A few weeks before his death Shakespeare made a will, bequeathing all his landed property in strict entail to his eldest daughter. This document is preserved at Somerset House, a vast government building in London, adjoining Waterloo Bridge, between the Strand and the Victoria Embankment, where the probate records of the kingdom are deposited. It is locked in a buff leather case with an engraved inscription on a brass disk on the lid. It is written on three large square separate sheets of heavy paper, discolored by time. Each sheet is laid flat and sealed between two plates of clear glass, so that both sides can be inspected. The handwriting of the scrivener in the body of the instrument is quite distinct and legible, considering its antiquity. The signature of Shakespeare appears at the bottom of each sheet. The chirography of men of genius is proverbially bad, generally from its fluent facility, but the autographs of Shakespeare are clumsy, uncouth, and awkward, their disconnected and sprawling letters seeming to have been formed with difficulty by fingers unfamiliar with the use of the pen. They may perhaps have been written in an unaccustomed position, or when the testator was enfeebled by disease. It could not have been the infirmity of age, for he was but fifty-two when he died. It is impossible to look at these signatures without receiving the impression that they were written by an illiterate man. It is not merely their illegibility, but they have the scrawly curves and uncertain terminations of the penman who is not certain about the spelling of his own name. The great collections of London contain many manuscripts of celebrated authors, ancient and modern, and some that are hard to decipher, but there is no chirography more hopelessly and irreclaimably unlettered and unscholarly than that of William Shakespeare.
At the shrine by the placid Avon, which the centuries have invested with their pensive and resistless charm, and over which genius has cast its enchanting spell, an impassable gulf seems fixed between the Shakespeare of Stratford and the Shakespeare of London. They appear like two entirely different and almost irreconcilable personalities. All that is known of either renders all that is claimed for the other improbable. Many dual lives have been lived before and since, but none seem so incompatible as these.
It is unlikely that the claim of Shakespeare to the authorship of the dramas that bear his name will ever be overthrown. His title has been too long conceded to be successfully contested. That he wrote them can now be neither proved nor refuted, but there are inherent improbabilities that must always make the Shakespearean legend a profoundly fascinating subject of psychological consideration.
And were he to be dethroned, to whom should the sceptre and the crown be given? Lord Bacon had a kingly soul, capacious great thoughts, and high designs, but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling and bacchanalian anacreontics, to be hiccoughed by drunkards in their most abandoned hours of revelry.
Pondering upon the mystery as I walked up and down beneath the flaring lights, on the windy platform at Bletchley, waiting, after a day at Stratford, for a belated train to London, I reflected that genius has no pedigree nor prescription, and that at last the greatest marvel was, not that the tragedy of "Hamlet" was written by Shakespeare, but that it was written at all.[Back to Contents]
MOLIÈRE
Extracts from "Molière," by Sir Walter Scott
(1622-1673)
