LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 THE McEWEN COLLECTION 
 
 OF SHAKESPEAREANA 
 
 

 e55 
 
#r 
 
THE 
 
 SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH 
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 
 
 CIBCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 APPLETON MORGAN, A.M., LL.B. 
 ii 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE LAW OF LITERATURE," "NOTES TO BEST'S PRINCIPLES 
 
 OF EVIDENCE," " SOME SHAKESPEAREAN COMMENTATORS," "VENUS 
 
 AND ADONIS, A STUDY IN WARWICKSHIRE DIALECT," ETC. 
 
 Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves; 
 Sic vos non vobis vellera fertis oves; 
 Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes; 
 Sic vos non vobis fertis aratra boves. 
 
 — P. Virgil. Maro 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 CINCINNATI 
 ROBERT CLARKE & CO 
 
 1886 
 

 COPYRIGHTED, 1881, 
 
 By APPLETON MORGAN. 
 
 
TO 
 
 D. T. MORGAN, ESQ., 
 
 OF 
 WHIP'S CROSS, WALTHAMSTOW, ESSEX, ENGLAND. 
 
 My Dear Sir: 
 
 I do not know your opinion on the matter treated in 
 
 these pages. Very possibly you will disagree with every line of my 
 
 Brief. But it gives me pleasure to connect my name with yours on 
 
 this page, and to subscribe myself 
 
 Very faithfully, your kinsman, 
 
 APPLETON MORGAN. 
 October, 1881. 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 When, four years ago, I prepared the first edition 
 of this work, I had very little idea that its appear- 
 ance was to be considered a personal affront to the 
 memory of William Shakespeare, or that I was my- 
 self to be accused of heterodoxy — rank disloyalty—- 
 threatened with active adverse operation of the Strat- 
 ford curse, etc. Being familiar with the difficulty (to 
 which the more honest commentators confessed) of 
 believing, from internal evidence, that but one single 
 hand wrote the Plays and Poems, I supposed myself 
 only doing Shakespeare students a service by group- 
 ing the external evidence thereto for them as well. 
 To be sure, the book presented an extreme view of the 
 circumstantial case against Shakespeare, but there 
 seemed to be no other plan of making the discussion 
 valuable. One can hardly be expected to argue he- 
 roically in support of a conceded presumption, and 
 I certainly did not propose to myself a re-writing of 
 the stereotype Essay on Shakespeare, which — like 
 Major-General Stanley's military knowledge — accrued 
 
 (v) 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 at about the beginning of the present century. 
 Neither did it seem to me that orthodox Shakespear- 
 eans (if by that term we mean those who believe Will- 
 iam Shakespeare to have written every line, exit, 
 entrance — to have made every pen stroke in some 
 thirty-seven plays; to have borrowed plots and inci- 
 dents by the handful, but never by any chance to have 
 used the words or speech of another) were exactly 
 in a position to protest against an alleged claimant 
 being fully, even emphatically, heard. They had cer- 
 tainly had ample time to present their side. Their 
 day in court had lengthened out to over two centuries. 
 To raise the hue and cry against hearing the other 
 side seemed to me as if they proposed to confess that 
 they had half heartedly, feebly, and imperfectly pre- 
 sented their own case, or felt incompetent to be in- 
 trusted with it further, or lacked confidence in the 
 presumption in their favor. 
 
 Still less was I, nor am I yet, able to see anything 
 emotional, anything over which gentlemen should 
 lash themselves into a temper, in a passionless histor- 
 ical question as to something which happened three 
 hundred years ago. So long as the capital question 
 of a Shakespeare Canon remains open, a discussion 
 of the secondary question of the William Shake- 
 speare authorship, whether considered as a whole (as 
 is the method of the Baconian Society) or as to par- 
 ticular works, or parts of works (as conducted by 
 
PREFACE. vil 
 
 Mr. Fleay in his admirable " Shakespeare Manual," 
 and Mr. Rolfe, in his invaluable " Friendly Edition "), 
 would seem to be proper. I, for one, am willing to 
 confess that after many years of familiarity with it 
 the question as to what William Shakespeare wrote 
 with his own pen, and what became his (to use Mr. 
 R. G. "White's language)." after the theatrical fashion 
 and under the theatrical conditions of his day," is, in 
 my opinion, an inquiry as legitimate as it is fascinat- 
 ing — entitled to the fullest examination and treat- 
 ment on purely historical grounds; and one which 
 may not only be pursued to any extent without cast- 
 ing suspicion on the querist's loyalty or othodoxy, but 
 whose discussion is always a contribution the more — 
 and therefore always welcome — to the world's noble 
 and ever magnifying Library of Shakespeareana. 
 
 In leaving the subject of the authorship as a whole 
 (for I shall never touch it, except possibly in detail, 
 again), there are one or two points to which I ask 
 permission to call attention, viz. : * 
 
 I. The very great elaboration the Baconian Theory 
 has received — since my first edition — at the hands of 
 Mrs. Henry Pott, Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, and others. 
 
 II. The wonderful demonstration which my friend 
 Ex-Governor Davis has given in his " The Law in 
 Shakespeare," of the argument from the Legalisms 
 which is only touched upon in my own pages. The 
 eloquent Governor has gone beyond all his predeces- 
 
Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 sors in showing that the Plays are Dot only fluent 
 in the use of our lawyers' and attorneys' jargon and 
 technicalities; but that their very structure is legal 
 and juridicial; that the Hamlet, at least, was once 
 thoroughly revised by some one learned in the law 
 of England, by supplying the legal explanation ol 
 the succession of Fortinbras, just as, in another play, 
 a misconstruction of the Salic law was set right, etc. 
 
 On re-reading the following pages I see only two 
 points as to which I have something to add, viz : 
 
 In the first edition I was obliged to confess that 
 the evidence that Sakespeare's verses were favorites at 
 court, and he the friend of Southampton, did not im- 
 press me as of any particular value. But it has since 
 occurred to me that, although obituary poetry is not 
 of any legal value as evidence, yet Ben Jonson, writ- 
 ing for his contemporaries, would hardly have intro- 
 duced such a line as 
 
 " That did so take Eliza and our James," 
 if he had not been pretty sure of his facts; es- 
 pecially since Elizabeth's courtiers were still alive, and 
 "our James" himself upon the throne. The Plays, 
 then, did attract some attention at court, and the 
 playwright may have been sent for, even though 
 we have no evidence to that effect. And I was 
 in error also in inferring that when young Shake- 
 speare left Stratford for London, he was liable to arrest 
 under the statute against u schollers, idlers, common 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 players of interludes and minstrels wandering abroad, 
 jugglers, tinkers and petty chapmen." On referring 
 to that statute (39 Eliz. c. 4), I find that it was not 
 passed until 1599, the year Shakespeare's father 
 received his grant of arms. However, as to the 
 friendship between Shakespeare and Southampton in 
 1593, I am still not only skeptical, but every record 
 of those times which I approach, confirms me in my 
 disbelief. 
 
 The answers to the first edition (I have read ninety- 
 three of them) seem to me mostly sentimental. The 
 only practical point made appears to be that the dis- 
 crepancies of the Will are to be accounted for by 
 supposing the Plays to have passed either to Mrs. 
 Shakespeare the relict, or to Dr. John Hall the exec- 
 utor, of the dramatist. But in either case, entries to 
 that effect in the Books of the Stationers' Company 
 would have been imperatively essential. And it must 
 be remembered, too, that copyright in those days 
 — being by common law and not by statute — did not 
 expire by limitation at all, but was perpetual. (In 
 other words, were it possible to trace them, we could 
 find to-day parties in whom the copyright of the 
 Shakespeare Plays still vests.) If light is wanted as 
 to the laws of literary property in Elizabeth's and 
 James's days, why guess at it, when law libraries are 
 accessible, and the Books of the Stationers' Company 
 extant? Blount and Jaggard, who printed the First 
 
 • 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 Folio, were alive to their own interests, when (No- 
 vember 8, 1623,) they copyrighted the sixteen Plays 
 first printed in that Folio. How did they obtain a 
 right to print the remaining twenty which had al- 
 ready been copyrighted? Nobody knows. They did 
 not re-copyright them for the simple reason that, 
 having helped themselves to them, they had no legal 
 rights to make registry of. Blount and Jaggard were 
 not interfered with, because these Plays, having lost 
 for the time their commercial value, were not es- 
 teemed worth a lawsuit by their former printers. But 
 the interesting fact remains that it was the firm of 
 Blount and Jaggard, and not their predecessors, who 
 printed " stolne and surreptitious copies." It is 
 simply silly to talk, as commentators will, of Shakes- 
 peare omitting to mention his Plays in his Testament, 
 because his copyrights in them had expired, or be- 
 cause he or his representatives had sold them to the 
 Globe Theater. 
 
 If his Plays had never been entered for copyright 
 on the Books of the Stationers' Company, he or his 
 executors might undoubtedly have sold them with- 
 out registering the transfer. But, unfortunately, 
 these Plays were registered ; and, once registered, it 
 was impossible to alienate them except by registry of 
 later date. If, however, William Shakespeare never 
 owned more than what we call to-day a Stageright in 
 the Plays, all is accounted for. There was no law 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 compelling an entry of stageright in the Stationers' 
 Books, and no public office at which anything anal- 
 ogous to — (what nowadays becomes of such large pe- 
 cuniary value) — a right to represent and perform 
 dramatic productions — could be entered and secured. 
 
 In reading the late autobiographies of Anthony 
 Trollope and Sergeant Ballantyne, I was impressed 
 with the conviction that — down to the first quarter 
 of the present century — nothing thorough (except 
 flogging) was considered essential to the education of 
 the British youth, in country schools. 1 was led by 
 this to examine carefully into what must have been 
 the course of instruction in Stratford school, when 
 young Shakespeare is supposed to have been a stu- 
 dent thore. To make my examinations as valuable 
 as possible, I cited the testimony of Roger Asham, 
 John Milton, and others nearly contemporary, and 
 went to the pains of compiling a considerable glos- 
 sary of the Warwickshire Dialect. The result was 
 too bulky, of course, for adding to this work, and 
 has been published elsewhere in a volume by itself. 
 
 While I have never yielded my assent to the Ba- 
 conian theory, I have been so widely accused of 
 bringing it aid and comfort that I would like to say 
 a final word or two in regard to it : 
 
 It seems to me quite as impossible that Francis Ba- 
 con should have written certain portions of the Plays 
 and Poems as that William Shakespeare should have 
 
Xll PREFACE. 
 
 written those other portions which the general con- 
 sent of the New Shakespeare Society, Mr. Fleay, Mr. 
 W. J. Rolfe, and others have rejected. But yet 
 Francis, afterward Lord, Bacon, was one of the most 
 versatile men who ever lived. It is not safe to judge 
 of his poetical powers by his Paraphrase of the 
 Psalms, which was written — just as John Milton's par- 
 aphrase was written — in what is to us, to-day, the 
 purest doggerel. But that these versions were so 
 written purposely, in order that the meanest intellects 
 might commit them to memory and sing them, no 
 one at all familiar with the times can doubt for a 
 moment. If there is any degree in doggerel, Mil- 
 ton's versions are the most ridiculous. But the pur- 
 pose for which both paraphrases were made is evi- 
 dently one and the same. Nor can we exactly rail at 
 the absurdity of a lord chancellor of England writing 
 stage plays in the days of Elizabeth, when we have 
 seen a prime minister of England writing novels in 
 the age of Victoria. We can, even now, hear the 
 twenty-second century's comparative critic cry, 
 "Ridiculous to conceive of the great Beaconsfield, 
 the man whose statesmanship grappled with the 
 world, who, singly and alone, confronted an empire 
 in its flush of victory, and forced it to relinquish a 
 prize its sword had just won — to conceive of that 
 man writing a few florid and stagey novels. And 
 then, if it were not ridiculous on its face, look at the 
 
PREFACE. Xlil 
 
 internal evidence; count the 'stopped' and the c un- 
 stopped' and the 'double' endings: the 'run on' lines, 
 and the 'alternates:' and, for the 'birth marks of 
 style' (which anyone not 'color-blind' can see for 
 himself), put one of his speeches at the Berlin con- 
 gress alongside a chapter of Lothair ! " In short, so 
 versatile, so great in every literary walk of that day, 
 was Francis Bacon, that nobody can wonder that the 
 old school Shakespearean, — while willing to admit 
 Greene, Marston, Nash, Middleton, Fletcher, or any- 
 body else, a collaborateur with Shakespeare in the 
 plays, — stands aghast at any approach of Francis 
 Bacon to that vicinity, and cries " sacrilege 7 ' and 
 " lunacy ! " 
 
 For my part I have never been able to decide 
 whether the Baconian Theory were the greater com- 
 pliment to Bacon or to Shakespeare himself. Cer- 
 tainly "William Shakespeare is the only man who ever 
 lived whose works are accounted too sublime for him- 
 self — the only man as to whom the centuries are still 
 debating whether he was not — after all — a Demigod I 
 
 Rooms op the New Yoke. 
 Shakespeare Society, 
 • October 2, 1885. 
 
