The Shakespearean Myth: William Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence

Appleton Morgan

The Shakespearean Myth: William Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence

Published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4064066249090

Table of Contents

PREFACE.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH.

PART I. THE MYSTERY.

PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY.

TO THE READER.

THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS

OF

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

EPITAPH ON ELIAS JAMES. *

EPITAPH ON SIR THOMAS STANLEY. **

EPITAPH OX TOM-A-COMBE, OTHERWISE THIXBEARD. *

WHOM I HAVE DRUNKEN WITH. **

DAVID AND GOLIATH. ***

LAMPOON ON SIR THOMAS LUCY. **

ON THE KING.

ANOTHER VERSION OF THE LAMPOON. *

INSCRIPTION FOR HIS OWN TOMB.

PART III. THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY.

PART IV. EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES: THE DELIA BACON THEORY.

THE DELIA BACON THEORY.

PART V. THE BACONIAN THEORY.

****

PART VI. THE NEW THEORY—THE SONNETS—CONCLUSION.

"TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF

THESE. INSUING. SONNETS.

MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE.

AND. THAT. ETERNETIE.

PROMISED.

BY.

OUR. EVER. LIVING. POET.

WISHETH.

THE. WELL-WISHING.

ADVENTURER. IN.

SETTING

FORTH.

THE END.

INDEX

PREFACE.

Table of Contents

M. Guizot, in his History of England, states the Shakespearean problem in a few words, when he says: Let us finally mention the great comedian, the great tragedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, who was in his lifetime butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William Shakespeare. In twenty years, amid the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed the thirty-two tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequaled power of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience and for ever remaining the treasure of the age—all this being accomplished, Shakespeare left the theater and the busy world, at the age of forty-five, to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing and never returning to the stage—ignored and unknown if his works had not forever marked out his place in the world—a strange example of an imagination so powerful, suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing, once for all, the door to the efforts of genius.

But M. Guizot is very far from suggesting any prima facie inconsistency in this statement as it stands.

Since every man reads the Shakespearean pages for himself and between the lines, much of what we are expected to accept as Shakespearean criticism must fail of universal appreciation and sympathy. But none who read the English tongue can well be unconcerned with the question as to who wrote those pages; and it would be affectation to deny that the intense realism of our day is offering some startling contributions to the solution of that question.

For instance, the gentlemen of the New Shakespeare Society (whom Mr. Swinburne rather mercilessly burlesques in his recent "Studies of Shakespeare) submit these dramas to a quantitative analysis; and, by deliberately counting the male, female, weak, and stopped" endings, and the Alexandrines and catalectics (just as a mineralogist counts the degrees and minutes in the angles of his crystals), insist on their ability to pronounce didatically and infallibly what was written by William Shakespeare, and at what age; what was composed by Dekker, Fletcher, Marlowe, or anybody else; what was originally theirs, touched up by William Shakespeare or vice versa, etc. It is curious to observe how this process invariably gives all the admirable sentiments to William Shakespeare, and all the questionable ones to somebody else; but at least these New Shakespearean gentlemen have surrendered somewhat of the cast-iron theory of our childhood—that every page, line, and word of the immortal Shakespearean Drama was written by William Shakespeare demi-god, and by none other—perhaps, even opened a path through which the unbelievers may become, in due time, orthodox.

There are still, however, a great many persons who are disposed to wave the whole question behind them, much as Mr. Podsnap disposed of the social evil or a famine in India. It is only a Historic Doubt, they say, and Historic Doubts are not rare, are mainly contrived to exhibit syllogistic ingenuity in the teeth of facts, etc., etc. The French, they say, have the same set of problems about Molière. Was he a lawyer? was he a doctor? etc.—and they all find their material in internal evidence—e. g., an accurate handling of the technique of this or that profession or science: parallelism, practical coincidence, or something of that sort.

The present work is an attempt to examine, for the benefit of these latter, from purely external evidence, a question which, dating only within the current quarter century, is constantly recurring to confront investigation, and, like Banquo's troublesome shade, seems altogether indisposed to down.

I have to add my acknowledgments to Mr. Julian Norris, for his careful preparation of the Index to these pages.

Grandview-on-Hudson, October 2, 1881.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH.

