Of course, it can be well urged that all this is mere negative evidence; that not only three but three million of men might be found who had never mentioned or ever heard of Shakespeare, without affecting the controversy either way. But, under the circumstances, in view of what the Shakespearean plays are, and of what their author must have been, and of when and where these three men—Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew—lived and flourished, the chronicles left by these three men—Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew—constitute, at the very least, a "negative pregnant" not to be omitted in any review of our controversy that can lay the faintest claim to exhaustiveness or sincerity; and, moreover, a negative pregnant which—if we admitted all the Ben Jonson testimony, in prose and poetry, as evidence on the one side—could not be excluded as evidence on the other. In which event it is fairest to the Shakespeareans to rule Ben out altogether. **
* And we might add to these Sir John Davies, Selden, Sir
John Beaumont, Henry Vaughn, Lord Clarendon and others.
** It is fair to note that another "negative pregnant"
arises here, to which the Shakespeareans are as fairly
entitled as the other side to theirs. Sir Tobie Matthew died
in 1655. He survived Shakespeare thirty-nine years, Bacon
twenty-nine years, and Raleigh thirty-seven years! Left in
possession of the secret of the Baconian authorship, how
could such a one as Matthew let the secret die with him?
Although we do not meet with it among the arguments of the
Shakespeareans, this strikes us as about the strongest they
could present, except that the answer might be that at the
date of Matthew's death, 1655, the Shakespearean plays were
not held in much repute, or that Matthew might have reserved
his unbosoming of the secret too long; but it is only one
fact among a thousand.
Besides, Ben is what the Scotchmen call "a famous witness" (if the commentators, who enlarge on Shakespeare's bounty and loans to him, can be relied upon), as being under heavy pecuniary obligation to the stage manager, and so his testimony is to be scrutinized with the greatest care, though he certainly did not allow his obligations to over-master him when writing the "Discoveries." But, in any event, it would be easier to believe that Ben Jonson once contradicted himself for the sake of a rhyme, and to "do the handsome thing" by the memory of an old friend and unpaid creditor, than to swallow the incredible results of a literal version of his prose and poetry, read by the light of the Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew remains. And the conclusion of the matter, it seems to us, must be: either that the poetry was the result of his obligations to William Shakespeare and to William Shakespeare's memory, or that, having sworn on both sides, Mr. Ben Jonson stands simply dehors the case—a witness for neither.
It is not, then—it is very far from being—because we know so little of the man Shakespeare that we disbelieve in his authorship of the great works ascribed to him. It is because we know so much. No sooner did men open their histories, turn up the records and explore the traditions and trace the gossip of' the Elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in the face. Long before any "Baconian theory" arose to account for these anomalies: at the instant these plays began to be valued for any thing else than their theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the man to his verse" began to be troublesome. "To be told that he played a trick on a brother actor in a licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote 'Lear,'" cried Mr. Hallam. *
* "I laud," says Hallam, "the labors of Mr. Collier, Mr.
Hunter, and other collectors of such crumbs, though I am not
sure that we should not venerate Shakespeare as much if they
had left him undisturbed in his obscurity.... If there was a
Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of
heaven, and it is of him we desire to know something."
"Every accession of in formation we obtain respecting the man Shakespeare renders it more and more difficult to detect in him the poet," cries Mr. William Henry Smith. * "I am one of the many," testifies Mr. Furness, "who have never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary space of each other; are there any other two things in the world more incongruous?" **
* "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 886.
** In a letter to Judge Holmes, printed at p. 628, third
edition, of the latter's "Authorship of Shakespeare."
It was necessary, therefore, in order to preserve a belief in the Shakespearean authorship, either that William Shakespeare should be historically known as a man of great mental power, a close student of deep insight into nature and morals—a poet, philosopher, and all the rest—or else that, by a failure of the records, history should be silent altogether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time have made it impossible to recover any details whatever as to his tastes, manners, and habits of life. In such a case, of course, there would remain no evidence on the subject other than that of the plays themselves, which would, of course, prove him precisely the myriad-minded genius required. In other words, it was only necessary to so cloud over the facts as to make the "Shakespearean miracle" to be, not that William Shakespeare had written the works, but—that history should be so silent concerning a "Shakespeare!" So long as the Shakespeareans could cry, "Behold a mysterious dispensation of Providence—that, of the two mightiest poets the world has ever held—Homer and William Shakespeare—we know absolutely nothing!"—so long as they could assign this silence to the havoc of a great deluge or a great fire, just so long the name "William Shakespeare" was as good and satisfactory a name as any other, and nobody could propose a better. But they can cry so no longer. It is not because we know so little, but because we know so much about the Stratford boy, that we decline to accept him as the master we not only admire and love, but in whose pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery anticipated. As a matter of fact, through the accident of his having been a part-proprietor in one of the earliest English play-houses, we know pretty accurately what manner of man he was. We know almost every thing about him, in short, except—what we do know about Homer—that the words now attributed to him were his. Homer, at least, we can trace to his "Iliad" and his "Odyssey," as he sang them in fragments from town to town. But neither to his own pen nor his own lips, and only problematically (as we shall see further on) to his own stage, can we trace the plays so long assigned to William Shakespeare. Let the works be placed in our hands for the first time anonymously; given the chronicles of the age of Elizabeth and James in which to search for an author of these works, would any thing we found in either lead us to pronounce William Shakespeare their author? And has any thing happened since to induce us to set aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion to blindly and obediently believe that William Shakespeare was not the man he was, lest we should be "disrespectful to our birthright?"