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 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 in- 
 structing his actors, he composed the thirty-two trag- 
 edies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an 
 incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an un- 
 equaled 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 Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon, where lived peacefully in the most 
 modest retirement, writing nothing and never return- 
 
 (XV) 
 
xvi PREFACE. 
 
 ing 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 uncon- 
 cerned 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 contribu- 
 tions to the solution of that question. 
 
 For instance, the gentlemen of the " New Shake- 
 speare Society " (whom Mr. Swinburne rather merci- 
 lessly 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 cat- 
 alectics (just as a mineralogist counts the degrees and 
 minutes in the angles of his crystals), insist on their 
 ability to pronounce didactically and infallibly what 
 was written by William Shakespeare, and at what age ; 
 what was composed by Dekker, Fletcher, Marlowe, or 
 
PREFACE. Xvil 
 
 anybody else ; what was originally theirs, touched up 
 by William Shakespeare or vice versa, etc. It is curi- 
 ous 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 £Te\v Shakespearean gentlemen have surrendered 
 somewhat of the' c cast-iron"theory of our childhood — 
 that every page, line, and word of the immortal 
 Shakespearean Drama was written by William 
 Shakespeare demigod, 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 Moliere. 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 some- 
 thing 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 quar- 
 
XV111 PREFACE. 
 
 ter century, is constantly recurring to confront inves- 
 tigation, 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. 
 
 PART I. 
 THE MYSTERY. 
 
 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 elate 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 na- 
 tions possesses not even a corresponding type. The 
 history of a century on either side of their era dis- 
 closes, within the precincts of their birth, no resources 
 upon which levy could have been made for their cre- 
 ation. They came and went like a meteor; neither 
 borrowing of what they found, nor loaning to what 
 they left, their own peculiar and unapproachable mag- 
 nificence. 
 
 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 re 
 turn, in a few years, a well-to-do esquire — with a coa: 
 
 of arms and money in his pocket. 
 
 (9) 
 
10 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 We have the history of the hoy, 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 rec- 
 ord. 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 con- 
 temporary 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 him- 
 self 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-clay, can it be perused, except one 
 line at a time, across the top of a dreary page of mi- 
 croscopic and exasperating annotation. But, up to 
 within a very few years, hardly a handful of Shakes- 
 pearean 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 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 11 
 
 for which — for almost three hundred years — he has 
 stood sponsor. 
 
 Miss Bacon's " madness," indeed, has been rapidly 
 contagious. 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 Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare was, after all, their author ; an ad- 
 mission, 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 his- 
 tory 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 5 
 and that no such question was asked, during the years 
 when those who could have dispelled the doubt or an- 
 swered 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 enter- 
 taining? Does it "draw?" And, when we wit- 
 
12 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 ness 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 Ave warn 
 them to keep away? We very speedily settle these 
 questions for ourselves. Doubtless we may and do in- 
 quire 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 pos- 
 sibly 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 con- 
 cern 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 testi- 
 mony of the play itself, if any, and a sort of tacit 
 presumption growing out of a statement it was no- 
 body'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. Now this sup- 
 posititious case is precisely all-fours with the facts 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 13 
 
 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 morn- 
 ing, 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 1616, were entertained. The plays "drew." Peo- 
 ple talked of them about town, and they become val- 
 uable 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 prow- 
 ess 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 kinsrs 
 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 cour- 
 tiers 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 rec- 
 ognition of the plays as works worthy of any other 
 than a stage-manager, occurred. 
 
14 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Even if it should appear that these plays thus per- 
 formed were the plays we now call Shakespeare's ; had 
 any of this audience suspected that these plays were 
 not written for them, hut for all time; that, three hun- 
 dred years later — when the plays should not only he 
 extant, hut 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 excep- 
 tional. The critic does not live, even to-day, however 
 learned or cultured or shrewd, who would take the re- 
 sponsibility 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, be- 
 yond 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 liter- 
 ary performance, and certainly nothing of the sort oc- 
 curred in Shakespeare's day, even if there were any 
 dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the sub- 
 ject. There can be no doubt — and it must be conceded 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 15 
 
 — that certain acted plays did pass with their first au- 
 diences, and that certain printed plays, both contempo- 
 raneously 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 no- 
 body ever asserted as a fact). If they did — with the 
 exception only of Robert Greeue — they certainly kept 
 their own counsel. On the one hand, then, the ques- 
 tion 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 satisfac- 
 tory 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 presump- 
 tion, arising from such lapse of time as that the mem- 
 ory of man runneth not to the contrary — the presump- 
 tion springing from tradition and common report — that 
 William Shakespeare composed the Shakespearean 
 plays ? It is, of course, understood that one presump- 
 
16 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 tion 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 top- 
 pled 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 pre- 
 sumption 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 finsrer of common sense to crackle and shrivel like 
 the egg that sat on the wall in the Kindergarten rhyme, 
 whieh 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 be- 
 cause 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 r many years has the myth of William Tell been 
 cherished as historv! 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 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 17 
 
 myths — which only required an exploration by physi- 
 cal sense for their explosion — the maps of two centu- 
 ries 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 Nonvay 
 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 w T as be- 
 lieved 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 Mael- 
 strom; 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 im- 
 munity from examination, simply because worth no- 
 body'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 no- 
 body 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 
 2 
 
18 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 iiud 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 clays 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 mast- 
 head of a ship in full sail does not fall at the foot of 
 the mast, but toward the stern. To this it was an- 
 swered 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 inde- 
 pendent. 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 
 lias 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 hap- 
 pens 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 compre- 
 
PART I. THE MYSTERY. 19 
 
 h ended the masterliness and matehlessness of the 
 '•Hamlet" and u Macbeth," and the rest of those tran- 
 scripts of nature, the prophetic insight of whose 
 author "spanned the ages that were to roll up after 
 him, mastered the highest wave of modern learn- 
 ing and discovery, and touched the heart of all time, 
 not through the breathing of living characters, but 
 by lifting mankind up out 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." 1 The age for which 
 the dramas were written had not come, in that Eliza- 
 bethan era. The tongues of the actors were tied, the 
 ears of the audience were deaf to syllables whose bur- 
 den 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 criti- 
 cism, 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- 
 
 1 Jean Paul Frederich Richter. 
 
20 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 deed, why our question did not arise sooner. Nobody 
 asked, *• Who wrote Shakespeare?' 3 because nobody 
 seemed to consider " Shakespeare " as any thing worth 
 speculating about. Let us pause right here to dem- 
 onstrate this. 
 
 Fuller, in 1622, chronicles that William Shakes- 
 peare'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, 
 be 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." l 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. 2 
 When spending some money in books he looks 
 over Shakespeare, but chooses " ' Hudibi as,' the book 
 now 7 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." 3 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 
 
 1 "Amenities of Authors — Shakespeare," p. 210. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 211. 
 
 3 Dr. Maginn, in his Shakespearean papers ("Learning of 
 Shakespeare'), endeavors to explain what Milton meant by 
 " native wood-notes wild." 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 21 
 
 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. 1 
 " 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." 2 
 
 In 1681, one Galium 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." 3 John Dryden, in or 
 about 1700, in his "Defence of the Epilogue," a post- 
 script 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 lameuess of their 
 plots," made up of some " ridiculous incoherent story, 
 . . . either grounded on impossibilities, or, at least, 
 
 1 "Amenities of Authors — Shakespeare," vol. ii, p. 208. Ibid., 
 p. 209, note. 
 
 2 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." 
 
 3 The "play" he did make out of it is to be found in W. H. 
 Smith's " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 129. 
 
22 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 so meanly written that the comedy neither caused your 
 mirth nor the serious part your concernment. . . . 
 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 the} 7 
 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. 1 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, 2 in which he is obliging 
 enough to say that the style of Shakespeare being "so 
 pestered with figurative expressions that it is as af- 
 fected as it is obscure ; " that, though " the author seems 
 to have began it with some fire, the characters of 
 'Pandarus' and * Troilus' are promising enough, but, 
 as if he grew weary of his task, after an entrance or 
 two, he lets 'em fall, and the latter part of the tragedy 
 is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, ex- 
 cursions and alarms. The chief persons who give name 
 to the trjgedy are left alive. 'Cressida' is left alive 
 and is not punished." " I have undertaken to remove 
 that heap of rubbish. ... I new- modelled the 
 plot; threw out many unnecessary persons, improved 
 
 1,1 Works," edited by Malone, vol. ii, p. 252. 
 
 2 " Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late." Written 
 by John Dryden, servant to his Majesty, London (4to) printed 
 for Abel Small, at the Unicorn at the West End of St. Paul's, and 
 Jacob Tonson, at the Judge's Head, in Chancery Lane, near 
 Fleet street. 1679. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 23 
 
 those characters which were begun and left unfinished, 
 . . . made, with no small trouble, an order and 
 connection of the scenes, and ... so ordered 
 them that there is a coherence of 'em with one an- 
 other, ... a due proportion of time allowed for 
 every motion, . . . have refined the language," etc. 
 The same thing was done in 1672, by Ravenscroft, 
 who produced an adaptation of " Titus Andronicus," 
 and boasted "that none in all the author's works ever 
 received greater alterations or additions; the language 
 not only refined, but many scenes entirely new, besides 
 most of the principal characters heightened, and the 
 plot much increased." John Dennis, a critic of that 
 day, declares that Shakespeare "knew nothing about 
 the ancients, set all propriety at defiance, . . . was 
 neither master of time enough to consider, correct, and 
 polish what he had written, . . . his lines are ut- 
 terly void of celestial fire," and his verses " frequently 
 harsh and unmusical." He was, however, so interested 
 in the erratic and friendless poet that he kindly altered 
 " The Merry Wives of Windsor," and touched up 
 " Coriolanus," which he brought out in 1720, under the 
 title of " The Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Re- 
 sentment." The play, however, did not prosper, and 
 he attributed it to the fact that it was played on a 
 Wednesday. Dean Swift, in his " The Narrative of 
 Dr. Robert Norris, concerning the Strange and Deplor- 
 able Frenzy of John Dennis," relates how the said Den- 
 nis, being in company with Lintot, the bookseller, and 
 Shakespeare being mentioned as of a contrary opinion 
 to Mr. Dennis, the latter " swore the said Shakespeare 
 was a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which 
 gave Mr. Lintot a very ill opinion of the said Shake- 
 
24 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 speare." Lord Shaftesbury complains, at about the 
 same date, of Shakespeare's "rude and unpolished 
 style and antiquated phrase and wit." 1 Thomas 
 Eymer knows exactly how Othello, which he calls 
 " a bloody farce, the tragedy of the pocket-hand- 
 kerchief," ought to have been done. In the first 
 place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a- 
 moor, and that the army should be insulted by his be- 
 ing a soldier. Of "Desdemona" he says: " There is 
 nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen- 
 maid — no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so 
 meanly." Speaking of expression, he writes that " in 
 the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff 
 there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, 
 I may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights 
 of Shakespeare." He is indignant that the catas- 
 trophe of the play should turn on a handkerchief. He 
 would have liked it to have been folded neatly on the 
 bridal couch, and, when Othello was killing Desde- 
 mona, " the fairy napkin might have started up to dis- 
 arm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth. Then 
 might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for dead; then 
 might he, believing her dead, and touched with re- 
 morse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good 
 leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who 
 might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, 
 and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and 
 truly represented in the theater. Then for the un- 
 raveling of the plot, as they call it, never was old 
 
