"Oh, he found it lying around the theater somewhere!"
* "Bunyan," in "Encyclopaedia Britannica," by Macaulay.
** Ibid.
Probably there were encyclopaedias to be fished ont of the mad of the bank-side in those days, of which we can find no mention in the chroniclers! And so, although scarcely a commentator on the glowing text has not paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of this material, leading him on to vaster and more magnificent treasuries at every step, so far as we are able to discover, not one of them has attempted to trace the intellectual experience of the man who wrought it all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. Not one of them has paused to ask the Scriptural question, "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" For, it can not be too incessantly reiterated, the question is not, "Was Shakespeare a poet?" but, "Had he access to the material from which the plays are composed?" Admit him to have been the greatest poet, the most frenzied genius in the world; where did he get—not the poetry, but—the classical, philosophical, chemical, historical, astronomical, geological, etc., etc., information—the facts that crowd these pages?
And let us not be credited, in these pages, with a malignant rejection of every tradition or anecdote that works to William Shakespeare's renown, and a corresponding retention of every tradition or anecdote to his disparagement. For example, if it is asked, Why reject the story of King James's autograph letter, and retain the story of the trespass on Sir Thomas Lucy's deer? the answer must be: first; because, while there is nothing improbable in the latter, there is much of improbability in the former. King James was a king, and kings rarely write autograph letters to subjects. The Lord Chamberlain may give a sort of permission to a haberdasher to call himself haberdasher to Queen Victoria; but it would be vastly improbable that Queen Victoria should write an autograph letter to the haberdasher to that effect. Second, because the poaching story (to use a legal test) appears to be so old that the memory of man runneth not to a time when it was not believed; whereas the King James story first appeared in the year 1710, in a biographical notice affixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one Bernard Lintot. Mr. Lintot gave no authority for the statement whatever, except to say that it rested on the word of "a credible person then living." But everybody can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which rival biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, struggle to get hold of a new fact for their columns, and nobody will wonder that, after Mr. Lintot, no "biographer" omitted to mention it. As a matter of fact, the letter from King James and the letter from Queen Elizabeth, produced by young Ireland, are equally genuine correspondence. But the stories of the latter class, while not beyond question, are at least not improbable, considering the record of the youth Shakespeare at Stratford, while those of the first are certainly improbable on their face, and can be in almost every case traced to their exact source.
So the story of his holding horses, while by no means authentic, (Mr White says it was not heard of until the middle of the last century), is by no means improbable, seeing that the lad ran away to London——and Rowe and the old sexton both agree that he began—as self-made men do—at the bottom. The story of Queen Elizabeth's crossing the stage and dropping her glove, which Shakespeare picked up and presented with an impromptu, Mr. White himself smiles at, with the remark that "the anecdote is plainly one made to meet the craving for personal details of Shakespeare's life," * and he treats it as he does the "Florio" in the British Museum, supposed to have belonged to William Shakespeare, because that name is written——after his mode—on a fly-leaf; with a pleasant wish that he were able to believe in it. *
Far from being of the class that kings delight to honor, it is simply impossible to turn one's researches into any channel that leads into the vicinity of Stratford without noticing the fact that the Shakespeare family left, in the neighborhoods where it flourished, one unmistakable trace familiar in all cases of vulgar and illiterate families; namely, the fact that they never knew or cared, or made an effort to know, of what vowels or consonants their own name was composed, or even to preserve the skeleton of its pronunciation. They answered—or made their marks—indifferently to "Saxpir" or "Chaksper;" or to any other of the thirty forms given by Mr. Grant White, ** or the fifty-five forms which another gentleman of elegant leisure has been able to collect. ***
* Shakespeare's Works. Boston, 1865. Vol. L, p. 80, in, and
see a note to the same volume, pp. 96-7, as to Ratzei's
ghost, surmised to be an allusion to Shakespeare.
* Ib., p. 128.
** Shakespeare's Scholar, pp. 478-480.
*** George Russel French, Shakespeareana Geologicana. p.
348.
In the records of the town council of Stratford, of which John Shakespeare was no unimportant part, the name is written in fourteen different forms, which may be tabulated as follows:——
| 4 times written Shackesper. 3 times written Shackespere. 4 times written Shacksper. 2 times written Shackspere. 13 times written Shakespere. 1 time written Shaksper. 5 times written Shakspere. | 17 times written Shakspeyr. 4 times written Shakysper. 9 times written Shakyspere. 69 times written Shaxpeare. 8 times written Shaxper. 18 times written Shaxpere. 9 times written Shaxspeare. |
In the marriage bond of November 28, 1582, it is twice written, each time Shagspere. On the grave of Susanna, it is Shakespere; and on the other graves of the family, Shakespeare, except that under the bust it is Shakspeare. That is to say, just as many orthographies as there are tombstones and inscriptions. Any lawyer's clerk who has had occasion to search for evidence among the uneducated classes, knows how certainly a lower or higher grade of intelligence will manifest itself primarily in an ignorance of or indifference to one's own name or a corresponding zeal for one's own identity, and anxiety that it shall be accurately "taken down." Whether this infallible rule obtained in the days of the Shakespeares or not, or whether a family, that was so utterly stolid as not to know if their patronymic was spelled with a "c," a "k," or an "x," could have appreciated and bestowed upon their child a classical education (not to ring the changes upon politics, philosophy, etc., right here), is for the reader to judge for himself.