Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss."
Whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant that either William Shakespeare or Mistress Hall, or both, were "witty above their sex" or "wise to salvation," cannot, at this date, be determined: but it would seem that this is all the immediate family of William Shakespeare have ever contributed to our knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contemporaries.
But Mr. Malone—and, being the first investigator, he would, doubtless, have been followed, as he has been, whatever the result of his inquiries—Mr. Malone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to whose pages he had recourse, not only assumed all he could not find authority for, but undertook to tell us the precise dates at which his Stratford lad composed the plays themselves. Among other achievements he constructed an admirable "chronology" of the Shakespearean plays; which—with such fanciful variations as have been made to it from time to time since—is an authority with the Sliakespeareans even to this day. To be sure, Mr. Malone did not rely entirely upon external evidence for this apochrypha. He often appeals to the text, as when, for example, he settles the date at which the "Merchant of Venice" was composed—as 1594, because Portia says:
"Even as a flourish when true subjects bow
To a new crowned monarch,"
referring of course, says Mr. Malone, (and this guesswork he not only called "commentary," but has actually succeeded in making all his successor "commentators" accept him as final) to the coronation of Henry IV., of France! Again, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor" he finds the words, (Act I, scene iii) "Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores."
"This shows," says Mr. Malone, "that this comedy must have been written after Sir Walter Raleigh's return from Guinia, in 1696. And so on."
We will not rehearse the scope and burden of Mr. Malone's painstaking and wonderful labors, but, from one instance of the credulity which, once it has overmastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and silly search, we can judge of the calm historical value of his "discoveries." In 1808, Mr. Malone published a pamphlet—"An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of 'The Tempest' were derived, and the Date ascertained." *
* By Edmond Malone. London: printed by C. & R. Baldwin,
Newbridge street, 1808.
The "Tempest" is the most purely fanciful and poetical of
the Shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to
show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it;
that it is all real: the "Magic Island," a real island; the
magician Prospero, a real portrait; the "monster," a real,
living curiosity, which happened to be on exhibition in
England in the days when the play either was written or
about to be written, (it makes no difference to these
gentlemen which) and the storm at sea—as if the brain which
conceived the play could not have conceived—what is not,
now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon thing in the world—
a storm at sea!—a real historical hurricane!
In 1839, the Reverend Joseph Hunter, following in the Malone
footsteps, published "A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin.
Date, etc., of Shakespeare's Tempest," in which the Magic
Island is the island of Lampedusa: first, because it is
uninhabited; secondly, because it is small; thirdly, because
it lies on the route between Naples and the coast of Africa,
so that had a prince been traveling from one to the other,
and wrecked on an island between, he could have been
conveniently wrecked on this one without going out of his
course; fourthly, because it bore the reputation (Mr. Hunter
does not say with whom) of being haunted; fifthly, because
there was a cell upon it, which Pros-pero might have found
most opportune for his ghostly residence; and sixthly, that
the island of Malta gets fire-wood from it. This last fact
being strongest in the way of proof, because we are told
that Prospero impressed Ferdinand into his service and kept
him piling logs of wood.
But it was reserved for Mr. Edward Dowden, in 1881, to
locate the island beyond the necessity of further
conjecture, and to give us accurate sailing directions for
reaching it. "Prospero's Island," he tells us, "was imagined
by Shakespeare as within two days' quick sail of Naples,"
for "Ariel is promised his freedom after two days" (Act I,
scene ii). "Why two days? The time of the entire action of
the Tempest is only three hours. What was to be the
employment of Ariel during two days? To make the winds and
seas favorable during the voyage." (Dowden's Shakespeare's
Mind and Art. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1881. p. 373.)
It seems that Mr. Malone finds reference to a hurricane that once dispersed a certain fleet of a certain nobleman, one Sir George Somers, in July, 1609, on a passage, with provisions, for the Virginia Colony; the above nobleman, and a Sir Thomas Gates, having been wrecked on the island of Bermuda. This discovery is warranty enough for Mr. Malone, and he goes on gravely to argue that William Shakespeare not only wrote his "Tempest" to commemorate this particular tempest—and, as will be seen by an examination of the premises, the relation between the occurrence and the play is confined merely to the word "tempest" and goes no further—but that he (Shakespeare) did not place the scene of his shipwreck on the Bermudas, "because he could spread a greater glamour over the whole by not alluding to so well-known islands as the Bermudas." Mr. Malone further remarks naively that, "without having read Tacitus, he (Shakespeare) well knew that 'omne ignotum pro magnifico est'!" Without pausing to wonder how Mr. Malone knew that Shakespeare of Stratford had never read Tacitus—(a slander, by the way, on the omniscient Shakespeare, too—the man who studied Plautus in Greek manuscript, the author of "Julius Cæsar"—that he had not read a simple Latin historian!)—or to dwell on the most marvelous coincidence between the wreck of Sir George Somers and that of Prince Ferdinand (the coincidence, according to Malone, being, that one was wrecked on the Bermuda and the other wasn't); or ask if a storm at sea was so rare an occurrence as to be easily identified; or to note that "the tempest" in the play of that name is an episode which covers only about a dozen lines of text, and which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the argument—without pausing for this, or to remark that Mil Malone might have taken to himself the 'omne ignotum pro magnifico est' of Tacitus more appositely than heap-plied it either to Sir George Somers or the Bermudas, had he reflected as generously as he took it for granted—it is as well to take our leave of Mr. Malone and his labors at this point, with a compliment to their zeal and impressment which must be withheld from their results. *