 1 Mr. De Quincy's painful effort to demonstrate that neither 
 Dryden nor Shaftesbury meant what he said is amusing reading. 
 See his " Shakespeare" in the " Encyclopaedia Britannica." Also 
 Knight, "Studies of Shakespeare," p. 510, as to Dr. Johnson. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 25 
 
 deputy recorder in a country town, with his spectacles 
 on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so 
 blundered and bedoltified as is our poet to have a good 
 riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. What 
 can remain with the audience to carry home with 
 them? How can it work but to delude onr senses, 
 disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt 
 our appetite, and fill our head with vanity, confusion, 
 tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what all the 
 parish clerks in London could ever pretend to?" He 
 then hopes the audience will go to the play as they go 
 to church, namely, "sit still, look on one another, 
 make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they 
 would a sermon." With regard to "Julius Caesar," 
 he is displeased that Shakespeare should have meddled 
 with the Romans. He might be "familiar with 
 Othello and Iago as his own natural acquaintances, 
 but Caesar and Brutus were above his conversation." 
 To put them "in gulls' coats and make them Jack- 
 puddens," is more than public decency should tolerate 
 — in Mr. Rymer's eyes. Of the well-known scene be- 
 tween Brutus and Cassius, this critic remarks : " They 
 are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to 
 show their activity of face and muscles. They are to 
 play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swag- 
 gering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reck- 
 oning." Rymer calls his book "A Short View of 
 Tragedy, with Some Reflections on Shakespeare and 
 Other Practitioners for the Stage." Hume thought 
 that both Bacon and Shakespeare showed " a want of 
 simplicity and purity of diction with defective taste 
 and elegance," and that " a reasonable propriety of 
 3 
 
26 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 thoughts he (Shakespeare) can not at any time up- 
 hold." Voltaire thought the Shakespearean kings 
 " not completely royal." Pope (who declared that 
 Kymer, just quoted, was " a learned and strict critic"), 
 to show that he was not insensible to the occasional 
 merits of the plays, was good enough to distinguish, 
 by inverted commas, such passages as he thought 
 might be safely admired by the rest of mankind ; while 
 Richard Steele, in " The Tatler," 1 borrows the story 
 of the " Taming of the Shrew," and narrates it as 
 "an incident occurring in Lincolnshire," feeling, no 
 doubt, that he did a good deed in rescuing whatever 
 was worth preserving from the clutches of such ob- 
 scure and obsolete literature ! 
 
 And then came the period when scholars and men 
 of taste were ravished with Addison's stilted rhymes, 
 and the six-footed platitudes of Pope, and the sesqui- 
 pedalian derivatives dealt out by old Samuel Johnson. 
 The Shakespearean plays are pronounced by Mr. Ad- 
 dison 2 "very faulty in hard metaphors and forced 
 expressions," and he joins them with " !Nat. Lee," as 
 " instances of the false sublime." Samuel Johnson is 
 reported as saying that William Shakespeare never 
 wrote six consecutive lines (he subsequently made it 
 seven) without " making an ass of himself," (in which 
 speech he seems to have followed his namesake with- 
 out the " h," old Ben, in the " Discoveries") — backing 
 up his assertion with some very choice specimens of 
 literary criticism. Let any one, interested enough in 
 
 1 Vol. vi, No. 31. He complains, in number 42, that the female 
 characters in the play make " so small a figure." 
 8 Spectator, 39; p. 285. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 27 
 
 the matter to see for himself, take down Dr. Johnson's 
 own edition of Shakespeare, and read his commen- 
 taries on the Shakespearean text. Let him turn, for 
 example, to where he says of " Hamlet " : 
 
 We must allow to the tragedy of " Hamlet " the praise of 
 variety. The incidents are so numerous that the argument of 
 the play would make a long tale. The scenes are interchangeably 
 diversified with merriment and solemnity, . . . that includes 
 judicious and instructive observations. . . . New characters 
 appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting 
 various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. The 
 pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth; . . . 
 the catastrophe is not very happily produced ; the exchange of 
 weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. 
 A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the daggei- 
 and Laertes with the bowl. 
 
 Again, of " Macbeth :" 
 
 This play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fic- 
 tion, and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action, but it has 
 no nice discriminations of character. ... I know not 
 whether it may not be said in defense of some parts which now 
 seem improbable, that in Shakespeare's time it was necessary to 
 warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions. 
 
 Again, of " Julius Caesar :" 
 
 Of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and 
 the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is uni- 
 versally celebrated. But I have never been strongly agitated in 
 perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc. 
 
 Was "Hamlet" a low comedy part, in the days 
 when all England bowed at the feet of an unkempt 
 and mannerless old man, awed by the brilliancy of his 
 " literary judgment ? " And did Hamlet's " pretended 
 madness " cause " much mirth " to the age, or only to 
 
28 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Samuel Johnson ? People now-a-days do not sit and 
 giggle over " the pretended madness of Hamlet." 
 But, waiving these questions, let him turn to the 
 "Rambler," 1 of this excellent lexicographer, and 
 read him (patiently, if he can), citing the magnificent 
 lines — 
 
 Come thick night 
 And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell ; 
 That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, 
 Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark 
 To cry " hold, hold /" 
 
 as an example of " poetry debased by mean expres- 
 sions ;" because " dun " is a " low " expression, " sel- 
 dom heard but in the stable ; " " knife " an instru- 
 ment used bv butchers and cooks in the meanest em- 
 ployment;" and asking "who, without some relax- 
 ation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt 
 peeping through the blanket of the dark!" Let the 
 reader look on a little further, and find this fossil- 
 scanning machine telling oft' the spondees and dactyls 
 in the dramas (to ascertain if the caesura was exactly 
 in the middle) on his fingers and thumbs, and count- 
 ing the unities up to three, to see if he could approve 
 of what the ages after him were to worship! if, 
 haply, this Shakespeare (although he might have de- 
 vised a scheme to kill Laertes with the bowl and Ham- 
 let with the dagger, or might have thrown a little more 
 fire into the quarrel with Brutus and Cassius) could 
 be admitted to sit at the feet of Addison, with his 
 sleepy and dreary " Campaign ;" or Pope, with his 
 metrical proverbs about "Man;" or even the afore- 
 said Samuel Johnson himself, with his rhymed dic- 
 
 1 $o. 168. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 29 
 
 tionaries about the " vanity of human wishes," and 
 so on* Let himjfind the old lexicographer admitting, 
 in his gracious condescension, that " The Tempest " " is 
 sufficiently regular ; " of " Measure for Measure" that 
 " the unities are sufficiently preserved;" that the " Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream" was " well written ;" that the 
 style of the " Merchant of Venice" was " easy ; " but 
 that in "As you Like It" "an opportunity of ex- 
 hibiting a moral lesson " is unhappily lost. The " Win- 
 ter's Tale" is " entertaining;" in " King John " he finds 
 " a pleasing interchange of incidents and characters," 
 remarking that "the lady's grief is very affecting." 
 Of " Troilus and Cressida " the old formalist says, that it 
 " is one of the most correctly written of Shakespeare's 
 plays ; " of " Coriolanus," that it " is one of the most 
 amusing." But, he says, that "Antony and Cleopatra " 
 is " low " and " without any art of connection or care of 
 disposition." He dismisses " Cymbeline " with the re- 
 mark that he does not care " to waste criticism upon 
 unresisting imbecility ; upon faults too evident for de- 
 tection and too gross for aggravation." He is pleased to 
 approve of " Romeo and Juliet," because " the incidents 
 are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresist- 
 ibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on 
 with such probability, at least with such congruity to 
 popular opinions, as tragedy requires" and, while on 
 the whole, approving of " Othello," he can not help re- 
 marking that, " had the scene opened in Cyprus, and 
 the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there 
 had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact 
 and scrupulous regularity." And so on every-where ! 
 Let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these 
 mighty and deathless monographs to-day ! Let him 
 
30 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 imagine a better illustration, if he can, of what our 
 Johnson's friend Pope called — in long meter — " fools 
 rushing in where angels feared to tread !" And let 
 him confess to himself that these were not the times 
 nor the men to raise the question. 
 
 Is it not the fact that, until our own century, the 
 eyes of the world were darkened, and men saw in 
 these Shakespearean dramas only such stage plays, sat- 
 isfying the acting necessities of almost any theater, as 
 might have been written — not by "the soul" of any 
 age ; not by a man " myriad-minded ;" not by a " morn- 
 ing-star of song," or a " dear son of memory," but — 
 by a clever playwright? The sort of days when 
 an Addison could have been pensioned for his dreary - 
 and innocent " Campaign," and a Mr. Pye made poet- 
 laureate of the land where an unknown pen had once 
 written " Hamlet ;" were, consequently, not the days 
 for the discovery with which this century has crowned 
 itself — namely, the discovery that the great first of 
 poets lived in the age when England and America 
 were one world by themselves, and that they must 
 now draw together again to search for the master 
 " who came " — to use, with all reverence, the words 
 of Judge Holmes—" upon our earth, knowing all 
 past, all present, and all future, to be leader, 
 guide, and second gospel of mankind." But the full- 
 ness of time has come, and we now know that, who- 
 ever was the poet that he " kept," he was of quite an- 
 other kidney than the manager of the theater, William 
 Shakespeare, who employed him to write Plays, and 
 who wrote Revelations and Gospels instead. 
 
 If we were interested to inquire what manner of 
 man Mr. Manager Shakespeare was, we have only to 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 31 
 
 look about us among the managers of theaters in this 
 latter half of our nineteenth century. Let us take 
 Mr. Wallack or Mr. Daly, both of whom arrange plays 
 for the stages of their own theaters, for example; or, 
 better yet, take Mr. Dion Boucieault, who is an actor 
 as well as a manager, and is, moreover, as successful 
 in his clay as was William Shakespeare in his. Mr. 
 Boucieault has, so far, produced about one hundred and 
 thirty-seven successful plays. Mr. William Shakes- 
 peare produced about a hundred less. All of Mr. Bou- 
 cicault's plays show that gentleman's skillful hand in 
 cutting, expanding, arranging, and setting for the 
 stage; and in the representation of them, Mr. Bouci- 
 eault has himself often participated. In like man- 
 ner, Mr. Shakespeare, the manager, we are told by 
 tradition, often assisted at the representation of the 
 dramas produced on his boards, playing the Ghost in 
 "Hamlet" 1 not only, but a range of other impor- 
 tant parts not likely to have been assumed by him, un- 
 less an actor of considerable ability. We happen to 
 know, also, that Mr. Shakespeare rewrote for the stage 
 what his unknown poet, poets, or friends composed, 
 from the tolerable hearsay testimony of his fellow 
 
 1 And played it, it is thought by some, so wretchedly that he 
 made "the gods" hoot. At any rate, in a pamphlet published 
 by Lodge, in 1596, "Witt's Miserie and the World's Madness; 
 Discovering the Devil's Incarnate of this age," a devil named 
 " Hate-Vertue"- is described as looking " as pale as the vizard of 
 the ghost, which cried so miserably at the theatre like an oister- 
 wife, 'Hamlet — Revenge.'" But perhaps Shakespeare did not 
 play the ghost that night. Shakespeare also played "Old 
 Knoweiy' Jonson's " Every Man in his Humor," "Adam," in 
 "As You Like It," and, according to Jonson, a part in the latter's 
 " Sejanus," in 1603. 
 
32 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 actor, Ben Jonson, who tells us that he remembers 
 to have heard the players say that the stage copies of 
 the plays were written in Shakespeare's autograph, 
 and were all the more available on that account, be- 
 cause he (Shakespeare), was a good penman, in that 
 "whatever he penned, he never blotted line." 1 Mr. 
 Boucicault, while claiming the full credit to which he 
 is entitled, is quite too clever, as well as too conscientious 
 to set up for an original author or a poet, as well as a 
 playwright. Neither does Shakespeare (as we have 
 already said), anywhere appear to have ever claimed 
 to be a poet, or even to have taken to himself — what 
 we may, however, venture to ascribe to him — the merit 
 of the stage-setting of the dramatic works, which, 
 having been played at his theater, we collectively call 
 the "Shakespearean plays" to-day. Why, then, to 
 begin with, should we not conceive of Mr. Manager 
 Shakespeare discharging the same duties as Mr. Wal- 
 lack, Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault? as very much — 
 from the necessities of his vocation — the same sort of 
 man as either of them ? 
 
