Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all the Latin and Greek extant; this poem, dedicated to Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if not a miracle. The genius of Robert Burns found its expression in the idiom of his father and his mother, in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he was born. When he came to London, and tried to warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire; without schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace of that Warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke—the language of his own fireside! As a matter of fact, English, was a much rarer accomplishment in the days when Thomas Jenkins and Thomas Hunt were masters of Stratford Grammar School, than Greek and Latin. Children, in those days, were put at their hic, hæc, hoc at an age when we send them to kindergartens. But no master dreamed of drilling them in their own vernacular. Admitting William Shakespeare to have been born a poet, he must also have been born a master of the arbitrary rules of English rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and prosody, as well, to have written that one poem. But, say the Shakespeareans, even if William did not study English at the Stratford Grammar School, or read it in those crowded days when earning his bread by menial employment in stranger London, he had an opportunity to study Lyly, Nash, Greene, Peele, Chettle, and the rest. But the Shakespearean vocabulary—like the whole canon of the plays—is a thing apart—unborrowed, unimitated, and unlearned from any of these. These were satisfied to write for the stages of the barns called "play-houses," and for their audiences, which—according to all reports—were decidedly indifferent as to scholarship. These might introduce a Frenchman, but they never troubled themselves to make him French; or a Scotchman, but they never stopped to make him Scotch. But even if William Shakespeare, in the immersions of the management, was author of that intellectual Dane, over-refined in a German university of metaphysics, he called Hamlet; or of that crafty Italian, named Iago; or of that Roman iceberg, Brutus—it is quite as difficult to conceive either the skylarking boy in Stratford, where there were no libraries, and his father too poor (not daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest for debt) to buy books; or the self-made man toiling from the bottom rung of poverty to the top of fortune—with leisure to study the characteristics of race and nationality—as acquiring all the grandeur of diction, insight into the human heart (which, at least, is not guess-work), knowledge and philosophy, we call his to-day. Even if we go no further than the "Venus and Adonis"—appearing at a date preluding a drill that, for the sake of the argument, we might even assume—how could that poem have been written by the peasant who only knew his native dialect, or the penniless lad earning his bread in stranger London, at the first shift at hand—with no entre to the great libraries, and no leisure to use one if he had it? Ben Jonson spent some years at Cambridge before he was taken away and set at brickmaking—he is said to have been a very studious brickmaker, working, according to Fuller, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other. As to his career as a soldier—a soldier, when not actually in the field or on the march, may find considerable opportunity for rumination; and, when lying in jail, he would certainly have ample leisure for his Greek and Roman. But Jonson wrote for the Elizabethan theaters; he lived and died hungry and poor, a borrower, over his ears in debt to the last. William Shakespeare, his contemporary, loaned Ben Jonson money; rose rapidly from penury to affluence; made his father rich, and a gentleman with an escutcheon; bought himself the most splendid house in Stratford (so splendid as to be deemed worthy a royal residence by Queen Henrietta); invested in outlying lands; speculated in tithes, and lived, until his death—according to Dominie Ward—at the rate of $25,000 a year. We are familiar enough with these stories of self-made men (so-called) in our daily newspapers. Let those who will, believe that William Shakespeare accumulated this splendid fortune, not by the successful management of the best appointed and affected theater in London, but by writing plays for its stage! and—at the same time—conceived, evolved from his own inner consciousness, all the learning which other playwrights (like Ben Jonson and the rest) were obliged—like ordinary mortals—to get out of books!
The only efforts made to account for this wealth flowing into the coffers of a poet, have been mere surmises, like the story of Southampton's munificence, and of the royal favor of King James, who wrote the manager a letter with his own hand. But neither of these stories happens to be contemporary with William Shakespeare himself. The first was an afterthought of Davenant, who was ten years old when Shakespeare died; and who is not accepted as an authority, even as to his own pedigree, by the very commentators who most eagerly seize upon and swear to his Southampton fiction. The other is not even hearsay, but the bold invention of Bernard Lintot, who published an edition of the plays in 1710. Doubtless, as has been the ambition of all the commentators, before Mr. Collier and since, Lintot was bound to be at least one fact ahead of his rivals, even if he had to invent that fact himself, he vouchsafes, as authority for this tale of the royal letter, however, the statement of "a credible person now living," who saw the letter itself in the possession of Davenant: in the teeth of the certainty that, had Davenant ever possessed such a letter, Davenant would have taken good care that the world should never hear the last of it: and coyly preserves the incognito of the "credible person," whom, however, Oldys conjectures must have been, if any body, the Duke of Buckingham. But, miracles aside, to consider William Shakespeare as the author of the Shakespearean drama—for that he has christened it, and that it will go forever by his name, we concede—involves us in certain difficulties that seem altogether insurmountable. In the first place, scholars and thinkers, whose hearts have been open to the matchless message of the Shakespearean text, and who found themselves drawn to conclude that such a man as William Shakespeare once lived, were amazed to discover that the very evidence which forced them to that conclusion, also proved conclusively that that individual could not have written the dramas since known by his name. Coleridge, Schlegel, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Hallam, Delia Bacon, Gervinus, and, doubtless, many more, clearly saw that the real Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare we have described. "In spite of all the biographies, 'ask your own hearts,' says Coleridge—'ask your own common sense to conceive the possibility of this man being... the anomalous, the wild, the irregular genius of our daily criticism. What! are we to have miracles in sport? or (I speak reverently) does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?'"
