Ephemera Critica; Or, Plain Truths About Current Literature

by John Churton Collins

"I know each lane, and [every alley green,]

Dingle or bushy dell of this wild wood,

And every bosky bourne from side to side,

My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood,"

has thridded it, and taught others to thrid it, as no one else has done. And he will have his reward. He has produced what deserves to be, and what will probably become, the standard life of our great national poet.

Mr. Lee's book is substantially a reproduction of his article on Shakespeare, contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, the high merits of which have long been recognised by scholars; and he has certainly done well to make that article popularly accessible by reprinting it in a separate form. But the present volume is not a mere reproduction of his contribution to the Dictionary; it is much more. He has here filled out what he could there sketch only in outline; what he could there state only as results and conclusions, he here illustrates and justifies by corroboration and proof. He has, moreover, both in the text and in the appendices, brought together a great mass of interesting and pertinent collateral matter which the scope of the Dictionary necessarily precluded.

More than a century ago George Steevens wrote: "All that can be known with any degree of certainty about Shakespeare is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married and had children there, went to London, where he commenced actor, wrote poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried there." And, if we set aside probable inferences, this is all we do know of any importance about his life. His pedigree cannot certainly be traced beyond his father. Nothing is known of the place of his education—that he was educated at the Stratford Grammar School is pure assumption. His life between his birth and the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593, is an absolute blank. It is at least doubtful whether the supposed allusion to him in Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit, and in Chettle's Kind Heart's Dream have any reference to him at all; it is still more doubtful whether the William Shakespeare of Adrian Quiney's letter, or of the Rogers and Addenbroke summonses, or the William Shakespeare who was assessed for property in St. Helens, Bishopsgate, was the poet. We know practically nothing of his life in London, or of the date of his arrival in London; we are ignorant of the date of his return to Stratford, of his happiness or unhappiness in married life, of his habits, of his last days, of the cause of his death. Not a sentence that fell from his lips has been authentically recorded. At least one-half of the alleged facts of his biography is as purely apocryphal as the life of Homer attributed to Herodotus.

But probability, as Bishop Butler says, is the guide of life, and on the basis of probability may be raised, it must be owned, a fairly satisfactory biography. Mr. Lee has not been able to contribute any new facts to Shakespeare's life, which is certainly not his fault; but he has given us a recapitulation, as lucid as it is exhaustive, of all that the industry of successive generations of memorialists from Ben Jonson to Halliwell Phillipps has succeeded in accumulating, and he has been as judicious in what he has rejected as in what he has adopted. From the curse of the typical Shakespearian biographer—we mean the statement of mere inference and hypothesis as fact—he is absolutely free. He has done excellent service in giving, if not finishing, at least swashing blows to the monstrous fictions of the theorists on the sonnets, particularly to the Fitton-Pembroke mare's nest, fictions which have been gradually generating a Shakespeare, as purely apocryphal as the Roland of the song or the Apollonius of Philostratus.

Mr. Lee's most remarkable contribution to speculative Shakespearian criticism, in which, we are glad to say, he does not often indulge, is his contention that the W. H. of the dedication to the sonnets was William Hall, a small piratical stationer. It is never wise to speak positively on what must necessarily be, till certain evidence is obtainable, a matter of speculation. But we are very much inclined to think that Mr. Lee's contention has at least something in its favour. Our readers will remember that one of the chief points in the enigma of the sonnets is the dedication, and it runs thus: "To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." It has generally been assumed that the "W. H." is the youth who is the hero of the first group of sonnets, and the poet's friend, and he has commonly been identified either with William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, or with Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The difficulties in the way of either hypothesis—and on each hypothesis not Babels merely, but cities of Babels have been raised—are to an unprejudiced mind insurmountable. Mr. Lee maintains with plausible ingenuity, but not, we think, conclusively, that there is no proof that the youth of the sonnets was named "Will" at all. His analysis of the "Will" sonnets is a masterpiece of subtle ingenuity, and well deserves careful attention. He then proceeds to adopt the theory that the word "begetter" is not to be taken in the sense of "inspirer," but simply as "procurer" or "obtainer" of the sonnets for T. T., i.e., the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. In other words, that Thorpe dedicated the sonnets to W. H., in return for W. H. having piratically obtained them for him. This is at least doubtful. In the first place it may reasonably be questioned whether "begetter" could have the meaning which is here assigned to it; the passages quoted from Hamlet ("acquire and beget a temperance") and from Dekker's Satiro-mastix, "I have some cousins german at Court shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King's Revels," are anything but conclusive. Still, Thorpe, who is by no means remarkable for the purity of his English, may have used it in the sense which Mr. Lee's theory requires.

Shakespeare's sonnets, as is well known, were circulating among his friends in manuscript, and Mr. Lee has discovered that one William Hall was well known as an Autolycus among publishers, and had already edited, under the initials W. H., a collection of poems left by the Jesuit poet, Southwell—in other words had already done for the publisher, George Eld, what it is assumed that he now did for Thomas Thorpe. Mr. Lee's theory is, it must be admitted, plausible, and few would hesitate to pronounce it far more probable than the theory which would identify the enigmatical initials with the names of Pembroke or Southampton.