 There is scarcely any evidence either way ; but the 
 fact that the actors were in the habit of receiving their 
 fair copy of these plays from the manager's — William 
 Shakespeare's — own hand, seems to make it evident 
 that he did not originally compose them. Indeed, if 
 Shakespeare had been their author, well-to-do and 
 bustling manager as he was, he would probably have 
 intrusted their transcription to some subordinate or su- 
 pernumerary ; or, better yet, would have kept a play- 
 wright of experience to set his compositions for the 
 
 1 See Post, part III, the Jonsonian Testimony. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 33 
 
 stage, to put in the necessary localisms, " gags," and 
 allusions to catch the ear of the penny seats. Such a 
 division of labor is imperative to-day, and was im- 
 perative then — or at least to suppose that it was not, 
 is to suppose that of his dozen or so of co-managers, 
 William Shakespeare was the one who did all the 
 work, while the others looked on. 
 
 But, it is surmised that Shakespeare was his own 
 playwright ; took the dramas and rewrote them for the 
 actors ; he inserted the requisite business, the exits, 
 and entrances, and — when necessary — suited the read- 
 ing to the actor who was to pronounce the dialogue, 
 according as he happened to be fat or lean. 1 Such was 
 
 1 It may be noted that the line, " He's fat and scant of breath," 
 does not occur in the early and imperfect edition of " Hamlet" 
 of 1603. Was it added to suit Burbadge ? And was there a fur- 
 ther change made also to suit Mr. Burbadge, the leading trage- 
 dian of the time ? In the edition of 1603, the grave-digger says 
 of Yorick's skull: 
 
 Looke you, here's a skull hath bin here this dozen year, 
 Let me see, ever since our last King Hamlet 
 Slew Fortenbrasse in combat, young Hamlet's father, 
 He that's mad. 
 
 But in all subsequent editions, the grave-digger says : " Here's 
 a skull now ; this skull has lain i' the earth three and twenty 
 years." The effect of this alteration is to add considerably to 
 Hamlet's age. "Alas, poor Yorick ! " he says, " 1 knew him, 
 Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He 
 hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now how ab- 
 horred in my imagination it is ! My gorge rises at it. Here hung 
 those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft," etc. How 
 old, then, was Hamlet when Yorick died ? But Hamlet's age is 
 even more distinctly fixed by other lines which do not occur in 
 the early edition of 1603 : 
 
 Hamlet. — How long hast thou been a grave-maker? 
 
34 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 the employment which fell to the part of William 
 Shakespeare, in the division of labor among the man- 
 agement in which he was a partner, and the resulting 
 manuscript was what Ben Jonson's friends told him 
 of. For nobody, we fancy, quite supposes that the 
 poet, whoever he was, produced " Hamlet" one even- 
 ing, " Macbeth" on another, and "Julius Caesar" on 
 another, without blotting or erasing, changing, prun- 
 ing or filing a line, and then handed his original drafts 
 to the players next morning to learn their parts from ! 
 This is not the w T ay that poems are written (nor, we 
 may add, the way theaters are managed). The greater 
 the geniuses, the more they blotch and blot and dash 
 their pens over the paper when the frenzy is in pos- 
 session of them. And besides, the fact that there ex- 
 ist to-day, and always have existed, numerous and di- 
 verse readings of the Shakespearean text, does very 
 clearly show that their author or authors did, at differ- 
 ent times, vary and alter the construction of the text 
 
 First Clown. — Of all the days i' the year, T came to't that day 
 that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortenbras. 
 
 Hamlet. — How long is that since ? 
 
 First Clown. — Can not tell that? Every fool can tell that; it 
 was the very day that young Hamlet was born ; he that is mad 
 and sent to England. 
 
 And presently he adds : 
 
 I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years. 
 
 Mr. Marshall writes : "It would appear that Shakespeare ad- 
 ded these details, which tend to prove Hamlet to have been 
 thirty years old, for much the same reason as he inserted the 
 line, 'He's fat and scant of breath,' namely, in order to render 
 Hamlet's age and personal appearance more in accordance 
 with those of the great actor, Burbadge, who personated him." 
 The edition of 1603 is generally accounted a piratical copy of 
 the first sketch of the play. — All the Year Round. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 35 
 
 as taste or fancy dictated, and, therefore, that the manu- 
 scripts Ben Jonson's friends saw and told him of (and 
 Heminges & Condell, as far as their testimony is of any 
 value, confirm Jonson, for they assert that " what he 
 thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have 
 received from him scarce a blot in his papers''), were 
 the acting copies, and not the original manuscripts of 
 the Shakespearean plays. 
 
 With the exception of Ben Jonson (to whose pane- 
 gyric we devote a chapter in its place further on), the 
 contemporaries of William Shakespeare, who celebra- 
 ted his death in verse, nowhere assert him to have 
 been the myriad-minded Oceanic (to use Coleridge's 
 adjectives) genius which we conceive him now-a-days — 
 which he must have been to have written the works 
 now assigned to him. Let any one doubting this 
 statement open the pages of Dr. Ingleby's " Shakes- 
 peare's Centurie of Prayse," a work claimed by its 
 compiler to be inclusive of every allusion to, comment 
 or criticism on Shakespeare, which Dr. Ingleby has 
 been able to unearth in print, dating anywhere within 
 one hundred years of Shakespeare's death. We have 
 industriously turned every page of this work, and will 
 submit to any other who will do the same, the ques- 
 tion whether it contains a line which exhibits William 
 Shakespeare as any other than a wit, a successful actor, 
 a'poet of the day, a genial and generous friend, a writer 
 of plays, or whether — when eulogistic of the plays 
 called his seven years after his death (a very different 
 list, by the way, than the one assigned him during his 
 life), rather than biographical as to the man, they are 
 of any more value as evidence than Gray's or Milton's 
 magnificent apostrophes to a genius with whom their 
 
36 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 only familiarity was through report, rumor, or impres- 
 sion derived from the ever immortal works. For, 
 like Gray, Coleridge, Emerson — all that John Mil- 
 ton knew about William Shakespeare was pure hear- 
 say, derived from local report or perusal of the Shakes- 
 pearean plays (" a book invalued," he calls them). 
 Even if we were called upon to do so, we could hardly 
 conceive Milton— a Puritan, and a blind Puritan at that 
 — as much of a play-goer or boon companion of actors 
 and managers. But we are not called upon to imagine 
 any thing of the sort; for, as a matter of fact, John 
 Milton was exactly seven years and four months old 
 when William Shakespeare died. And so, what is 
 called "the Milton testimony," upon examination, 
 proves to be no testimony at all, but only hearsay — 
 venerable, perhaps — but hearsay, nevertheless; 1 as 
 utterly immaterial as his "warbling his native wood 
 notes wild" — aline that might be, not inaptly, applied 
 to Eobert Burns, but which suggests almost any thing 
 except the stately and splendid pages of the Shakes- 
 pearean opera — to which we have before alluded as 
 justifying us, indeed, in wondering if the Puritan poet 
 had ever gone so far, before formulating his opinion, as 
 to open the book assigned to the Shakespeare he wrote 
 of. And so, in the first place, there was no great call 
 or occasion for discussion as to the authorship of the 
 Shakespearean dramas in the days when they first be- 
 gan to be known by the public ; and, as for Mr. Manager 
 Shakespeare's friends, and the actors of his company, 
 
 1 Milton was the enemy of all the ilk. "This would make 
 them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common 
 rimers and playwriters be," he says in his essays " of Education," 
 in 1634. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 37 
 
 they testified to what they had heard, and, if they 
 knew any thing to the contrary, they kept it to them- 
 selves. If his friends, jealous of his reputation, they 
 were not solicitous of heralding him a fraud; and if 
 the " stock" upon his pay-roll, they held their bread 
 at his hand, and were not eager to offend him. If — as 
 we shall notice further on — a wise few did suspect the 
 harmless imposition, either they had grounds for not 
 mentioning it, or there were reasons why people did 
 not credit them. And so, in the second place, the 
 times were not ripe for the truth to be known, because 
 there was nobody who cared about knowing it, and 
 nobody to whom it could be a revelation. 
 
 To suppose that William Shakespeare wrote the 
 plays which we call his, is to suppose that a miracle 
 was vouchsafed to the race of man in London in the 
 course of certain years of the reign of Elizabeth. If, 
 however, instead of probing for miracles, we come to 
 consider that men and managers and theaters in the 
 age of Elizabeth were very much the same sort of 
 creatures and places that we find them now; that, 
 among the habitues of the Globe and Blackfriars Thea- 
 ters in that reign, were certain young gentlemen of 
 abundant leisure and elegant education who admitted 
 managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange 
 for the entre^of the green-room ; and that managers in 
 those days as in these, were always on the alert for 
 novelties, and drew their material — in the crude, if 
 necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they 
 were so fortunate — from wherever they could find it; 
 if, in short, we find that among the curled darlings 
 who frequented Master William Shakespeare's side 
 doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, 
 
38 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 at least one ready writer who was so placed as to be 
 eager to write anonymously for bread (and who, more- 
 over, had access to the otherwise sealed and occult 
 knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the 
 giants of his day — to say nothing of the theater-man- 
 agers — did not and could not dream) — if, we say, we 
 consider all this, we need pin our faith to no miracles, 
 but expect only the ordinary course of human events. 
 If William Shakespeare were an unknown quantity, 
 like Homer, to be estimated only by certain masterly 
 works assigned to him, this answer might, indeed, be 
 different. For, just as Homer's writings are so mag- 
 nificent as to justify ascribing to him — so far as mere 
 power to produce them goes — any other contemporary 
 literature to be discovered, so the works attributed to 
 William Shakespeare are splendid enough to safely 
 credit him with the compositions of any body else ; of 
 even so great a man as Bacon, for example. But 
 William Shakespeare is no unknown quantity — 
 except that we lose sight of him for the few years 
 between his leaving Stratford, and (as part proprietor 
 of the largest London play-house) accepting Ben Jon- 
 son's play of " Every Man in His Humour " — we know 
 pretty well all about him. There are half a hundred 
 biographies extant — new ones being written every day 
 — and any one of them may be consulted as to the 
 manner of life William Shakespeare's was. The 
 breakneck marriage bond, which waived all for- 
 malities, the consent of any body's parents, justifi- 
 cation of sureties, three askings of banns, etc., so he 
 could only be fast married ; the beer-bouts, youthful 
 and harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, 
 Sir Thomas Lucy thought, to justify instructing a War- 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 39 
 
 wick attorney to prosecute the lad before the law: all 
 these are matter of record, amply photographing for 
 us William Shakespeare in Stratford. Then the hiatus 
 — and this same lad appears, prosperou s, and in the great 
 town ; sending home money to his impoverished family 
 — part proprietor of a theater, purchasing freehold es- 
 tates in London — a grant of arms for his father — the 
 great house in his native village for his own home- 
 stead; investing in the tithings of his county, and be- 
 ginning a chancery suit to recover lands which his 
 father — in his poverty — had allowed himself to forfeit 
 by foreclosure. Surely we will not go far astray if 
 we set it down that some pretty hard work at what 
 this rising lad found to do in London, and learned to 
 do best, has filled up those unrecorded years ! Was 
 all this money made by writing plays for the Globe, 
 or by working on Bacon's Novum Organum, or by 
 other literary labor? Was that the hard work Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare found to do, and laid up money at, 
 in the interval between his last crop of wild oats at 
 Stratford, and the condescension of the man of affairs 
 in London ? If it were, it is curious that no rumor or 
 tradition of it comes from Stratford. Nothing travels 
 quite so fast in rural neighborhoods as a reputation 
 for " book learning," while the local worthy, who has 
 actually written a book of his own, is a landmark in 
 his vicinage. Now, William Shakespeare died one of 
 the richest men — if not the richest — in all Stratford. It 
 is strange that the gossip and goodwives, who so loaded 
 themselves with his boyish freaks and frailties, should 
 never have troubled themselves about his manly pur- 
 suits and accomplishments. The only English com- 
 positions he is credited within Stratford gossip are one 
 
40 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 or two excessively conventional epitaphs on Elias 
 James, John a Coombe, and others — the latter of 
 which is only to be appreciated by a familiarity with 
 Warwickshire patois. He sprang from a family so il- 
 literate that they could not write their own name; and, 
 moreover, lived and died utterly indifferent as to how 
 anybody else wrote it — whether with an " x " or a " g," 
 a"c" ora"ks." And as he found them, so he left 
 them. For, although William Shakespeare enjoyed an 
 income of $25,000 (present value of money) at his 
 death, he never had his own children taught to read 
 and write, and his daughter Judith signed her mark 
 to her marriage bond. 
 
