Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s law Is death to any he that utters them,
is held up as a peculiarly Italian touch, no such law appearing in the English statute-book of the time. The fact is that Shakespeare found the idea in Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” and used it simply to heighten the terror of the situation.
The insult of “biting the thumb” is said, rather doubtfully, to be characteristically Italian; but what can be more English than the cry for “clubs, bills, and partisans” which immediately follows it? Lord Campbell, indeed, seeks to prove Shakespeare’s minute knowledge of English law by the frequent and accurate references to it in this opening scene. The “grove of sycamore” under which Romeo is described as wandering, is said to be of unmistakably Italian growth; why, then, does Schlegel, though one of the originators of the local-color theory, seek to make it still more Italian by translating it “Kastanienhain”? Had Shakespeare possessed either the will or the ability to transport his hearers into specifically Italian scenes, would he have confined himself to mentioning one tree, which is neither peculiar to Italy nor a particularly prominent feature in Italian landscapes? Where are the oranges and olives, the poplar, the cypress, and the laurel? Where are the rushing Adige and the gleaming Alps? Where is the allusion to the Amphitheatre, which could scarcely have been wanting had the poet known or cared anything about Verona except as the capital of his mythic love-land? It might as well be argued that he intended the local color to be peculiarly English because he makes Capulet call Paris an “Earl.”
The truth is that when the reader’s imagination is heated to a certain point, the colors which subtle associations have implanted in it flush out of their own accord, with no stronger stimulus from the poet than is involved in the mere mention of a name. There is a strict analogy in the Elizabethan theatre. Given poetry and acting which powerfully excited the feelings, and the placard bearing the name of “Agincourt” made all the glaring incongruities vanish, and conjured up in the mind of each hearer such a picture of the tented field as his individual imagination had room for. So it is with the Italy of “Romeo and Juliet.” Our fancy being quickened by the mere glow of the poetry, the very name “Verona” places before us a vivid picture composed of all sorts of reminiscences of art, literature, and travel. The pulsing life of the two lovers—types of pure-humanity as general as ever poet fashioned—easily puts on a southern physiognomy with their Italian names. The might of a name has power to cloak even openly incongruous details. It is only on reflection, for instance, that we recognize in Mercutio a most un-Italian and distinctly Teutonic figure, an “angelsächsisch-treuherzig” humorist, as Kreyssig truly says, who is even made to ridicule Italian manners and phrases with the true Englishman’s provincial intolerance. Thus all of us, in reading “Romeo and Juliet,” are haunted by visions of Italy, whose origin the commentators strive to find in individual touches of local color and costume, instead of in the powerful stimulus given to all sorts of latent associations by the whole force of the poet’s genius. Even apart from travel, pictures and descriptions which do actually aim at local color have made us far more familiar with Italy than any Elizabethan audience can possibly have been. It is scarcely paradoxical to maintain that the least imaginative among us gives to the love-land of “Romeo and Juliet” far more accurately Italian hues than it wore in the imagination of Shakespeare himself. In the same way I, for my part, never read Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta” without forming a vivid picture of the narrow, sultry stairways of Valetta (which I have never seen), conjured up, not certainly by any individual touches of description in the text, but by the mere imaginative vigor of the whole presentation. Conversely, too, a work of small vitality, a second-rate French tragedy for instance, may be full of accurate local and historical allusion, and may yet transport us no whither beyond the cheerless steppes of frigid alexandrines. There is an art, and a high art, to which definite local color is essential, but Shakespeare’s is of another order. If we want a masterpiece of strictly Italian coloring we must go, not to “Romeo and Juliet,” but to Alfred de Musset’s “Lorenzaccio.”