"If there was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect," says Hallam—alluding to the fact that all the commentators told him of the man Shakespeare, inferred him as anything but the master he was cited—"there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to learn more." * **
* "Notes to Shakespeare's Works," iv., 56.—Holmes
"Authorship of Shakespeare," 598.
** "Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 26.
This evidence was of three sorts: 1. Official records and documents; 2. The testimony of contemporaries; and, 3. That general belief, reputation, and tradition, which, left to itself in the manner we have indicated, has grown into the presumption of nearly three hundred years. We will not recapitulate the well-thumbed records, nor recite the dog's-eared testimony, which together gave rise to the presumption. But the dilemma presented to the student was in this wise: By the parish records it appeared that a man child was christened in Stratford Church April 26th, (old style) 1564, by the name William. He was the son of one John Shakespeare, a worthy man, who lived by either, or all, the trades of butcher, wool-comber, or glover—three not incompatible pursuits variously assigned him—was, at different times, a man of some means, even of local importance, (becoming, on one occasion, even ale-taster for the town,) and, at his son's birth, owner in freehold of two plots of ground in Stratford village, on one of which plots a low-raftered house now stands, which has come to be a Mecca to which pilgrims from the whole world reverently repair. The next official record of the son so born to John Shakespeare is the marriage-bond to the Bishop of Worcester; enabling this son to wed one Anne Hathaway, his senior in years, which bond remains to this day on file in the office of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.
Later on, the son, having become a person of means, purchases for his father a grant of arms; and (the name being Shakespeare) the heralds allot him an escutcheon on which is represented a shaking spear (symbolically treated)—a device which, under the circumstances, did not tax the heralds' ingenuity, or commit them to any theory about ancestors at Hastings or among the Saracens. The increasing wealth of the son leaves its traces in the title-deeds to and records of purchase of freehold and leasehold possessions, of the investment in meadow-lands, and tithes, and of sundry law suits incidental to these. Local tradition—which in like cases is perforce admitted as evidence—supplements all this record, and, so far as it can, confirms it, until we have an all but complete biography.
This biography the world knows by heart. It does not esteem the boy William Shakespeare the less because he was a boy—because—in the age and period reserved for that crop—he sowed and garnered his "wild oats." It has reason to believe him to have been much more than a mere wayward youth. Aubrey ("old Aubrey," "arch-gossip Aubrey," the Shakespeareans call him, probably because he wrote his sketch fifty years after his subject's death, instead of two hundred and fifty), says that he was the village prodigy, that "he exercised his father's trade—but, when he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech," etc., etc. Nor is there anything in the record of his mature and latter years—of his investments in tithes, and messuages, and homesteads—of his foreclosures and suits for money loaned and malt delivered—of his begetting children and dying; leaving—still with finical detail and nice and exact economy—an elaborate testament, in which he disposes, item by item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down to the second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he tenderly bestows upon the wife of his youth and the mother of his children—any thing at which the world should sneer.
If he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he shows no especial anxiety that posterity shall hear of it. Besides such contracts and business papers as he must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the theaters, and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his name to nothing except a declaration of debt against a poor neighbor who is behind-hand with his account, footed at one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence, and a not over-creditable last Will and Testament. This is his own business, and who has any thing to say? But, when our biographers go a step further and demand that we shall accept this as the record of a demigod; of the creator of a "Hamlet" and an "Othello;" and this practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to London—worked himself up (as he must have worked himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater; and, in that business and calling earned money and kept it—as the identical man who singly and alone wrote the "Hamlet," the ".Julius Cæsar," the "Othello," and all the splendid pages of the Shakespearean drama—some of us have been heard to demur! The scholar's dilemma is how to reconcile the internal evidence of the plays, which is spread before them undimmed by age, with these records, which are as authentic and beyond question as the internal evidence itself. And, once stated, the dilemma of the scholar becomes the dilemma of the whole world. Let any one try to conceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employment to-day—when the theater is at its best, and half the world play-goers—precarious for capital and industry; but in those days an experiment, in every sense of the word), who succeeded by vigilance, exact accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in securing and saving not only a competency, but a fair fortune; in the mean time—while engaged in this engrossment of business—writing Isabella's magnificent appeal to the duke's deputy, Angelo; or Cardinal Wolsey's last soliloquy! Or conceive of the man who gave the wife of his youth an old bedstead, and sued a neighbor for malt delivered, penning Antony's oration above Cæsar, or the soliloquy of Macbeth debating the murder of Duncan, the invocation to sleep in "King Henry IV.," or the speech of Prospero, or the myriad sweet, or noble, or tender passages that nothing but a human heart could utter! Let him try to conceive this, we say, and his eyes will open to the absurdity of the belief that these lines were written by the lessee and joint-manager of a theater, and he will examine the evidence thereafter for corroboration, and not for conviction; satisfied in his own mind, at least, that no such phenomenon is reasonable, probable, or safe to have presented itself.