 That the rustic youth, whom local traditions vari- 
 ously represent as a scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's 
 apprentice, and the like, but never as a school-boy, a 
 student, a reader, a poet — as ever having been seen 
 with a book in his hand — driven by poverty to shift 
 for himself, should at once (for the dates, as variously 
 given by Mr. Malone and Mr. Grant White, are ex- 
 ceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that 
 most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman 
 about town, Southampton, is almost incredible. But, 
 it is no more incredible than that this ill-assorted 
 friendship can be accounted for by the lad's superhu- 
 man literary talents. Southampton never was sus- 
 pected, during his lifetime, of a devotion to literature, 
 much less of an admiration for letters so rapt as to 
 make him forget the gulf between his nobility and 
 that of a peasant lad — who (even if we disbelieve his 
 earliest biographers as to the holding horses and car- 
 rying links) must necessarily have been employed in 
 the humblest pursuits at the outset of his London 
 
PAKT I. — THE MYSTERY. 41 
 
 career. But yet, according to the various " chronolo- 
 gies " (which, in the endeavor to crowd these works 
 into William Shakespeare's short life, so as to tally 
 with the dates — when known — of their production, 
 only vary inconsiderably after all), the Stratford boy 
 hardly puts in his appearance in London before he pre- 
 sents Lord Southampton, as the "first heir of his in- 
 vention," with — if not the most mature — at least the 
 most carefully polished production that William 
 Shakespeare's name w T as ever signed to ; and, more- 
 over, as polished, elegant, and sumptuous a piece of 
 rhetoric as English letters has ever produced down to 
 this very day. 
 
 Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all 
 the Latin and Greek extant ; this poem, dedicated to 
 Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if 
 not a miracle. The genius of Robert Barns found its 
 expression in the idiom of his father and his mother, 
 in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he 
 was born. When he came to London, and tried to 
 warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into 
 formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a 
 peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire; without 
 schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most 
 sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace 
 of that Warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and 
 coetaneans spoke — the language of his own fireside! 
 As a matter of fact, English was a much rarer accom- 
 plishment in the days when Thomas Jenkins and 
 Thomas Hunt were masters of Stratford Grammar 
 School, than Greek and Latin. Children, in those 
 days, were put at their hie, hsec, hoc at an age when we 
 4 
 
42 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 send them to kindergartens. But no master dreamed 
 of drilling them in their own vernacular. Admitting 
 William Shakespeare to have been born a poet, he 
 must also have been born a master of the arbitrary 
 rules of English rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and pros- 
 ody, as well, to have written that one poem. But, say 
 the Shakespeareans, even if William did not study 
 English at the Stratford Grammar School, or read it 
 in those crowded days when earning his bread by 
 menial employment in stranger London, he had an 
 opportunity to study Lyly, Eash, Greene, Peele, Chet- 
 tle, and. the rest. But the Shakespearean vocabulary 
 — like the whole canon of the plays — is a thing apart 
 —unborrowed, unimitated, and unlearned from any 
 of these. These were satisfied to write for the stages 
 of the barns called " play-houses," and for their audi- 
 ences, which — according to all reports — were decidedly 
 indifferent as to scholarship. These might introduce 
 a Frenchman, but they never troubled themselves to 
 make him French ; or a Scotchman, but they never 
 stopped to make him Scotch. But even if William 
 Shakespeare, in the immersions of the management, 
 was author of that intellectual Dane, over-refined in a 
 German university of metaphysics, he called Hamlet ; 
 or of that crafty Italian, named Iago ; or of that Roman 
 iceberg, Brutus — it is quite as difficult to conceive 
 either the skylarking boy in Stratford, where there 
 were no libraries, and his father too poor (not 
 daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest 
 for debt) to buy books ; or the self-made man toiling 
 from the bottom rung of poverty to the top of for- 
 tune — with leisure to study the characteristics of race 
 and nationality — as acquiring all the grandeur of die- 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 43 
 
 tion, insight into the human heart (which, at least, 
 is not guess-work), knowledge and philosophy, we 
 call his to-day. Even if we go no further than the 
 "Venus and Adonis" — appearing at a date preluding 
 a drill that, for the sake of the argument, we might 
 even assume — how could that poem have been written 
 by the peasant who only knew his native dialect, or 
 the penniless lad earning his bread in stranger London, 
 at the first shift at hand — with no entre to the great 
 libraries, and no leisure to use one if he had it? Ben 
 Jonson spent some years at Cambridge before he was 
 taken away and set at brickmaking — he is said to have 
 been a very studious brickmaker, working, according 
 to Fuller, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the 
 other. As to his career as a soldier — a soldier, when 
 not actually in the field or on the march, may find con- 
 siderable opportunity for rumination ; and, when lying 
 in jail, he would certainly have ample leisure for his 
 Greek and Roman. But Jonson wrote for the Eliza- 
 bethan theaters ; he lived and died hungry and poor, 
 a borrower, over his ears in debt to the last. William 
 Shakespeare, his contemporary, loaned Ben Jonson 
 money ; rose rapidly from penury to affluence ; made 
 his father rich, and a gentleman with an escutcheon ; 
 bought himself the most splendid house in Stratford 
 (so splendid as to be deemed worthy a royal residence 
 by Queen Henrietta) ; invested in outlying lands ; 
 speculated in tithes, and lived, until his death — accord- 
 ing to Dominie Ward — at the rate of $25,000 a year. 
 We are familiar enough with these stories of self- 
 made men (so-called) in our daily newspapers. Let 
 those who will, believe that William Shakespeare 
 accumulated this splendid fortune, not by the success- 
 
44 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 fill management of the best appointed and affected 
 theater in London, but by writing plays for its stage! 
 and — at the same time — conceived, evolved from his 
 own inner consciousness, all the learning which other 
 playwrights (like Ben Jonson and the rest) were 
 obliged — like ordinary mortals — to get out of books ! 
 The only efforts made to account for this wealth 
 flowing into the coffers of a poet, have been mere sur- 
 mises, like the story of Southampton's munificence, 
 and of the royal favor of King James, who wrote the 
 manager a letter with his own hand. But neither of 
 these stories happens to be contemporary with Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare himself. The first was an after- 
 thought of Davenant, who was ten years old when 
 Shakespeare died ; and who is not accepted as an au- 
 thority, even as to his ow r n pedigree, by the very com- 
 mentators who most eagerly seize upon and swear to 
 his Southampton fiction. The other is not even hear- 
 say, but the bold invention of Bernard Lintot, who 
 published an edition of the plays in 1710. Doubtless, 
 as has been the ambition of all the commentators, be- 
 fore Mr. Collier and since, Lintot was bound to be at 
 least one fact ahead of his rivals, even if he had to in- 
 vent that fact himself. He vouchsafes, as authority 
 for this tale of the royal letter, however, the statement 
 of " a credible person now living," who saw the letter 
 itself in the possession of Davenant : in the teeth of 
 the certainty that, had Davenant ever possessed such 
 a letter, Davenant would have taken good care that 
 the world should never hear the last of it: and coyly 
 preserves the incognito of the " credible person," 
 whom, however, Oldys conjectures must have been, 
 if any body, the Duke of Buckingham. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 45 
 
 But, miracles aside, to consider William Shakes- 
 peare as the author of the Shakespearean drama — for 
 that he has christened it, and that it will go forever by 
 his name, we concede — involves us in certain difficul- 
 ties that seem altogether insurmountable. In the first 
 place, scholars and thinkers, whose hearts have been 
 open to the matchless message of the Shakespearean 
 text, and who found themselves drawn to conclude 
 that such a man as William Shakespeare once lived, 
 were amazed to discover that the very evidence which 
 forced them to that conclusion, also proved conclusively 
 that that individual could not have written the dramas 
 since known by his name. Coleridge, Schlegel, Goethe, 
 Jean Paul Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, 
 Hallam, Delia Bacon, Gervinus, and, doubtless, many 
 more, clearly saw that the real Shakespeare was not 
 the Shakespeare we have described. " In spite of all 
 the biographies, ' ask your own hearts,' says Coleridge 
 — ' ask your own common sense to conceive the possi- 
 bility of this man being . . . the anomalous, the wild, 
 the irregular genius of our daily criticism. What! 
 are we to have miracles in sport ? or (I speak rever- 
 ently) does God choose idiots by whom to convey di- 
 vine truths to man V m - " If there was a Shakespeare 
 of earth, as I suspect," says Hallam — alluding to the 
 fact that all the commentators told him of the man 
 Shakespeare, inferred him as anything but the master 
 he was cited — " there was also one of heaven, and it is 
 of him we desire to learn more." 2 
 
 1 " Notes to Shakespeare's Works," iv., 56. — Holmes "Author- 
 ship of Shakespeare," 598. 
 2,1 Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 26. 
 
46 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 This evidence was of three sorts: 1. Official records 
 and documents ; 2. The testimony of contemporaries ; 
 and, 3. That general belief, reputation, and tradition, 
 which, left to itself in the manner we have indicated, 
 has grown into the presumption of nearly three hun- 
 dred years. We will not recapitulate the well-thumbed 
 records, nor recite the dog's-eared testimony, which 
 together gave rise to the presumption. But the dilem- 
 ma presented to the student was in this wise: By the 
 parish records it appeared that a man child was 
 christened in Stratford Church April 26th, (old style) 
 1564, by the name William. He was the son of one 
 John Shakespeare, a worthy man, who lived by 
 either, or all, the trades of butcher, wool-comber, or 
 glover — three not incompatible pursuits variously 
 assigned him — was, at different times, a man of some 
 means, even of local importance, (becoming, on one 
 occasion, even ale-taster for the town,) and, at his 
 son's birth, owner in freehold of two plots of ground 
 in Stratford village, on one of which plots a low- 
 raftered house now stands, which has come to be a 
 Mecca to which pilgrims from the whole world rever- 
 ently repair. The next official record of the son so 
 born to John Shakespeare is the marriage-bond to the 
 Bishop of Worcester; enabling this son to wed one 
 Anne Hathaway, his senior in years, which bond re- 
 mains to this day on file in the office of the Preroga- 
 tive Court of Canterbury. 
 
 Later on, the son, having become a person of means, 
 purchases for his father a grant of arms ;' and (the name 
 being Shakespeare) the heralds allot him an escutcheon 
 on which is represented a shaking spear (symbolically 
 treated) — a device which, under the circumstances, 
 
* 
 
 PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 47 
 
 did not tax the heralds' ingenuity, or commit them to 
 any theory about ancestors at Hastings or among the 
 Saracens. The increasing wealth of the son leaves its 
 traces in the title-deeds to and records of purchase of 
 freehold and leasehold possessions, of the investment 
 in meadow-lands, and tithes, and of sundry law suits 
 incidental to these. Local tradition — which in like 
 cases is perforce admitted as evidence — supplements 
 all this record, and, so far as it can, confirms it, until 
 we have an all but complete biography. 
 
 This biography the world knows by heart. It does 
 not esteem the boy William Shakespeare the less be- 
 cause he was a boy — because — in the age and period 
 reserved for that crop — he sowed and garnered his 
 " wild oats." It has reason to believe him to have 
 been much more than a mere wayward youth. Aubrey 
 ("old Aubrey," " arch-gossip Aubrey," the Shakes- 
 peareaus call him, probably because he wrote his sketch 
 fifty years after his subject's death, instead of two 
 hundred and fifty), says that he was the village prod- 
 igy, that " he exercised his father's trade — but, when 
 he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make 
 a speech," etc., etc. Nor is there any thing in the record 
 of his mature and latter years — of his investments in 
 tithes, and messuages, and homesteads — of his fore- 
 closures and suits for money loaned and malt deliv- 
 ered — of his begetting children and dying; leaving — 
 still with finical detail and nice and exact economy — 
 an elaborate testament, in which he disposes, item by 
 item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down to the 
 second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he ten- 
 derly bestows upon the wife of his youth and the 
 
48 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 mother of his children — any thing at which the world 
 should sneer. 
 
