Shakespere’s Chairs.
Strange Form of Marriage Licence.
Shakespere’s Later Home at New Place.
Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays? A Guess at the Truth.
Mr. Donnelly and the Cryptogram, with Supplement and Notes on Various Subjects.
BY
REV. SCOTT SURTEES,
OF
Dinsdale-on-Tees.
CHAPTER I.
William Shakespere’s Epitaphs and Chairs at Stratford-on-Avon.
There is one point above all others which bears strongly against the theory that William Shakspere, of Stratford-on-Avon, was the author of the so-called Shakespeare’s Plays, and that is the audacious doggerel which has been fathered on his memory. William Shakspere, after a disreputable youth, marrying at 17 or 18 a woman many years older than himself, whose child was soon after born, the son of a father who could not write his name, and in debt and difficulty, and who himself (père) had been within the clutches of the law, found his native place too hot to hold him, and if the universal tradition on the subject is worth anything, having a warrant out against him for poaching, “flitted” to London, became a stage-player, went in for speculation in building a theatre, laid out his modest earnings judiciously, bought a house in his native place, another in London “within the precinct of the late Black Fryers,” retired to New Place, died, and was buried in the church of that dirty town, in 1616, in the chancel, and his epitaph inscribed at his request upon his tomb. He appears to have been in the habit of writing or quoting such, and got the credit for this sort of poetry from his companions. It is plain from the evidence I produce (p. 7) that in and about those years it was the custom in London churches to put verses of questionable merit on monuments and tombs, that it was usual to “crib” or copy them from some one else, and use them as their own. The instances I give (and their name is legion) shows this clearly to have been an every-day practice. The play-actor, with a memory sharpened “by learning his parts,” had no doubt seen them on the walls of churches during his residence in London, and was in the habit of repeating and passing off as his own these doggerel rhymes for the edification and amusement of his companions and select friends; but when asked to give them an extempore one (evidently there was a leetle doubt as to his powers of composition), knocked off one or two much inferior to those his memory had retained (p. 11). What a specimen of their high literary taste and also of his own, requesting to have such rubbish inscribed upon his grave! No doubt there were many other such-like epitaphs in churches in London which have been destroyed or effaced by lapse of time, but these are a sufficient specimen to show how little variation there is in them, and that mainly in the spelling. The epitaph on the stone over Shakspere’s grave has been pressed into the service by a believer in his writings to prove—first, that he “curst those who should move his bones,” because that he was fearful that when his renown was acknowledged, his bones would be moved from their last resting-place in the Stratford that he loved, to find a grave (they have a monument) in Westminster Abbey! and secondly, by a non-believer, that when the imposture was found out, they would be exhumed and cast out to the four winds of heaven! But how about poor “Virginea optima vita El. 21,” whose Covent Garden grave had on its surface the same curse “for he that moves my bones”? Did her people fear that some after-scandal might occur to show that she was no better than Ann Hathway or Jane Shore, and her ashes be scattered in the swollen flood of the Fleet stream! or that an unknown princess or poetess unrecognised, cared not for a niche in Poet’s Corner or a sepulchre amongst the great ones of the land, should her real self and character ever be found out! In searching for epitaphs of a similar style I found the following, which I give as illustrative of what I have mentioned above. They are extracted from an ancient folio, 1736 A.D., The History of London, by William Maitland, F.R.S., which gives an account of the several parishes and churches.