Shakespeare, in short, presents us with so much, or so little, of the Italian manners depicted in Brooke and Paynter as would be readily comprehensible to his audience. The fact, too, that the whole love-poetry of the period was influenced by Cisalpine models gave to the forms of expression in certain portions of his work a slightly Italian turn. For the rest, he imbued the great erotic myth with the warmest human life, and left it to create an atmosphere and scenery of its own in the imagination of the beholder. No atmosphere or scenery can be more appropriate than those of an Italian summer, and therefore it is right that our scenic artists should strain their resources to reproduce its warm luxuriance of color. “For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring,” says Benvolio, and if we choose to call this hot air a scirocco, why not? But Shakespeare knew nothing of scirocco or tramontana; he knew that warmth is the life-element of passion, and made summer in the air harmonise with summer in the blood. That is the whole secret of his “local color.”—Gentleman’s Magazine.
WILLIAM SMITH AND WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.
In the year 1856 Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakspeare Society, received one day a little pamphlet bearing the at that time astounding title, “Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakspeare’s Plays?” The writer’s name was Smith. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 76 Harley Street, writer on Shakspeare, is the style he goes by in the Catalogue of the British Museum, to distinguish him from others of the name, whose works fill no less than eight volumes of that Catalogue, and have a special index all to themselves, thereby nobly confirming the truth of our Mr. Smith’s answer to some irreverent critics who had jested on his patronym, that it was “a name which some wise and many worthy men have borne—which though not unique, is perfectly genteel.” What Lord Ellesmere, either in his presidential or merely human capacity, thought of the pamphlet, we do not know; but Lord Palmerston (who had passed the threescore years then) is said to have declared himself convinced by it, though he is also said to have added that he cared not a jot who the author of the plays might have been provided he was an Englishman. By some of the critics poor Mr. Smith was very roughly handled, and what seems to have galled him most was an insinuation by Nathaniel Hawthorne (then at Liverpool as American Consul) that he had merely taken for his own the ideas of Miss Delia Bacon, whose book was not published till the year after Mr. Smith’s pamphlet, but of whose speculation some rumors had before that come “across the Atlantic wave.” This Mr. Smith (in his next publication, Bacon and Shakspeare; an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth, 1857) most emphatically denied. He had never heard the name of Miss Bacon till he saw it in a review of his pamphlet: he could not for a long while find what or where she had written, and when he did so the alleged insinuation seemed to him too preposterous to be worth notice. Out of courtesy to Mr. Hawthorne, however, he made his denial public; Mr. Hawthorne returned the courtesy of acceptance, and so this part of the great Baconian controversy slept in peace. In 1866 appeared in New York, a book called The Authorship of Shakspeare, the work of a Mr. Nathaniel Holmes, which so enchanted Mr. Smith that he vowed “Providence had provided exactly the champion the cause required,” and that for him it remained only “to retire to the rear of this unexpected American contingent,” and to “make himself useful in the commissariat department.” This American book had, among its other striking merits, this unique one—of being such that no man could possibly quarrel with it. “If argument,” says Mr, Smith, “is ever to outweigh preconception and prejudice, the preponderance can only be in one direction”—perhaps the only judgment ever formulated by mortal man which it would be literally impossible to traverse. In this rearward position Mr. Smith modestly abode for eighteen years; but now—“now that the triumph seems so near at hand, we cannot resist coming to the front to congratulate those that have fought the battle upon their success, and, we candidly own, to show ourselves as a veteran who has survived the campaign, and is ready to give an honest account of the stores which still remain on his hands.” This congratulation and these stores may be read and seen in another little pamphlet just published by Mr. Smith, and to be bought at Mr. Skeffington’s shop in Piccadilly.