 If he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he 
 shows no especial anxiety that posterity shall hear of 
 it. Besides such contracts and business papers as he 
 must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the theaters, 
 and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his 
 name to nothing except a declaration of debt against 
 a poor neighbor who is behind-hand with his account, 
 footed at one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence, and 
 a not over-creditable last Will and Testament. This 
 is his own business, and who has any thing to say? 
 But, when our biographers go a step further and de- 
 mand that we shall accept this as the record of a demi- 
 god ; of the creator of a " Hamlet " and an " Othello ;" 
 and this practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to 
 London — worked himself up (as he must have worked 
 himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater; and, in 
 that business and calling earned money and kept it^ 
 as the identical man who singly and alone wrote the 
 "Hamlet," the "Julius Caesar," the "Othello," and 
 all the splendid pages of the Shakespearean drama — 
 some of us have been heard to demur ! The scholar's 
 dilemma is how to reconcile the internal evidence of 
 the plays, which is spread before them undimmed by 
 age, with these records, which are as authentic and be- 
 yond question as the internal evidence itself. And, 
 once stated, the dilemma of the scholar becomes the 
 dilemma of the whole world. Let any one try to con- 
 ceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employ- 
 ment to-day — when the theater is at its best, and half 
 the world play-goers — precarious for capital and in- 
 dustry; but in those days an experiment, in every 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 49 
 
 sense of the word), who succeeded by vigilance, exact 
 accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in se- 
 curing and saving not only a competency, but a fair 
 fortune; in the mean time — while engaged in this en- 
 grossment of business — writing Isabella's magnificent 
 appeal to the duke's deputy, Angelo; or Cardinal Wol- 
 sey's last soliloquy! Or conceive of the man who gave 
 the wife of his youth an old bedstead, and sued a 
 neighbor for malt delivered, penning Antony's oration 
 above Caesar, or the soliloquy of Macbeth debating 
 the murder of Duncan, the invocation to sleep in 
 "King Henry IV.," or the speech of Prospero, or the 
 myriad sweet, or noble, or tender passages that nothing 
 but a human heart could utter ! Let him try to con- 
 ceive this, we say, and his eyes will open to the absurd- 
 ity of the belief that these lines were written by the 
 lessee and joint-manager of a theater, and he will 
 examine the evidence thereafter for corroboration, 
 and not for conviction; satisfied in his own mind 3 at 
 least, that no such phenomenon is reasonable, proba- 
 ble, or safe to have presented itself. 
 
 Then, last and greatest difficulty of all, is the Will. 
 This is by far the completest and best authenticated 
 record we have of the man William Shakespeare, tes- 
 tifying not only to his undoubtedly having lived, but 
 to his character as a man ; and — most important of 
 all to our investigation — to his exact worldly condi- 
 tion. Here we have his own careful and ante-mortem 
 schedule of his possessions, his chattels real and chat- 
 tels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety 
 bedstead under his roof. And we may be pretty sure 
 that it is an accurate and exhaustive list. But if he 
 5 
 
50 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 were — as well as a late theater-manager and country 
 gentleman — an author and the proprietor of dramas 
 that had been produced and found valuable, how about 
 these plays? Were they not of as much value, to say 
 the least, as a damaged bedstead ? Were they not, as 
 a matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual 
 source of his wealth? How does he dispose of them? 
 Does our thrifty Shakespeare forget that he has writ- 
 ten them ? Is it not the fact, and is it not reason and 
 common sense to conceive, that, not having written 
 them, they have passed out of his possession along 
 with the rest of his theatrical property, along with 
 the theater whose copyrights they were, and into the 
 hands of others ? This is the greatest difficulty and 
 stumbling-block for the Shakespeareans. If their hero 
 had written these plays, of which the age of Eliza- 
 beth was so fond, and in whose production he had 
 amassed a fortune — that he should have left a will, in 
 items, in which absolutely no mention or hint of them 
 whatever should be made, even their most zealous 
 pundits can not step over, and so are scrupulous not 
 to allude to it at all. This piece of evidence is unim- 
 peachable and conclusive as to what worldly goods, 
 chattels, chattel-interests, or things in action, William 
 Shakespeare supposed that he would die possessed of. 
 Tradition is gossip. Records are scant and niggardly. 
 Contemporary testimony is conflicting and shallow, 
 but here, attested in due and sacred form, clothed with 
 the foreshadowed solemnity of another world, is the 
 calm, deliberate, ante mortem statement of the man 
 himself. We perceive what becomes of his second- 
 hand bedstead. What becomes of his plays? Is it 
 possible that, after all these years' experience of their 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 51 
 
 value — in the disposition of a fortune of which they 
 had been the source and foundation — he should have 
 forgotten their very existence? 
 
 But if, diverging from the scanty records, we go to 
 the testimony of contemporaries, what do we find there? 
 Very little more of the man William Shakespeare, but 
 precisely the same dilemma as to his alleged author- 
 ship of the plays. We find that the country lad 
 William, the village prodigy with whom the gossips 
 concerned themselves, was no milksop and no Joseph; 
 that he was hail-fellow with his fellows of equal age; 
 that he poached — shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned 
 their owner when punished for the offense; went on 
 drinking-bouts with his equals of the neighboring 
 villages; and, finally — -just as any clever, country lad, 
 who had made his fellows merry with mock eulogies 
 over the calves he slaughtered might and probably 
 would do to-day, and which is precisely what bis 
 earliest and, therefore, safest biographer, Rowe, asserts 
 that he did do — wound up with following a company 
 of strolling players to the metropolis; where he began 
 bis prosperous career by holding gentlemen's horses 
 at the theater door, while the gentlemen themselves 
 went inside to witness the performance. We turn to 
 the stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting, and the 
 beer-drinking, with relief. It is pleasant to think 
 that the pennywise old man was — at least in his 
 youth — human. A little poaching and a little beer do 
 nobody any harm, and it is, at all events, more cheerful 
 reading than the record of a parsimonious freeholder 
 taking the law of his poorer neighbor who defaults 
 in the payment of a few shillings for a handful of 
 malt. 
 
52 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 There is a village school in Stratford, and Mr. De- 
 Quincy, and all his predecessors and successors who 
 have preferred to construct pretty romances, and call 
 them "lives of William Shakespeare," rather than to 
 accept his known and recorded youth, boldly unite 
 in making their hero attend its sessions. Their asser- 
 tions are bravely seconded by the cicerones and local 
 guides of Stratford, who, for a sixpence, will show 
 you the identical desk which Shakespeare, the lad, oc- 
 cupied at that grammar school; and at Shottery, the 
 same guides show us the chair in which our hero sat 
 while courting Mistress Anne; just as, in Wittem- 
 burg, these same gentry point out the house where 
 Hamlet lived when a student in the University there; 
 or, in Scotland, the spot where Fitz-James and Rode- 
 rick Dhu fought. But, William could not have at- 
 tended this school very perseveringly, since he turns 
 up in London at about the age that country lads first 
 go to school. In London, he seems to have risen 
 from nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of 
 co-manager, along with a dozen others, of a theater. 
 Here, just as young lords and swells take theater 
 managers into their acquaintance to-day, he became 
 intimate with greater men than himself, and so en- 
 larged his skirts and his patronage, as it was the part 
 of a thrifty man to do. At this time there were no 
 circulating libraries in London, no libraries, accessible 
 to the general public, of any sort, in fact; no book- 
 sellers at every corner, no magazines or reviews; no 
 public educators, and no schools or colleges swarming 
 with needy students; even the literature of the age 
 w r as a bound-up book to all except professional 
 readers. But, for all that, this William Shakes- 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 53 
 
 peare — this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a 
 term at Stratford school (admitting that he went 
 where the romancers put him), cuts off to London at 
 the heels of a crew of strolling players — who begins 
 business for himself somewhere (perhaps as "link- 
 boy" at a theater door, but we may be sure, at an 
 humble end of some employment) and, by saving his 
 pence, works up to be actually a part- proprietor in 
 two theaters, and ultimately a rich man — begins to 
 possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the Past 
 which, even to-day, with all our libraries, lyceums, 
 serials, and booksellers, it would need a lifetime to 
 acquire. 
 
 He did the work of a lifetime. Like Mr. Stewart, 
 in "Hew York, he began penniless, and by vigilance, 
 shrewdness, and economy, rose to respectability, afflu- 
 ence, and fortune. 
 
 But, as we could not imagine Mr. Stewart, gentle- 
 man as he was, writing all the tags and labels on his 
 goods or making with his own hand every pen-stroke 
 necessary in the carrying on of his immense trade; or 
 poems or philosophical essays on the manufacture of 
 the silks and linens and cottons he handled while slow- 
 ly coining his fortune, and revolving poetry in his over- 
 worked brain while overseeing the business that was 
 evolving that fortune; so do we fail to conceive of 
 William Shakespeare doing all the pen-work on the 
 dramas he coins his money by producing on his boards. 
 How much less can we conceive of this man compos- 
 ing, not only poems of his own, but a Literature of his 
 own — drawing his material from the classic writers 
 (and notably from those Greek plays not at that time 
 translated, and only accessible in the originals and in 
 
54 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 manuscript), from legal works, " caviare to the gene- 
 ral," from philosophical treatises not known to have 
 been available even for reference; writing of the cir- 
 culation of the blood in the human system — a fact not 
 discovered until years after his own death ! Let us 
 find him, too, setting down, in writing, epitomes of all 
 known wisdom; ascertaining the past, prophesying of 
 the future ; laying down off-hand the philosopher's, the 
 lawyer's, the leech's, the soldier's, the scholar's craft 
 and art, which only these themselves, by long years of 
 study, might attain to — and all this while coining a 
 fortune in the management of two theaters; to have 
 solved, in short, the riddle of the sphinx and all the 
 as yet unspinning whirligigs of time ! Verily, a greater 
 riddle than the sphinx's is this the riddle of the boy 
 — Master Shakespeare. Thomas Chatterton found his 
 wealth in a musty chest in an old muniment room. 
 But here the chest and muninent room were not in ex- 
 istence till years after the boy Shakespeare has been 
 a man, and traveled on to his grave. It is no solution 
 of this riddle to say the lad was a genius, and that 
 genius is that which soars, while education plods. 1 
 Genius itself can not account for the Shakespearean 
 plays. Genius may portray, but here is a genius that 
 not only portrayed that which after his death became 
 fact, but related other facts which men had forgotten; 
 the actors in which had lain in the dust for centuries, 
 and whose records had slept sealed in dead languages, 
 in manuscripts beyond his reach ! Genius, intuition, 
 
 1 This class of evidence can not be recapitulated in the space 
 of a foot note, but the curious reader will do well to refer to the 
 chapter on the attainments of the author of Shakespeare, at pages 
 56-65 Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition. 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 55 
 
 is beyond education indeed. It may prophesy of the 
 future or conceive of the eternal ; but only knowledge 
 can draw record of the past. If the author of Shakes- 
 peare had been a genius only, his " Julius Caesar" 
 might have been a masterpiece of tragedy, or pathos, 
 or of rage ; but it would have portrayed an ideal Rome, 
 not the real one. His "Comedy of Errors" might 
 have been matchless in humor and sparkling in con- 
 tretemps, but, three years afterward, on translating a 
 hidden manuscript of Plautus, the comedies would 
 not have been found quite identical in argument. 1 
 
 The precocity of a child may be intuitive. But no 
 babe learns its alphabet spontaneously or by means of 
 its genius; but out of a book, because the characters 
 are arbitrary.' Pascal, when a child, discovered the 
 eternal principles of geometry, and marked them out 
 in chalk upon the floor; but he did not know that the 
 curved figures he drew were called " circles," or that 
 the straight ones were called "lines;" so he named 
 them." rounds" and "bars." He discovered what 
 was immutable and could be found by the searcher, 
 but his genius could not reinvent arbitrary language 
 that bad been invented before his birth. In short, to 
 have possessed and to have written down, in advance, 
 the learning and philosophy of three centuries to come, 
 
 1 Viz : with the Mensechmi of Plautus, In "Pericles," allusion is 
 made to a custom obtaining among a certain undiscussable class 
 of Cyprians, which it is fair to say could not be found mentioned 
 in a dozen books of which we know the names to-day, andwhich, 
 from its very nature, is treated of in no encyclopaedia or manual 
 of information, or of popular antiquities. How could any one 
 but an antiquarian scholar, in those days, have possessed himself 
 — not in this alone, but in a thousand similar instances — of such 
 minute, accurate, and occult information? 
 