Then, last and greatest difficulty of all, is the Will. This is by far the completest and best authenticated record we have of the man William Shakespeare, testifying not only to his undoubtedly having lived, but to his character as a man; and—most important of all to our investigation—to his exact worldly condition. Here we have his own careful and ante-mortem schedule of his possessions, his chattels real and chattels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety bedstead under his roof. And we may be pretty sure that it is an accurate and exhaustive list. But if he were—as well as a late theater-manager and country gentleman—an author and the proprietor of dramas that had been produced and found valuable, how about these plays? Were they not of as much value, to say the least, as a damaged bedstead? Were they not, as a matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual source of his wealth? How does he dispose of them? Does our thrifty Shakespeare forget that he has written them? Is it not the fact, and is it not reason and common sense to conceive, that, not having written them, they have passed out of his possession along with the rest of his theatrical property, along with the theater whose copyrights they were, and into the hands of others? This is the greatest difficulty and stumbling-block for the Shakespeareans. If their hero had written these plays, of which the age of Elizabeth was so fond, and in whose production he had amassed a fortune—that he should have left a will, in items, in which absolutely no mention or hint of them whatever should be made, even their most zealous pundits can not step over, and so are scrupulous not to allude to it at all. This piece of evidence is unimpeachable and conclusive as to what worldly goods, chattels, chattel-interests, or things in action, William Shakespeare supposed that he would die possessed of. Tradition is gossip. Records are scant and niggardly. Contemporary testimony is conflicting and shallow, but here, attested in due and sacred form, clothed with the foreshadowed solemnity of another world, is the calm, deliberate, ante mortem statement of the man himself. We perceive what becomes of his secondhand bedstead. What becomes of his plays? Is it possible that, after all these years' experience of their value—in the disposition of a fortune of which they had been the source and foundation—he should have forgotten their very existence?
But if, diverging from the scanty records, we go to the testimony of contemporaries, what do we find there? Very little more of the man William Shakespeare, but precisely the same dilemma as to his alleged authorship of the plays. We find that the country lad William, the village prodigy with whom the gossips concerned themselves, was no milksop and no Joseph; that he was hail-fellow with his fellows of equal age; that he poached—shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned their owner when punished for the offense; went on drinking-bouts with his equals of the neighboring villages; and, finally—-just as any clever, country lad, who had made his fellows merry with mock eulogies over the calves he slaughtered might and probably would do to-day, and which is precisely what his earliest and, therefore, safest biographer, Howe, asserts that he did do—wound up with following a company of strolling players to the metropolis; where he began his prosperous career by holding gentlemen's horses at the theater door, while the gentlemen themselves went inside to witness the performance. We turn to the stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting, and the beer-drinking, with relief. It is pleasant to think that the pennywise old man was—at least in his youth—human. A little poaching and a little beer do nobody any harm, and it is, at all events, more cheerful reading than the record of a parsimonious freeholder taking the law of his poorer neighbor who defaults in the payment of a few shillings for a handful of malt. There is a village school in Stratford, and Mr. De-Quincy, and all his predecessors and successors who have preferred to construct pretty romances, and call them "lives of William Shakespeare," rather than to accept his known and recorded youth, boldly unite in making their hero attend its sessions. Their assertions are bravely seconded by the cicerones and local guides of Stratford, who, for a sixpence, will show you the identical desk which Shakespeare, the lad, occupied at that grammar school; and at Shottery, the same guides show us the chair in which our hero sat while courting Mistress Anne; just as, in Wittemburg, these same gentry point out the house where Hamlet lived when a student in the University there; or, in Scotland, the spot where Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu fought. But, William could not have attended this school very perseveringly, since he turns up in London at about the age that country lads first go to school. In London, he seems to have risen from nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of co-manager, along with a dozen others, of a theater. Here, just as young lords and swells take theater managers into their acquaintance to-day, he became intimate with greater men than himself, and so enlarged his skirts and his patronage, as it was the part of a thrifty man to do. At this time there were no circulating libraries in London, no libraries, accessible to the general public, of any sort, in fact; no booksellers at every corner, no magazines or reviews; no public educators, and no schools or colleges swarming with needy students; even the literature of the age was a bound-up book to all except professional readers. But, for all that, this William Shakes-peare—this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a term at Stratford school (admitting that he went where the romancers put him), cuts off to London at the heels of a crew of strolling players—who begins business for himself somewhere (perhaps as "link-boy" at a theater door, but we may be sure, at an humble end of some employment) and, by saving his pence, works up to be actually a part-proprietor in two theaters, and ultimately a rich man—begins to possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the Past which, even to-day, with all our libraries, lyceums, serials, and booksellers, it would need a lifetime to acquire.