Nothing whatever has happened since, except the labors of the commentators. By the most painfully elaborate explorations on the wrong track, by ingenious postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering carefully clear of the records, they have evolved a butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a divinity student, a a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker—but, after all, a Shakespeare. That the error, in the commencement, was the result of carelessness, there can be no doubt. But that, little by little—each commentator, either in rivalry for a new fact, and jealous to be one item ahead of his competitor (even if obliged to invent it out of hand), or being too indolent to examine for himself, or too subservient to authority to rebel—it grew to vast proportions, we have only to look at the huge "biographies" of the last half century to be assured. It will not detain us long, as an example of these, to briefly glance at the labors of one of the most intrepid of the ilk to identify the traditional poet with the traditional man. In 1839, Thomas De Quincy contributed to the "Encyclopædia Britannica" its article "Shakespeare." That about the story of the prankish Stratford lad, who loved, and wooed and won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smoky-raftered cottage in Stratford town and the snug little thatch at Shottery trudged every sunset to do his courting, there lingers the glamour of youth, and love, and poetry, no patron of the "Encyclopædia" would probably have doubted. But that a staid and solemn work, designed for exact reference, should have printed so whimsical a fancy sketch as Mr. De Quincy supplied to it, and that it should have been allowed to remain there, must certainly command surprise. There can surely be complaint as to the variety of the performance. Mr. De Quincy very ably and gravely speculates as to the size of the dowry old Hathaway gave his daughter; as to whether old John Shakespeare mortgaged his homestead to keep up appearances; and whether that gentleman received the patronage of Stratford corporation when (as there is no direct authority for saying they did not) they had occasion to present a pair of gloves to some favored nobleman (and this portion of the composition winds up with a history of gloves and glove-making which can not fail to interest and instruct the reader). And his speculations as to whether the messengers who sped to Worcester for the "marriage-lines" did or did not ride in such hot haste, in view of an expected but premature Susannah, that they gave vicious orthographies of the names "Shakspeare" and "Hathaway" to the aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially pretty reading. But—with facilities in 1839 for writing a history of the Stratford lad, which the Stratford lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors, two hundred years and more before Mr. De Quincy, seem never to have possessed—Mr. De Quincy quite surpasses himself in setting us exactly right as to William Shakespeare. And, first, as to the birthday. There has always been a sort of feeling among Englishmen that their greatest poet ought to have had no less a birthday than the day dedicated to their patron saint. The Stratford parish records certifying to the christening of William Shakespeare on the 26th day of April, 1564 (which Mr. De Quincy forgets was "old style," and so, in any event, twelve days before the corresponding date in the present or "new style"), and the anniversary of St. George being fixed for celebration on the 23d of April, it had come to be unanimously resolved by the commentators that, in Warwickshire, it was the custom to christen infants on the third day after birth, and that, therefore, William Shakespeare was born on the anniversary of St. George, April 23, 1564. To baptise a three-days-old baby, in an English April, a period five days earlier than, in the mild latitude of Palestine, the Israelites thought it necessary to circumcise their infants, seems a very un-English proceeding. So Mr. De Quincy, who would rather perish than mislead, thinks, after all, the birth might have been a day earlier. "After all," he says, "William might have been born on the 22d. Only one argument," he gravely proceeds, "has sometimes struck us for supposing that the 22d might be the day, and not the 23d, which is, that Shakespeare's sole granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was married on the 22d of April, ten years exactly from the poet's death, and the reason for choosing this day might have had a reference to her illustrious grandfather's birthday, which, there is good reason for thinking, would be celebrated as a festival in the family for generations!" But even Mr. De Quincy appears to concede that, in writing history, we must draw the line somewhere; for he immediately adds, "Still this choice may have been an accident" (so many things, that is to say, are likely to be considered in fixing a marriage-day, besides one's grandfather's birthday!), "or governed merely by reason of convenience. And, on the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the old belief that Shakespeare was born and died on the 23d of April. We can not do wrong if we drink to his memory both on the 22d and 23d." *
* Mr. De Quincy's own estimate of this performance we take
from a preface to the article itself, in the American
edition of his collected works (Boston: Shepard & Gill,
1873), vol. xv., p. 11: "No paper ever cost me so much
labor; parts of it have been recomposed three times over."
And again, "William Shakespeare's article cost me more
intense labor than any I ever wrote in my life and, I
believe, if you will examine it, you will not complain of
want of novelty." We should say not.