He did the work of a lifetime. Like Mr. Stewart, in New York, he began penniless, and by vigilance, shrewdness, and economy, rose to respectability, affluence, and fortune.
But, as we could not imagine Mr. Stewart, gentleman as he was, writing all the tags and labels on his goods or making with his own hand every pen-stroke necessary in the carrying on of his immense trade; or poems or philosophical essays on the manufacture of the silks and linens and cottons he handled while slowly coining his fortune, and revolving poetry in his overworked brain while overseeing the business that was evolving that fortune; so do we fail to conceive of William Shakespeare doing all the pen-work on the dramas he coins his money by producing on his boards. How much less can we conceive of this man composing, not only poems of his own, but a Literature of his own—drawing his material from the classic writers (and notably from those Greek plays not at that time translated, and only accessible in the originals and in manuscript), from legal works, "caviare to the general;" from philosophical treatises not known to have been available even for reference; writing of the circulation of the blood in the human system—a fact not discovered until years after his own death! Let us find him, too, setting down, in writing, epitomes of all known wisdom; ascertaining the past, prophesying of the future; laying down off-hand the philosopher's, the lawyer's, the leech's, the soldier's, the scholar's craft and art, which only these themselves, by long years of study, might attain to—and all this while coining a fortune in the management of two theaters; to have solved, in short, the riddle of the sphinx and all the as yet unspinning whirligigs of time! Verily, a greater riddle than the sphinx's is this the riddle of the boy—Master Shakespeare. Thomas Chatterton found his wealth in a musty chest in an old muniment room. But here the chest and imminent room were not in existence till years after the boy Shakespeare has been a man, and traveled on to his grave. It is no solution of this riddle to say the lad was a genius, and that genius is that which soars, while education plods. *
* This class of evidence can not be recapitulated in the
space of a foot note, but the curious reader will do well to
refer to the chapter on the attainments of the author of
Shakespeare, at pages 56-65 Holmes's "Authorship of
Shakespeare," third edition.
Genius itself can not account for the Shakespearean plays. Genius may portray, but here is a genius that not only portrayed that which after his death became fact, but related other facts which men had forgotten; the actors in which had lain in the dust for centuries, and whose records had slept sealed in dead languages, in manuscripts beyond his reach! Genius, intuition, is beyond education indeed. It may prophesy of the future or conceive of the eternal; but only knowledge can draw record of the past. If the author of Shakespeare had been a genius only, his "Julius Cæsar" might have been a masterpiece of tragedy, or pathos, or of rage; but it would have portrayed an ideal Rome, not the real one. His "Comedy of Errors" might have been matchless in humor and sparkling in contretemps, but, three years afterward, on translating a hidden manuscript of Plautus, the comedies would not have been found quite identical in argument. *
* Viz: with the Menæchmiof Plautus. In "Pericles," allusion
is made to a custom obtaining among a certain undiscussable
class of Cyprians, which it is fair to say could not be
found mentioned in a dozen books of which we know the names
to-day, and which, from its very nature, is treated of in no
encyclopaedia or manual of information, or of popular
antiquities. How could any one but an antiquarian scholar,
in those days, have possessed himself—not in this alone,
but in a thousand similar instances—of such minute,
accurate, and occult information?
The precocity of a child may be intuitive. But no babe learns its alphabet spontaneously or by means of its genius; but out of a book, because the characters are arbitrary. Pascal, when a child, discovered the eternal principles of geometry, and marked them out in chalk upon the floor; but he did not know that the curved figures he drew were called "circles," or that the straight ones were called "lines;" so he named them "rounds" and "bars." He discovered what was immutable and could be found by the searcher, but his genius could not reinvent arbitrary language that had been invented before his birth. In short, to have possessed and to have written down, in advance, the learning and philosophy of three centuries to come, might have been the gift of Prophecy (such a gift as has ere this fallen from we know not where upon the sons of men) descending into the soul of a conceivable, genius. But who can tell of more than he knows? Second sight is not retrospective. And to have testified of the forgotten past, without access to its record, was as beyond the possibilities of genius as the glowing wealth of the Shakespearean page is above the creation of an unlettered man of business in the age of Elizabeth or of Victoria.