56 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 might have been the gift of Prophecy (such a gift as 
 has ere this fallen from we know not where upon the 
 sons of men) descending into the soul of a conceivable 
 genius. But who can tell of more than he knows? Sec- 
 ond sight is not retrospective. And to have testified 
 of the forgotten past, without access to its record, was 
 as beyond the possibilities of genius as the glowing 
 wealth of the Shakespearean page is above the crea- 
 tion of an unlettered man of business in the age of 
 Elizabeth or of Victoria. 
 
 Here is the dilemma with which the Shakespear- 
 eans struggle: that in those years the man William 
 Shakespeare did live, and was a theatrical manager 
 and actor in London; and precisely the same evi- 
 dence which convinces us that this man did live in 
 those clays, convinces the world to-day — or must con- 
 vince it", if it will only consent to look at it — that the 
 dramas we call Shakespearean were so called because 
 they were first published from the stage of William 
 Shakespeare's theaters in London, just as we call cer- 
 tain readings of the classics the"Delphin classics," 
 because brought together for a Dauphin of France; 
 or certain paintings " Dlisseldorf paintings," because 
 produced in the Dlisseldorf school. If, however, in 
 the course of ages it should come to be believed that 
 the Dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named 
 Dlisseldorf painted the pictures, even then the time 
 would come to set the world right. If there had been no 
 Dauphin and no Dlisseldorf, we might have assigned 
 those names to a power which might have produced 
 the poems or the pictures. If there had been no 
 William Shakespeare, we might easily have idealized 
 one who could have written the plays. But, unhap- 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 67 
 
 pily, there was the actual, living, breathing man in 
 possession of that name, who declines to assign it to 
 another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the 
 Shakespeareans want. Aud, moreover, once the pre- 
 sumption is waived and the question is opened again; 
 there is a mass of evidence in the possession of this 
 century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately 
 waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped 
 together, is a mountain over which the airiest skeptic 
 can not vault. 
 
 But did none of "William Shakespeare's contempor- 
 aries suspect the harmless deception ? There is no 
 proof at hand, nor any evidence at all positive, that 
 the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or 
 to have ever pretended to have been, the original 
 author of the text of the plays he gave to his players. 
 Let us hasten to do William Shakespeare the justice 
 to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his 
 having asserted a falsehood. But, if he did so pretend 
 tohisintim ites, and if the dramas we now call" Shakes- 
 pearean" were actually produced, in those days, on 
 William Shakespeare's own stage, under that preten- 
 sion, certainly some of them must have wagged their 
 heads in secret. Surely, Ben Johnson, who bears 
 testimony that his friend Shakespeare had " small 
 Latin and less Greek," must have queried a little within 
 himself as to where certain things he read in the text 
 of his friend's plays came from, always supposing that 
 he did not know perfectly well where they did come 
 from. It seems more than probable, as we have al- 
 ready said, that, whoever suspected or knew the source 
 of the plays, and who also knew, if such was the fact, 
 that they were claimed as Shakespeare's compositions 
 
58 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 — had more cue to wink at than to expose the "hum- 
 bug. We find, indeed, that one, Robert Greene, by 
 name, did protest against " an upstart crow, beautified 
 with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and adapter of 
 other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when 
 he was not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a 
 player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast 
 out a blank verse as the best of you ; and, beeing an 
 absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceyt the 
 only Shake-scene in a countrey." That is to say, in 
 language more intelligible at this day, that, being a 
 sort of Jack-of- all-trades around the theater — holding 
 horses, taking tickets, acting a little, putting pieces on 
 the stage, and writing out their parts for the actors — 
 he (Shakespeare) came in time to consider himself 
 a dramatist, a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. 
 Doubtless Greene was inspired by jealousy— for he 
 was a writer of plays for the stage himself — in mak- 
 ing and publishing this sneer. But, as he was en- 
 deavoring to make his remarks so personal to Shakes- 
 peare as to be readily recognized, he would not have 
 alluded to him except by some well-known character- 
 istic. So he calls him a " Jack- of- all-trades," that is, 
 a man who did a little of every thing. Is a Jack- of- 
 all-trades about a theater the ideal poet, philosopher, 
 and seer, who wrote the Shakespearean drama — the 
 ideal of the Shakespeareans? 
 
 According to the chronicles and the record, then, 
 one William Shakespeare, a " general utility " actor, 
 and Johannes Factotum, lived and thrived in London, 
 some two hundred and fifty odd years ago. At about 
 that date a book is likewise written. Who are these 
 who find this book, and make this man to fit it? 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 59 
 
 To have written that book one must have been a 
 philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a leech, a naturalist, a 
 traveler, a student of bible history! At the same 
 time this book — in portions— is making its appear- 
 ance, there are two men living, each of whom is 
 all these. One of them is known to have studied 
 the bible — not what we understand to-day by a 
 "current work" (as the New Testament revision of 
 1881 is "current " as we write these lines) until 1611, 
 when the King James version is printed. 1 Together, 
 these two men possess in themselves about all of their 
 age with which subsequent ages care to connect them- 
 selves. But it is not suggested that these two men, 
 Bacon and Raleigh, might have written the book for 
 which an author is wanted. 
 
 Must the man that wrote the dramas have visited 
 Italy? Mr. Halliwell and others, inform us of Shakes- 
 peare's visit to Verona, Venice, and Florence. Must 
 Shakespeare have been at the bar? My Lord Camp- 
 bell writes us a book to show his familiarity with the 
 science of jurisprudence. That book has traveled far 
 upon a lordly name. Later explorations in the same 
 Held — while sustaining his lordship's conclusions — 
 have doubted whether the passages in these dramas, 
 which stamp their author's knowledge of the com- 
 mon law, are the ones over which Lord Campbell re- 
 
 1 Up to 1611 (the year in which he is claimed to have ceased 
 writing plays), the Geneva bible was the only one within Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare's reach. — ("An Attempt to Discover which 
 version of the Bible was that ordinarily used by Shakespeare. 
 J. 0. Halliwell Phillipps. London, 1867. Only ten copies 
 printed.") But Bishop Wadsworth, Mr. Rees, and the other gen- 
 tlemen who find parallelisms between passages in the dramas 
 and the King James version, pay very little attention to dates. 
 
60 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 lapses into ecstasy). Must Shakespeare have been a 
 physician? There have not been wanting the books 
 to prove him that. 1 And, crowning this long misrule 
 of absurdity, comes an authority out of Philadelphia, 
 to assure us that the youth Shakespeare, on quitting 
 his virgin Stratford for the metropolis, was scrupulous 
 to avoid the glittering temptations of London; that 
 he eschewed wine and women; that he avoided the 
 paths of vice and immorality, and piously kept him- 
 self at home, his only companion being the family 
 Bible, which he read most ardently and vigorously! 2 
 It is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his 
 latest authority has truth for his color and testimony 
 
 111 The Medical Acquirement of Shakespeare." By C. W. 
 Stearns, M. D. New York, 1865. Shakespeare's Medical Knowl- 
 edge. By Dr. Bucknill. London. I860. 
 
 2 " Shakespeare and the Bible." By John Rees, etc., etc. Phil- 
 adelphia: Claxton, Remsen & IJaffelfinger, 1876. 
 
 We commend to readers of these pages this latest authority, 
 and can not forbear noting a few of his " discoveries." Mr. 
 Rees has found out (p. 37) not only that William Shakespeare 
 wrote the lines — 
 
 " Not a hair perished, 
 
 On their sustaining garments not a blemish, 
 But fresher than before." ("The Tempest," i. 2) 
 
 But that he took them from Acts xxvii. 34: 
 
 There shall not a hair fall from the head of any of you. 
 
 In which the parallelism is in the word hair ! ! I 
 Or, again (p. 36) that the lines : 
 
 Though they are of monstrous shape, . . . 
 Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of 
 Our human generation you shall find 
 Many, nay, almost any ("The Tempest," iii. 3), 
 
PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 61 
 
 for his oil. The picture has at least the freshness and 
 charm of utter novelty ! 
 
 The work of Shakespeare-making goes on. The 
 facts are of record. We may run as we read them ! 
 But rather let us, out of reverence for the errors of 
 our fathers, refuse to read at all, and accept the 
 ideal of Malone, of Halliwell and De Quincy, of 
 Grant White, and of ten thousand more, who prefer 
 to write their biographies of William Shakespeare, 
 not in the first person, like Baron Miinchhausen, nor 
 in the second person, like the memoirs of Sully, but 
 in the probable and supposititious person of "it is 
 possible he did this" and " it is likely he did that." 
 
 Let those who will, disparage the boy and man 
 William Shakespeare, who married and made an hon- 
 est woman of Anne Hathaway of Shottery ; left home 
 to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the 
 slender household store ; used his first wealth to make 
 a gentleman of his father; and who, with what fol- 
 lowed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood's 
 
 are taken from the following: 
 
 In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the island, 
 whose name was Publius ; who received us, and lodged us three days court- 
 eously, . . . who also honored us with many honors ; and when we de- 
 parted, they laded us with such things as were necessary. — (Acts xxviii. 7-10. 
 
 In which — unless it be in the fact that one of these passages is 
 in an act and the other in Acts — the reader must find the par- 
 allelism for himself, without assistance from Mr. Kees. 
 
 Shakespeare, Mr. Kees tells us, never neglected his Bible, be- 
 cause (p. 28) " he was indebted to one whose love added a bright 
 charm to the holy passages she taught him to read and study — 
 to his mother was Shakespeare indebted for early lessons of 
 piety, and a reverence for a book from whose passages in after- 
 life he wove himself a mantle of undying fame!" 
 
62 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 banks, where — " procul negotiis" — in the evening of 
 life he might enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. 
 But that he ever claimed, much less wrote, what we 
 call the Shakespearean drama, let those bring proof 
 who can. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 63 
 
 PART II. 
 
 THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 
 
 UT, having taken the liberty of doubting 
 whether — as matter of record — one William 
 Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, 
 sometime part-proprietor of the Globe and 
 Blackfriars Theaters in London, could have very well 
 been himself and the author of what are known popu- 
 larly to-day as "the plays of Shakespeare," although 
 there seemed to be ground for supposing that he might 
 have cast them into something of the acting form 
 they possess as preserved to us; and having come to 
 the conclusion that — once this presumption is lifted — 
 all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of 
 the actual William Shakespeare is actually evidence 
 cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the 
 record: let us proceed to inquire whether — on re- 
 view — a case rested on this evidence can be rebutted 
 by those certain considerations and matters, by way 
 of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to 
 the surface whenever these waters are troubled — 
 which whoever ventures to canvass the possibilities of 
 an extra Shakesperean authorship of the dramas 
 can so infallibly anticipate. 
 
 Granted that the Shakespeare Will does not prove the 
 testator oblivious of his own copyrights or rights in 
 the nature of copyrights ; granted that the story of the 
 deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely 
 
64 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 rejected by the Shakespereans, because conceived to be 
 unworthy of the image they set up ; granted that the 
 fact of the circulation of the blood was a familiar 
 fact in the days of William Shakespeare; that the 
 "Mensechmi" of Plautus; that Iago's speech in 
 "Othello" and the stanza of* Berni's Orlando Innamorato 
 were mere coincidences ; or, better yet, admit that there 
 was an English version of the Italian poem in Shakes- 
 peare's day 1 — admit, if required — that the "Hamlet" 
 of Saxo, had been translated ; 2 that the law in " The 
 
 1 When Iago utters the often quoted lines, "who steals my 
 purse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with little variation, 
 this stanza of the Orlando Innamorato of which poem, to this day, 
 there is no English version. 
 
 " Chi ruba un corno nn cavallo, un anello 
 E simil cose, ha qualcha discrezione, 
 E patrebbe chimarsi ladroncello ; 
 Ma quel che ruba la reputazione 
 E de l'altrai patiche si fa bello, 
 Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone ; 
 
 E tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno ? " 
 
 As no English translation has been made of the Orlando 
 Innamorato, I must ask the reader who can not command the 
 original to be content with this rendering of the above stanza: 
 
 " The man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring, 
 
 Or such a trifle, thieves with moderation, 
 And may be justly called a robberling ; 
 
 But he who takes away a reputation 
 And pranks in feathers from another's wing 
 
 His deed is robbery — assassination, 
 And merits punishment so much the greater 
 
 As he to right and truth is more a traitor." 
 
