptly, applied to Robert Burns, but which suggests almost any thing except the stately and splendid pages of the Shakespearean opera—to which we have before alluded as justifying us, indeed, in wondering if the Puritan poet had ever gone so far, before formulating his opinion, as to open the book assigned to the Shakespeare he wrote of.
* Milton was the enemy of all the ilk. "This would make them
soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rimers
and playwriters be," he says in his essays "of Education,"
in 1634.
And so, in the first place, there was no great call or occasion for discussion as to the authorship of the Shakespearean dramas in the days when they first began to be known by the public; and, as for Mr. Manager Shakespeare's friends, and the actors of his company, they testified to what they had heard, and, if they knew any thing to the contrary, they kept it to themselves. If his friends, jealous of his reputation, they were not solicitous of heralding him a fraud; and if the "stock" upon his pay-roll, they held their bread at his hand, and were not eager to offend him. If—as we shall notice further on—a wise few did suspect the harmless imposition, either they had grounds for not mentioning it, or there were reasons why people did not credit them. And so, in the second place, the times were not ripe for the truth to be known, because there was nobody who cared about knowing it, and nobody to whom it could be a revelation.
To suppose that William Shakespeare wrote the plays which we call his, is to suppose that a miracle was vouchsafed to the race of man in London in the course of certain years of the reign of Elizabeth. If, however, instead of probing for miracles, we come to consider that men and managers and theaters in the age of Elizabeth were very much the same sort of creatures and places that we find them now; that, among the habitues of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in that reign, were certain young gentlemen of abundant leisure and elegant education who admitted managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange for the entre of the green-room; and that managers in those days as in these, were always on the alert for novelties, and drew their material—in the crude, if necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they were so fortunate—from wherever they could find it; if, in short, we find that among the curled darlings who frequented Master William Shakespeare's side doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, at least one ready writer who was so placed as to be eager to write anonymously for bread (and who, moreover, had access to the otherwise sealed and occult knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the giants of his day—to say nothing of the theater-managers—did not and could not dream)—if, we say, we consider all this, we need pin our faith to no miracles, but expect only the ordinary course of human events.
If William Shakespeare were an unknown quantity, like Homer, to be estimated only by certain masterly works assigned to him, this answer might, indeed, be different. For, just as Homer's writings are so magnificent as to justify ascribing to him—so far as mere power to produce them goes—any other contemporary literature to be discovered, so the works attributed to William Shakespeare are splendid enough to safely credit him with the compositions of any body else; of even so great a man as Bacon, for example. But William Shakespeare is no unknown quantity—except that we lose sight of him for the few years between his leaving Stratford, and (as part proprietor of the largest London play-house) accepting Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in His Humour"—we know pretty well all about him. There are half a hundred biographies extant—new ones being written every day—and any one of them may be consulted as to the manner of life William Shakespeare's was. The breakneck marriage bond, which waived all formalities, the consent of any body's parents, justification of sureties, three askings of banns, etc., so he could only be fast married; the beer-bouts, youthful and harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, Sir Thomas Lucy thought, to justify instructing a Warwick attorney to prosecute the lad before the law: all these are matter of record, amply photographing for-us William Shakespeare in Stratford. Then the hiatus—and this same lad appears, prosperous, and in the great town; sending home money to his impoverished family—part proprietor of a theater, purchasing freehold estates in London—a grant of arms for his father—the great house in his native village for his own homestead; investing in the tithings of his county, and beginning a chancery suit to recover lands which his father—in his poverty—had allowed himself to forfeit by foreclosure. Surely we will not go far astray if we set it down that some pretty hard work at what this rising lad found to do in London, and learned to do best, has filled up those unrecorded years! Was all this money made by writing plays for the Globe, or by working on Bacon's Novum Organum, or by other literary labor? Was that the hard work William Shakespeare found to do, and laid up money at, in the interval between his last crop of wild oats at Stratford, and the condescension of the man of affairs in London? If it were, it is curious that no rumor or tradition of it comes from Stratford. Nothing travels quite so fast in rural neighborhoods as a reputation for "book learning," while the local worthy, who has actually written a book of his own, is a landmark in his vicinage. Now, William Shakespeare died one of the richest men—if not the richest—in all Stratford. It is strange that the gossip and goodwives, who so loaded themselves with his boyish freaks and frailties, should never have troubled themselves about his manly pursuits and accomplishments. The only English compositions he is credited within Stratford gossip are one or two excessively conventional epitaphs on Elias James, John a Coombe, and others—the latter of which is only to be appreciated by a familiarity with Warwickshire patois. He sprang from a family so illiterate that they could not write their own name; and, moreover, lived and died utterly indifferent as to how anybody else wrote it—whether with an "x" or a "g," a "c" or a "ks." And as he found them, so he left them. For, although William Shakespeare enjoyed an income of $25,000 (present value of money) at his death, he never had his own children taught to read and write, and his daughter Judith signed her mark to her marriage bond.
That the rustic youth, whom local traditions variously represent as a scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's apprentice, and the like, but never as a school-boy, a student, a reader, a poet—as ever having been seen with a hook in his hand—driven by poverty to shift for himself, should at once (for the dates, as variously given by Mr. Malone and Mr. Grant White, are exceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman about town, Southampton, is almost incredible. But, it is no more incredible than that this ill-assorted friendship can be accounted for by the lad's superhuman literary talents. Southampton never was suspected, during his lifetime, of a devotion to literature, much less of an admiration for letters so rapt as to make him forget the gulf between his nobility and that of a peasant lad—who (even if we disbelieve his earliest biographers as to the holding horses and carrying links) must necessarily have been employed in the humblest pursuits at the outset of his London career. But yet, according to the various "chronologies" (which, in the endeavor to crowd these works into William Shakespeare's short life, so as to tally with the dates—when known—of their production, only vary inconsiderably after all), the Stratford boy hardly puts in his appearance in London before he presents Lord Southampton, as the "first heir of his invention," with—if not the most mature—at least the most carefully polished production that William Shakespeare's name was ever signed to; and, moreover, as polished, elegant, and sumptuous a piece of rhetoric as English letters has ever produced down to this very day.