It is in no spirit of cavil or disparagement that we overhaul those stores, but solely out of curiosity. We have read Mr. Smith’s last pamphlet, and read again his two earlier ones, with the most lively interest and amusement. Indeed, we have never for our part, been able to see the necessity for that “lyric fury” into which some of Mr. Smith’s opponents have lashed themselves. His theory has amused thousands of readers—readers of Bacon (both Francis and Delia), of Shakspeare, and of Mr. Smith; it has harmed nobody; it has added fresh lustre to the memories of two great men. Surely, then, we should do ill to be angry, and to be angry with one so courteous and good-humored as Mr. Smith would be a twofold impossibility. Moreover, we have always felt that there was a great deal to be said for the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the plays printed under the name of William Shakspeare, just as there is a great deal to be said for the converse of the theory, or for any other speculation with which the restless mind of man chooses for the moment to concern itself. After a certain lapse of years there can be no proof positive, no mathematical proof, that any man did or did not write anything. The mere fact of a work having gone for any length of time under such or such a name proves nothing; that the manuscript is confessedly in a particular man’s handwriting, or the undisputed receipt of a manuscript from a particular man, really, when one comes to consider it, proves nothing, so far as authorship is concerned. Take the excellent ballad of “Kafoozleum,” for instance. That, like Shakspeare’s plays, was known and popular before it was printed; like those, it was printed anonymously; no manuscript of it is known to exist; the authorship is unknown. A hundred years hence who will be able to prove it was not written by Lord Tennyson, let us say? One line in it runs “A sound there falls from ruined walls.” Why should not some speculative Smith a hundred years hence point to this line as proof conclusive that it must be the work of him who wrote, “The splendor falls on castle walls”? The parallel would be at least incomparably closer than any of those as yet found in the undisputed writings of Bacon and the alleged writings of Shakspeare. Let this be, however; we are not now concerned with any attempt to destroy Mr. Smith’s theory, for which, we repeat, we still feel, as we have always felt, there is very much to be said—very much to be said, of course, on both sides; the puzzle is how very little Mr. Smith, and those about him, have found to say on their side.
And, in truth, little as Mr. Smith had found to say in 1856-57 he has found still less to add now in 1884. His “stores” are still very scanty. He has, indeed, satisfied himself (he had “an intuitive idea” of it in 1856) that Shakspeare could neither read nor write, beyond scrawling most illegibly his own name (the reading he passes by), and curiously enough on the evidence, or rather hypothesis, of another Smith one William James! But, of course, as no scrap of Shakspeare’s handwriting is known to exist beyond six signatures, all tolerably like each other, this hypothesis cannot stand for very much. Yet really this is the only fresh “fact” Mr. Smith has added to his stores in all these seven-and-twenty years. He recapitulates his old “facts” and, we must add, some of his old blunders, when he says “there is no record of his having been in any way connected with literature until the year 1600,” forgetful of the mention of Shakspeare’s name as author of The Rape of Lucrece in the prelude to Willobie’s Avisa (1594), the marginal reference to the same work in Clarke’s Polimanteia (1595), and the long catalogue of the works then attributed to Shakspeare, as well as the very high praise given to him and them in Meres’s Palladis Tamia, 1598. The allusions in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit and Chettle’s Kind-Harts Dreame we put by as hypotheses merely; but how curious it is to find the champions of this theory so strangely ignorant, or careless of facts familiar, we will not say to every student of Shakspeare’s writings, because the word student in connexion with those works has come to have a rather distasteful sound in these Alexandrian days, but to every one who has ever had any curiosity about the man to whom these marvellous works are commonly attributed. Nor is this knowledge within the reach only of those who have money, leisure, or learning. Any one who is able to procure a ticket of admission to the Reading-Room of the British Museum may get it at first hand for himself; numberless books exist any one of which at the cost of a few shillings will furnish him with it at second-hand. We remember to have been much struck last year, when turning over the leaves of Mrs. Pott’s edition of the Promus, with many proofs of the same ignorance of what one may call the very alphabet of the subject. Coleridge, as we all know now blundered much in the same way in his lectures on Shakspeare; but our knowledge both of the poet and his times has very greatly increased since Coleridge lectured. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Pott cannot now soothe themselves with the thought that it is better to err with Coleridge than to shine with Mr. Halliwell-Phillips or Mr. Furnivall; they have only themselves to blame if the world declines to take seriously a theory which its champions have been at so little serious pains to examine and support.