The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief."
Now, exclaim the men who upho'd the stage manager's ability to read Greek, the idea of this is from Anacreon, and they give the ode in which William Shakespeare found it. Not so fast, says Dr. Farmer. He might have taken it from the French of Ronsard, a French poet: because one Puttenham, in his "Arte of English Poesie," published in 1589, speaks of some one—of a "reasonable good facilitie in translation, who, finding certain of Anacreon's odes very well translated by Ronsard, the French poet—comes a minion and translates the same out of French into English," and "on looking into Ronsard I find this very ode of Anacreon among the rest!" Letting pass the far-fetched conjecture which aims to prove that William Shakespeare could not read Greek by showing that he could reach French—or the observation, that the sum of Dr. Farmer's arguments (for the above is a sample of each and all of them) amounts simply to this, that: though the manager knew no Greek—he knew where every thing contained in Greek was to be obtained in translation: the question for us is simply, Why should the stage-manager have recourse to either Anacreon or Ronsard for a meteorological episode? This, and a thousand like passages, are nothing but digressions, with nothing whatever to do with the action or by-play of the comedy or tragedy in which they occur, and not apposite to anything else in the part of the speakers who pronounced them. A scholar might be unable to keep them out; but why should a stage-manager—fitting a spectacle to the acting necessities of his boards or to the humor of his audience—put them in? Whereas, if a scholar did write the manuscript play and sell it to a stage-manager, it is useless to ask why the stage-manager did not cut out the digression or why he left it in, for that was a mere matter of whim or circumstance, not worth our while to speculate over. Dr. Farmer went just far enough to see that, if the William Shakespeare of history wrote the Book, something must be done to account for his access to the material he wrought with. If the Doctor had kept on a little further, the truth would have dawned upon him. But, as it was, he (without looking for them) observed traces of what he believed to be two hands in the Plays, and so followed Theobald. He says of Hamlet, that he considered it "extremely probable that the French ribaldry in the last scene of Hamlet was the work of another than the author of the body of the work"—but the hint was altogether lost on him. He looked no further, and so lived and died unsuspicious of the truth—namely, that it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was William Shakespeare's. The "without blotting a line" of Ben Jonson—not a mere form of speech, but a fact, confirmed by Heminges and Condell, the editors of the "first folio" of 1623, who say in their preface, "we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers"—as we shall see further on, ought to have itself awakened suspicion. Lope de Vega, the Spaniard, who supplied his native stage with upward of two thousand original dramas—who is computed to have written upward of 21,300,000 verses, and who wrote so hurriedly that he never had time to unravel his intrigues, but cut them all open "with a knife" in the last act—probably did write "without blotting a line." At least so Mr. Hallam thinks, adding that, "nature would have overstepped her bounds, and have produced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with this rapidity and invention, attained perfection in any department of literature." * But in the case of these marvelous Shakespeare plays, it was preferred to believe that nature had "produced the marvelous," rather than accept the simple truth that what Hem-inges and Condell and Ben Jonson saw, were the engrossed parts written out for each actor, and not the first drafts of the poet, improvising as he wrote.
* Literature of Europe, part ii., ch. vi., § 8.
Except that Mr. Spedding, in the "Gentleman's Magazine" for February, 1852, printed a paper "Who wrote Shakespeare's Henry VIII?"—in which he claimed to have found startling traces of two hands in that play, (and possibly some other floating papers which have escaped our search)—prior to the year 1852 it had occurred to nobody (except Kitty, in "High Life Below Stairs") to ask the question, "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" But, in August of that year an anonymous writer, in Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal," distinctly and for the first time discussed the question, "Who wrote Shakespeare?"—when, after going overmuch of the ground we have already traversed, arrived, to his own "extreme dissatisfaction," (as he says, at the conclusion), that William Shakespeare "kept a poet." It is curious to find this anonymous writer dealing, as airily as Lady Bab herself, with the question: and (while unconscious of the elaborate network of evidence he might have summoned, and suggesting no probable author by name) actually foreshadowing the laborious conviction which, four years later, Delia Bacon was to announce. He surmises, indeed, that William Shakespeare was a sort of showman, whose interest in the immortal plays was a purchased interest—precisely what the law at present understands by "proprietary copyright."
"The plays apparently arise... as the series goes on; all at once Shakespeare, with a fortune, leaves London, and the supply ceases. Is this compatible with a genius thus culminating, on any other supposition than the death of the poet and the survival of the employer?" Of this supposititious hack-author, who dies, and leaves to William Shakespeare the halo of his genius as well as the profit of his toil, this anonymous writer draws a picture that has something familiar in its coloring. "May not William Shakespeare," he asks, "the cautious, calculating man, careless of fame, and intent only on money-making, have found, in some farthest garret over-looking the 'silent highway of the Thames,' some pale, wasted student... who, with eyes of genius gleaming through despair, was about, like Chatterton, to spend his last copper coin upon some cheap and speedy means of death? What was to hinder William Shakespeare from reading, appreciating, and purchasing these dramas, and thereafter 'keeping his poet,' like Mrs. Packwood?
With this view the disputed passages—those in which critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting—the meretricious ornaments sometimes crowded in—the occasional bad taste—in short, all the imperfections discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, are reconcilable with their being the interpolations of Shakespeare himself on his poet's works. * Miss Delia Bacon, a remarkable lady, followed in a paper printed in "Putnam's Magazine," in its issue of January, 1856, (and therefore must have written it in 1855), and was supposed therein to distinctly announce and maintain that Lord Bacon—her namesake by coincidence—was the "Shakespeare" wanted—a supposition which, as we shall see, was erroneous.
* Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal,"'August 7, 1852, p. 88.