Table of Contents

PART I. THE MYSTERY.

Table of Contents

Original

HE thirty-seven plays called, collectively, Shakespeare, are a phenomenon, not only in English letters, but in human experience. The literature of the country to which they belong, had, up to the date of their appearance, failed to furnish, and has been utterly powerless since, to produce any type, likeness, or formative trace of them; while the literature of other nations possesses not even a corresponding type. The history of a century on either side of their era discloses, within the precints of their birth, no resources upon which levy could have been made for their creation. They came and went like a meteor; neither borrowing of what they found, nor loaning to what they left, their own peculiar and unapproachable magnificence.

The unremitting researches of two centuries have only been able to assign their authorship (where it rested at first) to an hiatus in the life of a wayward village lad named William Shakespeare—who fled his native town penniless and before the constable, to return, in a few years, a well-to-do esquire—with a coat of arms and money in his pocket. We have the history of the boy, and certain items as to the wealthy squire, who left behind him two or three exceedingly common-place and conventional epitaphs (said to be his handiwork) and a remarkable will; but, between them, no hint of history, chronicle, or record. Still, within this unknown period of this man's career, these matchless dramas came from somewhere, and passed current under his name.

The death of their reputed author attracted no contemporary attention, and for many years thereafter the dramas remained unnoticed. Although written in an idiom singularly open to the comprehension of all classes and periods of English-speaking men, no sooner did they begin to be remarked, than a cloud of what are politely called commentators bore down upon them; any one who could spell feeling at liberty to furnish a reading; and any one who supposed himself able to understand one of these readings, to add a barnacle in the shape of a note. From these commentators the stately text is even now in peril, and rarely, even to-day, can it be perused, except one line at a time, across the top of a dreary page of microscopic and exasperating annotation. But, up to within a very few years, hardly a handful of Shakespearean students had arisen with courage to admit—what scarcely any one of the commentators even, could have failed to perceive—the utterly inadequate source ascribed to the plays themselves.

It is not yet thirty years since an American lady was supposed to have gone crazy because she declared that William Shakespeare, of the Globe and Black-friars theaters in London, in the days of Elizabeth, was not the author of these certain dramas and poems for which—for almost three hundred years—he has stood sponsor.

Miss Bacon's madness, indeed, has been rapidly contageous. Now-a-days, men make books to prove, not that William Shakespeare did not write these works, but that Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, or some other Elizabethan, did not. And we even find, now and then, a treatise written to prove that William Shakespeare was, after all, their author; an admission, at least, that the ancient presumption to that effect no longer covers the case. And, doubtless, the correct view is within this admission. For, probably, if permitted to examine this presumption by the tests which would be applied to any other question of fact, namely, the tests of contemporary history, muniments, and circumstantial evidence, it will be found to be quite as well established and proved that William Shakespeare was not the author of the plays that go by his name, as any other fact, occurring in London between the years 1585 and 1616, not recorded in history or handed down by tradition, could be established and proved in 1881.

If a doubt as to the authorship of the plays had arisen at any time during or between those years, and had been kept open thereafter, the probability is that it would have been settled by this time. But, as it is, we may be pretty certain that no such doubt did arise, and that no such question was asked, during the years when those who could have dispelled the doubt or answered the question were living. When we are about to visit a theater in these days, what we ask and concern ourselves with is: Is the play entertaining? Does it draw? And, when we witness it, the question is: Do we enjoy it—or does it bore us? Will we recommend our friends to come that they may be entertained, too, and that we may discuss it with them? or will we warn them to keep away? We very speedily settle these questions for ourselves. Doubtless we may and do inquire who the author is. But we do not enter into any discussion upon the subject, or charge our minds enough with the matter to doubt it when we are told. The author's name is, not unusually, printed on the play-bill before us; we glance at it indifferently, take what is told us for granted, and think no more about it. If the name happens to be assumed, we may possibly see its identity discussed in the dramatic columns of our newspapers next morning, or we may not. If the play entertains us, we commend it. If it drags, we sneer at it, get up and go off. That is all the concern we give it. The evening has slipped away; and, with it, any idle speculations as to the playwright who has essayed to amuse us for an hour.