Here is the dilemma with which the Shakespear-eans struggle: that in those years the man William Shakespeare did live, and was a theatrical manager and actor in London; and precisely the same evidence which convinces us that this man did live in those days, convinces the world to-day—or must convince it, if it will only consent to look at it—that the dramas we call Shakespearean were so called because they were first published from the stage of William Shakespeare's theaters in London, just as we call certain readings of the classics the "Delphin classics," because brought together for a Dauphin of Prance; or certain paintings "Düsseldorf paintings," because produced in the Düsseldorf school. If, however, in the course of ages it should come to be believed that the Dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named Düsseldorf painted the pictures, even then the time would come to set the world right. If there had been no Dauphin and no Düsseldorf, we might have assigned those names to a power which might have produced the poems or the pictures. If there had been no William Shakespeare, we might easily have idealized one who could have written the plays. But, unhappily, there was the actual, living, breathing man in possession of that name, who declines to assign it to another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the Shakespeareans want. And, moreover, once the presumption is waived and the question is opened again; there is a mass of evidence in the possession of this century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped together, is a mountain over which the airiest skeptic can not vault.
But did none of William Shakespeare's contemporaries suspect the harmless deception? There is no proof at hand, nor any evidence at all positive, that the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or to have ever pretended to have been, the original author of the text of the plays he gave to his players. Let us hasten to do William Shakespeare the justice to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his having asserted a falsehood. But, if he did so pretend to his intimates, and if the dramas we now call "Shakespearean" were actually produced, in those days, on William Shakespeare's own stage, under that pretension, certainly some of them must have wagged their heads in secret. Surely, Ben Johnson, who bears testimony that his friend Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek," must have queried a little within himself as to where certain things he read in the text of his friend's plays came from, always supposing that he did not know perfectly well where they did come from. It seems more than probable, as we have already said, that, whoever suspected or knew the source of the plays, and who also knew, if such was the fact, that they were claimed as Shakespeare's compositions —had more cue to wink at than to expose the humbug. We find, indeed, that one, Robert Greene, by name, did protest against "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and adapter of other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when he was not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, beeing an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceyt the only Shake-scene in a countrey." That is to say, in language more intelligible at this day, that, being a sort of Jack-of-all-trades around the theater—holding horses, taking tickets, acting a little, putting pieces on the stage, and writing out their parts for the actors—he (Shakespeare) came in time to consider himself a dramatist, a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. Doubtless Greene was inspired by jealousy—for he was a writer of plays for the stage himself—in making and publishing this sneer. But, as he was endeavoring to make his remarks so personal to Shakespeare as to be readily recognized, he would not have alluded to him except by some well-known characteristic. So he calls him a "Jack-of-all-trades," that is, a man who did a little of everything. Is a Jack-of-all-trades about a theater the ideal poet, philosopher, and seer, who wrote the Shakespearean drama—the ideal of the Sliakespeareans?
According to the chronicles and the record, then, one William Shakespeare, a "general utility" actor, and Johannes Factotum, lived and thrived in London, some two hundred and fifty odd years ago. At about that date a book is likewise written. Who are these who find this book, and make this man to fit it? Verily, there are none so blind as those who are determined not to see! To have written that book one must needs have been, let us say—for he was at least all these—a philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a leech, a naturalist, a traveler, a student of Bible history! Strange to say, at the time this book—in portions—is making its appearance, there are two men living, each of whom is a poet, a philosopher, a student of laws and of physics, and a traveler over the by-ways of many lands beside his own. One of them is known to have read the Bible, then what we understand to-day by a "current work." Together, these two men possess in themselves about all of their age with which subsequent ages care to connect themselves. But it is not suggested that these two men, Bacon and Raleigh, might have written the book for which an author is wanted. We are to pass them by, and sift the dust at their illustrious feet, if haply we may find a fetich to fall down before and worship!
Must the man that wrote the dramas have visited Italy? Mr. Halliwell and others inform us of Shakespeare's visit to Verona, Venice, and Florence. Must Shakespeare have been at the bar? My Lord Campbell writes us a book to show his familiarity with the science of jurisprudence. (That book has traveled far upon a lordly name. It is an authority until it happens to be read. Once we open it, it is only to find that, the passages of the Shakespearean dramas which stamp their author's knowledge of the common law are the passages his lordship does not cite, while over the slang and dialect which any smatterer might have memorized from turning the pages of an attorney's hornbook, his lordship gloats and postulates and relapses into ecstasy). Must Shakespeare have been a physician? There have not been wanting the books to prove him that. * And, crowning this long misrule of absurdity, comes an authority out of Philadelphia, to assure us that the youth Shakespeare, on quitting his virgin Stratford for the metropolis, was scrupulous to avoid the glittering temptations of London; that he eschewed wine and women; that he avoided the paths of vice and immorality, and piously kept himself at home, his only companion being the family Bible, which he read most ardently and vigorously! **