I have therefore arrived at the conclusion that the whole article was really intended to poke fun at the generally received notion that the author of the plays was an unlettered man, who picked up his knowledge at tavern doors and in taprooms and tennis courts. I would specially refer to the passage where Bacon asks "How frame you such interlocutors as Brutus and Coriolanus?" and Shakspeare replies "By searching histories, in the first place, my Lord, for the germ. The filling up afterwards comes rather from feeling than observation. I turn myself into a Brutus or a Coriolanus for the time and can at least in fancy partake sufficiently of the nobleness of their nature to put proper words in their mouths."
Surely this also must have been penned to open the eyes of the public to the absurdity of the popular conception of the author of the plays as an unlettered man who "had small Latin and less Greek"!
The highest scholarship not only in this country and in Germany but throughout the world has been for many years concentrated upon the classical characters portrayed in the plays, and the adverse criticism of former days has given place to a reverential admiration for the marvellous knowledge of antiquity displayed throughout the plays in the presentation of the historical characters of bygone times; classical authority being found for nearly every word put into their mouths.
What does it matter whether the immortal works were written by Shakspeare (of Stratford) or by a great and learned man who assumed the name Shakespeare to "Shake a lance at Ignorance"? We should not forget that this phrase "Shake a lance at Ignorance" is contemporary, appearing in Ben Jonson's panegyric in the Shakespeare folio of 1623.
CHAPTER II. — The Shackspere Monument, Bust, and Portrait.
In the year 1909 Mr. George Hookham in the January number of the National Review sums up practically all that is really known of the life of William Shakspeare of Stratford as follows:—
'We only know that he was born at Stratford, of illiterate parents—
(we do not know that he went to school there)—that, when 18-1/2
years old, he married Anne Hathaway (who was eight years his senior,
and who bore him a child six months after marriage); that he had
in all three children by her (whom with their mother he left, and
went to London, having apparently done his best to desert her before
marriage);—that in London he became an actor with an interest in a
theatre, and was reputed to be the writer of plays;—that he
purchased property in Stratford, to which town he returned;—engaged
in purchases and sales and law-suits (of no biographical interest
except as indicating his money-making and litigious temperament);
helped his father in an application for coat armour (to be obtained
by false pretences); promoted the enclosure of common lands at
Stratford (after being guaranteed against personal loss); made his
will—and died at the age of 52, without a book in his possession,
and leaving nothing to his wife but his second best bed, and this
by an afterthought. No record of friendship with anyone more
cultured than his fellow actors.
No letter,—only two contemporary reports of his conversation, one
with regard to the commons enclosure as above, and the other in
circumstances not to be recited unnecessarily.
In a word we know his parentage, birth, marriage, fatherhood,
occupation, his wealth and his chief ambition, his will and his
death, and absolutely nothing else; his death being received with
unbroken and ominous silence by the literary world, not even Ben
Jonson who seven years later glorified the plays in excelsis,
expending so much as a quatrain on his memory.'
[Illustration: Plate III. The Stratford Monument, From Dugdale's Warwickshire, 1656.]