If, three hundred years hence, a question as to who wrote the play we saw at Mr. Daly's theater or Mr. Wallack's theater last evening should come up, there would be very little evidence, not any records, and scarcely an exhibit to refer to in the matter. Copies of the play-bill or the newspapers of the day might chance to be discovered; but these—the internal testimony of the play itself, if any, and a sort of tacit presumption growing out of a statement it was nobody's cue to inquire into at the time it was made, and had been nobody's business to scrutinize since—would constitute all the evidence at hand. How this supposititious case is precisely all-fours with the facts in the matter of the dramatic works which we call, collectively, Shakespeare's. Precisely: except that, on the evenings when those plays were acted, there were no play-bills, and, on the succeeding morning, no daily newspaper. We have, therefore, in 1881, much fewer facilities for setting ourselves right as to their authorship than those living three hundred years after us could possess in the case we have supposed. The audiences who witnessed a certain class of plays at Shakespeare's theaters, in the years between 1585 and 1606, were entertained. The plays drew. People talked of them about town, and they become valuable to their proprietors. The mimic lords and ladies were acceptable to the best seats; the rabble loved the show and glitter and the alarum of drums; and all were Britons who gloated over rehearsal of the prowess of their own kings and heroes, and to be told that their countrymen at Agincourt had slain ten thousand Frenchmen at an expense of but five and twenty of themselves. But, if M. Taine's description of the Shakespearean theaters and the audience therein wont to assemble may be relied upon, we can pretty safely conclude that they troubled themselves very little as to who fashioned the dialogue the counterfeit kings and queens, soldiers, lords, and ladies spoke; or that they saw any thing in that dialogue to make such speculation appear worth their while. Nor can we discover any evidence, even among the cultured courtiers who listened to them—or in the case of Elizabeth herself, who is said to have loved them (which we may as well admit for the argument's sake)—that any recognition of the plays as works worthy of any other than a stage-manager, occurred. Even if it should appear that these plays thus performed were the plays we now call Shakespeare's; had any of this audience suspected that these plays were not written for them, but for all time; that, three hundred years later—when the plays should not only be extant, but more loved and admired than ever—the thinking world should set itself seriously to probe the mystery of their origin; there might have been some interest as to their producer manifested, and we might have had some testimony competent to the exact point to-day.

But it is evident enough that no such prophetic vision was vouchsafed to them, and no such prophetic judgment passed. Nor is the phenomenon exceptional. The critic, does not live, even to-day, however learned or cultured or shrewd, who would take the responsibility of affirming upon his own judgment, or even upon the universal judgment of his age and race, that any literary composition would be, after a lapse of three hundred years, not only extant, but immortal, hugged as its birthright by a whole world. Such a statement would have been contrary to experience, beyond the prophecy of criticism, and therefore only to be known—if known at all—as a Fact. Moreover, it could only be known as a fact at the expiration of the three hundred years. Doubtless, few critics would care, in any case, to commit themselves upon record one way or the other in a matter so hypothetical and speculative as the judgment of posterity upon a literary performance, and certainly nothing of the sort occurred in Shakespeare's day, even if there were any dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the subject. There can be no doubt—and it must be conceded —that certain acted plays did pass with their first audiences, and that certain printed plays, both contemporaneously and for years thereafter, did pass with the public who read them, as the compositions of Mr. Manager Shakespeare; and that probably even the manager's pot companions, who had better call to know him than any others, saw nothing to shake their heads at in his claim to be their author (provided he ever made any such claim; which, by the way, does not appear from any record of his life, and which nobody ever asserted as a fact). If they did—with the exception only of Robert Greene—they certainly kept their own counsel. On the one hand, then, the question of the authorship was never raised, and, on the other hand, if it had been, the scholars and critics who studied the plays (supposing that there were any such in those days) could not possibly have recognized them as immortal. If they had so recognized them, they would doubtless have left us something more satisfactory as to the authorship of the compositions than the mere impression that they were informed that the manager of the theater where they were produced wrote them; that they supposed he was clever enough to have done so, and they therefore took it for granted that he did. That is all there is of the evidence of Shakespeare's own day, as to the question—if it still is a question—before us.

But how about the presumption—the legal presumption, arising from such lapse of time as that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary—the presumption springing from tradition and common report—that William Shakespeare composed the Shakespearean plays? It is, of course, understood that one presumption is as good as another until it is disturbed. It is never safe to underrate an existing presumption; as long as it stands at all, it stands as conclusive; once overthrown, however, it is as if it had never existed.

A presumption three hundred years old may be a strong one to overthrow. But if its age is all there is of it—if it be only strong in years—it can yet be toppled over. Once overthrown, it is no more venerable because it is three hundred years old than if it were only three. An egg-shell will toss upon the crest of an angry surf, and, for very frailty, outride breakers when the mightiest ship man ever framed could not survive an instant. But it is only an egg-shell, for all that, and a touch of the finger will crush and destroy it. And so, formidable as it was in age, the presumption as to William Shakespeare's authorship of the great dramas which for three hundred years had gone by his name, had only to be touched by the thumb and finger of common sense to crackle and shrivel like the egg that sat on the wall in the Kindergarten rhyme, which all the king's army and all the king's men could not set up again, once it had tumbled over.

But as the world advanced and culture increased, why did not the question arise before? Simply because the times were not ripe for it. This is the age and generation for the explosion of myths, and, as one after another of them falls to pieces and disappears, who does not wonder that they have not fallen sooner? For how many years has the myth of William Tell been cherished as history! And yet there is no element of absolute impossibility or even of improbability—much less of miracle—in the story of an archer with a sure eye and a steady aim. Or, in the case of physical myths—which only required an exploration by physical sense for their explosion—the maps of two centuries or so ago represented all inaccessible seas as swarming with krakens and ship-devouring reptiles. And it is not twenty years since children were taught in their geographies that upon the coast of Norway there was a whirlpool which sucked down ships prow foremost. And here, in our midst, a cannon-shot from where we sit and write these lines, there was believed to be and exist a Hell Gate which was a very portal of death and slaughter to hapless mariners. But there are no krakens, and not much of a Maelstrom; and, for twenty years before General Newton blew up a few rocks at Hell Gate, people had laughed at the myth of its ferocity. And again: nothing is easier than to invent a story so utterly unimportant and immaterial that it will be taken for granted, without controversy, and circulate with absolute immunity from examination, simply because worth nobody's while to contradict it. For example, it is likely enough that Demosthenes, in practicing oratory, stood on a sea-beach and drilled his voice to outroar the waves. The story is always told, however, with the rider, that Demosthenes did this with his mouth filled with pebble-stones; and, as nobody cares whether he did or not, nobody troubles himself to ascertain by experiment that the thing is impossible, and that nobody can roar with a mouth full of pebble-stones. And not even then would he succeed in removing the impression obtaining with the great mass of the world, that a thing is proven sufficiently if it gets into print. Charles II. set the Royal Society of his day at work to find the reason why a dead fish weighed more than a live one—and it was only when they gave it up, that the playful monarch assured them that the fact they were searching for the reason of was not a fact at all. It is not impossible to demonstrate from experience, that the human mind will be found—as a rule—to prefer wasting laborious days in accounting for, rather than take the very simplest pains to verify even a proposition or alleged fact, which, if a fact at all, is of value beyond itself. It was objected to the system of Copernicus, when first brought forward, that, if the earth turned on its axis as he represented, a stone dropped from the summit of a tower would not fall at the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west, in the same manner that a stone dropped from the masthead of a ship in full sail does not fall at the foot of the mast, but toward the stern. To this it was answered that a stone, being a part of the earth, obeys the same laws and moves with it, whereas it is no part of the ship, of which, consequently, its motion is independent. This solution was admitted by some and opposed by others, and the controversy went on with spirit; nor was it till one hundred years after the death of Copernicus that, the experiment being tried, it was ascertained that the stone thus dropped from the head of the mast does fall at the foot of it. And so, if, in the case of the Shakespearean authorship, the day has come for truth to dispel fiction, and reason to scout organic miracle, why should we decline to look into an alleged Shakespearean myth simply because it happens to be a little tardy in coming to the surface?

But, most of all, it is to be remembered that it is, practically, only our own century that has comprehended the masterliness and matchlessness of the Hamlet and Macbeth, and the rest of those transcripts of nature, the prophetic insight of whose author spanned the ages that were to roll up after him, mastered the highest wave of modern learning and discovery, and touched the heart of all time, not through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting mankind up ont of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity; who so wrote that to his all-seeing vision schools and libraries, sciences and philosophies, were unnecessary, because his own marvelous intuition had grasped all the past and seen through all his present and all his future, and because, before his superhuman power, time and space had vanished and disappeared. * The age for which the dramas were written had not come, in that Elizabethan era.

* Jean Paul Frederich Richter. deed, why our question

did not arise sooner. Nobody asked, Who wrote Shakespeare?

because nobody seemed to consider Shakespeare as any thing

worth speculating about. Let us pause right here to

demonstrate this.

The tongues of the actors were tied, the ears of the audience were deaf to syllables whose burden was for the centuries that were to come after. The time for the question, Who wrote them? was not yet. For two hundred years more—from the day of William Shakespeare's death down to years within the memory of those now living—down to at least the date of Lord Byron (who admits that it is the perfectly correct thing to call Shakespeare god-like, mighty, and the like, but very unfashionable to read him),—we may ransack the records of scholarship and criticism, and unearth scarcely a hint of what is now their every-where conceded superiority, to say nothing of their immortality. In short, we can not rise from such a search without understanding, very clearly in Fuller, in 1622, chronicles that William Shakespeare's genius was jocular, his comedies merry, and his tragedies wonderful; his wit quick, but that his learning was very little. Evelyn notes that, in 1661, he saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played: but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since His Majesty has been so long abroad. * Pepys, his contemporary, says that the 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' was the most insipid, ridiculous play he had ever seen.... and, but having lately read the 'Adventures of Five Hours,' 'Othello' seemed a mean thing, though he liked Davenant's opera of Macbeth, with its music and dancing. ** When spending some money in books he looks over Shakespeare, but chooses 'Hudibras,' the book now in the greatest fashion for drollery, instead. It is doubtful if Milton ever read the Shakespearean plays, in spite of the eloquent verses, What needs my Shakespeare, etc.; since, in L'Allegro, he speaks of his (Shakespeare's) native wood-notes wild. ***

* Amenities of Authors—Shakespeare," p. 210.

** Ibid., p. 211.

*** Dr. Maginn, in his Shakespearean papers ("Learning of

Shakespeare"), endeavors to explain what Milton meant by

native wood-notes wild.

Surely if there is any thing in letters that is not native wood-notes, it is the stately Shakespearean verse, full of camps and courts, but very rarely of woodlands and pastures; besides, whatever Milton might say of the book called Shakespeare in poetry—like Ben Jon-son—he showed unmitigated contempt for its writer in prose: about the worst thing he could say about his king in The Iconoclast, was that Charles I. kept an edition of Shakespeare for his closet companion. * Other stuff of this sort, cries the blind poet, may be read throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the poet used much license in departing from the truth of history. **

In 1681, one Nahum Tate, supposed to be a poet (a delusion so widespread that he was actually created poet laureate) stumbled upon a thing called Lear, assigned to one William Shakespeare, and, after much labor, congratulated himself upon having been able to make a play out of it. ***

* Amenities of Authors—Shakespeare, vol. ii, p. 208.

Ibid., p. 209, note.

** It is fair to say that stuff may only have meant

matter, but it is indisputable that the passage was meant

as a slur on one who would read Shakespeare.

*** The play he did make out of it is to be found in W.

H. Smith's Bacon and Shakespeare, p. 129. so meanly

written that the comedy neither caused your mirth nor the

serious part your concernment....

John Dryden, in or about 1700, in his Defence of the Epilogue, a postscript to his tragedy The Conquest of Granada, says: Let any man who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; and yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven. He denounces the lameness of their plots, made up of some ridiculous incoherent story,... either grounded on impossibilities, or, at least, he writes, in many places, below the dullest writers of our own or any precedent age. Of the audiences who could tolerate such matter, he says: They knew no better, and therefore were satisfied with what they brought. Those who call theirs the 'Golden Age of Poetry,' have only this reason for it: that they were then content with acorns before they knew the use of bread, etc. * To show the world how William Shakespeare should have written, Mr. Dryden publishes his own improved version of Troilus and Cressida, with an abjectly fulsome dedication to the Earl of Sunderland, and a Preface, ** in which he is obliging enough to say that the style of Shakespeare being so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure; that, though "the