 Shakespeare, by R. Gr. White, vol. I, p. 23. 
 
 2 Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian from whom the 
 plot of the " Hamlet" was taken, Whalley says, writing in 1748, 
 that " no translation hath yet been made," must have been read 
 by the writer of " Hamlet" in the original. "An Enquiry into 
 the Learning of Shakespeare," etc. By Peter Whalley, A. B. t 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 65 
 
 Merchant of Venice" was "Venetian" instead of 
 "crowner's quest" law; admit that "William Shakes- 
 peare "had the advantages in school of something 
 more than the mere rudiments of learning;" admit 
 that " his devotion to his family drove him forth from 
 the rural seclusion of Stratford into the battle of the 
 great world ; " that the immortal gift of the second- 
 best bed was, (we quote from Mr. Grant White, who 
 is apparently willing to sacrifice anybody's reputation 
 if he can thereby prove his William to have been a 
 prodigy of virtue no less than of genius), explained by 
 the fact that, at the time of the hurried marriage, 
 a husband had to be provided for Mistress Hathaway 
 without loss of time, and that little Susannah was as 
 much of a surprise to William as to any body — in 
 other words, that Anne was " no better than she 
 should be," (oblivious of the fact that "the prema- 
 ture Susannah" was William Shakespeare's favorite 
 child; that he, at least, never doubted her paternity, 
 for he left her the bulk of his fortune in his will); or 
 even that — according to Steevens, that testamentary 
 second thought was actually " a mark of rare confi- 
 dence and devotion ;" granted all these — if they have 
 anything to do with the question — and a dozen more, 
 and we only attenuate, by the exact value of these, 
 
 Fellow of St. John's College, London. Printed for J. Waller at 
 the Crown and Mitre, 1748 — And see a suggestion that the 
 "Hamlet" came from Germany, in a pamphlet "On the Double 
 Personality of the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet of 
 Shakespeare. Its Relation to the German Hamlet." By Dr. 
 Latham, Royal Society of Literature Transactions. 1878. Also, 
 " Shakespeare in Germany. Alfred Cohn. Berlin and London. 
 1874. 
 
 6 
 
66 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 the mountain of probability, nothing less than the 
 complete dilapidation and disappearance of which 
 could leave room for substitution, in the stead of the 
 probability, the possibility of such a suspension of the 
 laws of nature as is required by the Shakespearean 
 theorists. For, as we have said, the evidence is 
 cumulative, and, therefore, no more to be waived or 
 disposed of by doubts as to, or even the dispelment 
 of, this or that or the other item — or disintegration of 
 this or that or the other block — of evidence than the 
 Coliseum has been wiped away and disposed of 
 because its coping has crumbled, or because, for some 
 centuries, the petty Roman princes built their palaces 
 from its debris. 
 
 And we may as well remark that, just here, it is 
 always in order to mention Archbishop Whately's 
 " Historic Doubts." We wish some of the gentlemen 
 who cite it so glibly, would take the trouble to read 
 that clever little book. It is a logical, not a whim- 
 sical effort. It was intended by its author as an 
 answer to " Hume's Essay on Miracles." Hume's ar- 
 gument being, in the opinion of the Archbishop, 
 reducible to the proposition that miracles were impos- 
 sible because they were improbable, his lordship wrote 
 his little work to show that the history of Napoleon 
 was actually most improbable, and, written of feigned 
 characters, would read like the most extravagant 
 fable. Surely it can not be necessary to reiterate the 
 difference between the Archbishop's brochure and the 
 proposition of " The Shakspearean Myth ! " The 
 one was the argument from improbability, applied to 
 facts in order to show its dangerous and altogether 
 vicious character. The other is the demonstration 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 67 
 
 that history — that the record — when consulted, is di- 
 rectly fatal to a popular impression, and directly con- 
 tradictory of a presumption, horn of mere carelessness 
 and accident, and allowed to gather weight hy mere 
 years and lapse of time. 
 
 But, for the sake of the argument, let us leave the 
 discussion, for the moment, just where it stands, and 
 take still bolder ground. Instead of sifting evidence 
 and counting witnesses, let us assume that, w T hen we 
 painted William Shakspeare — who lived between the 
 years 1564 and 1616 — as an easy-going rural wag, 
 with a rural w T it, thereafter to be sharpened by 
 catering to the "gods" of a city theater; a poacher 
 on occasion, and scapegrace generally in his youth, 
 who chose the life of " a vagabond by statute " — 
 i. e. a strolling player — but who turned up in Lon- 
 don, and found his way into more profitable con- 
 nection with a permanent play-house; and, in his 
 advancing years, became thrifty, finally sordid — we 
 had only taken the liberty of conceiving, like 
 every other who ever wrote on a Shakespearean 
 theme, yet one more William Shakespeare ; so that, 
 instead of ten thousand William Shakespeares, no 
 two of which were identical, there were now ten 
 thousand and one ! Admitting that, the next question 
 would of necessity be — and such an investigation as 
 the present must become utterly valueless if prose- 
 cuted with bias or with substitution of personal opin- 
 ion for historical fact — whose William Shakespeare is 
 probably most a likeness of the true William Shakes- 
 peare, who did wander from Stratford to London, 
 who did sojourn there, and who did wander back 
 
68 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 again to Stratford, and there was gathered to his 
 fathers, in the year 1616? 
 
 The popular William Shakespeare, built to fit the 
 plays, is a masterless philosopher, a matchless poet, a 
 student of Greek manuscripts and classic manners, of 
 southern romance and northern sagas, a traveler and 
 a citizen of the world, a scientist, a moralist, a master 
 of statecraft, and skilled in all the graces and ameni- 
 ties of courtly society ! Which of these two portraits 
 is nearest to the life? Let us take an appeal to His- 
 tory. 
 
 There appears to be but one way to go about to dis- 
 cover; that way is to appeal to the truth of history; 
 to go as nearly back as we can get to the lifetime of 
 the actual man we are after, and inquire, wherever a 
 trace of him can be touched, what manner of man he 
 was. Now, it happens that the very nearest we can 
 come to an eye-witness as to the personnel of William 
 Shakespeare is the Reverend John Ward, Vicar of 
 Stratford, who wrote in that town a diary or memo- 
 randa, between February, 1662, and April, 1663, say 
 forty-seven years after William Shakespeare's death. 
 The following meager references to his late fellow- 
 townsman are all (except an entry to the effect that he 
 had two daughters, etc. ; and another memorandum, 
 " Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays, etc.,) 
 thought worth while by Dominie Ward, viz : 
 
 " I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural 
 wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays 
 all his younger time, but in his elder days he lived at 
 Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every 
 year, and for that he had an allowance so large that 
 
* PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 69 
 
 he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year, as I have heard." 
 
 "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a 
 merrie meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for 
 Shakespeare died of a feaver there contracted." 
 
 Next, chronologically, we come to a gentleman 
 named Aubrey. This Mr. Aubrey was himself a na- 
 tive of Warwickshire; was born in 1627 — that is, 
 eleven years after Shakespeare died. He entered gen- 
 tleman commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, and so, 
 presumably, was no Puritan. He was considerable of 
 a scholar himself, and was esteemed, we are told, 
 a Latin poet of no mean abilities. He was admitted 
 a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1616; and so, a 
 scholar, a poet, and a lawyer, might presumably know 
 the difference between a wag and a genius. His man- 
 uscripts are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. 
 He gives an account of his fellow-countyman, and, 
 coming as it does, next to Dominie Ward's, nearer to 
 the lifetime of William Shakespeare than any chronicle 
 extant, (Malone admits it was not written later than 
 1680), we give it entire : 
 
 "Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford- 
 upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father 
 was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by 
 some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he 
 exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calfe 
 he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. 
 There was, at this time, another butcher's son in that 
 towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a 
 natural witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died 
 young. This Win. being inclined naturally to poetry 
 and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, 
 
70 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH 
 
 and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did 
 act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson never was a 
 good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began 
 early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at 
 that time was very lowe, and his plays took well. He 
 was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good com- 
 pany, and of a verie redie and pleasant smooth witt. 
 The humour of the Constable in <A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream,' he happened to take at Grendon, in 
 Bucks, 1 which is the road from London to Stratford, 
 and there was living that Constable, about 1642, 
 when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that 
 parish, and knew him. Ben Jonson and he did gather 
 humours of men dayly, wherever they came. One 
 time, as he was at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, 
 an old rich usurer, was to be buryed; he makes there 
 this extemporary epitaph : 
 
 Ten in the hundred the Devil allows, 
 But Combes will have twelve, he swears and vows. 
 If any one asks who lies in this tomb, 
 " Hoh," quoth the Devil, " 'tis my John a Combe ! " 
 
 He was wont to go to his native country once a 
 year. I think I have been told that he left £200 or 
 £300 a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. I have heard 
 Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shad well (who 
 is counted the best comedian we have now) say that he 
 had a most prodigious witt, and did admire his natural 
 parts beyond all other dramaticall writers. He was 
 
 'Aubrey says, in a note at this place: " I think it was a mid- 
 summer's night that he happened there. But there is no Con- 
 stable in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'" Aubrey probably in- 
 tended reference to Dogberry, in the " Much Ado." 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 71 
 
 wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life ; 
 says Ben Jonson, ' I wish he had blotted out a thou- 
 sand.' His comedies will remain witt as long as the 
 English tongue is understood, for that he handles 
 mores hominum: Now our present writers reflect much 
 upon particular persons and coxcombites that twenty 
 years hence they will not be understood. Though, as 
 Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little Latin 
 and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for 
 he had been, in his younger days, a school-master in 
 the country." 1 
 
 Imagine this as the record of a real "Shakespeare ! " 
 Could we imagine it as the record of a Milton ? Let 
 us conceive of a fellow-countryman of John Milton's, 
 a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the au- 
 thor of " Paradise Lost ; " " He was a goodish-looking 
 sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secre- 
 tary, or something to Cromwell, or some of his gang ; 
 had some trouble with his wife ; was blind, as I have 
 heard ; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." And con- 
 ceive of this, a few years after Milton's death being 
 
 1 Aubrey's MSS. was called " Minutes of Lives," and was ad- 
 dressed to his " worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquary of 
 Oxford." A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680, accompanied it, 
 in which Aubrey says : " 'T is a task that I never thought to have 
 undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for 
 it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only 
 lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also 
 been much tumbled up and down in it, which hath made me so 
 well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses, 
 before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their 
 own relations or societies, I might add that I come of a long- 
 aevious race, by which means I have wiped some feathers off the 
 wings of time for several generations, which does reach high." 
 
72 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 actually all the information accessible concerning 
 him! 
 
 But to continue our search in the vicinage. On the 
 10th day of April, 1693 (thirteen years later), a visitor 
 to Warwickshire wrote a letter to his cousin, describ- 
 ing, among other points of interest, the village and 
 church of Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as the letter 
 was discovered among the papers of a well-known 
 nobleman, addressed to a person known to have lived, 
 and indorsed by this latter, " From Mr. Dowdall ; de- 
 scription of several places in Warwickshire " — as it 
 bears on its face evidence of its genuineness, and, above 
 all, mentions William Shakespeare, precisely in the 
 same strain j;hat it alludes to other worthies of the 
 county — the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, etc. — it has al- 
 ways been accepted as authentic. After a description 
 of the tomb and resting place of " our English trage- 
 dian, Mr. Shakespeare," the writer continues: 
 
 "The clerk that showed me this church was above 
 eighty years old. 1 He says that this Shakespeare was 
 formerly of this town, bound apprentice to a butcher; 
 but that he ran from his master to London, and there 
 
 1 I.e. (more than "above" three years old when s. died.) This 
 letter was among the papers of Lord DeClifFord, which were sold 
 by auction — and was purchased by Mr. Rodd, a well-known anti- 
 quarian bookseller, of Great Newport Street, London, in 1834. 
 Mr. Rodd printed it in pamphlet form in 1838 (at least the copy 
 we have bears imprint of that year). It is dated " Butlers Mer- 
 ston in Warwickshire, April, the 10th, 1693;" is signed, "Your 
 very faithful kinsman and most aff'te humble serv't till death, 
 John at Stiles," and is addressed, "These for Mr. Southwell, pr. 
 serv't." This is Mr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed 
 in his handwriting, " From Mr. Dowdall. Description of several 
 places in Warwickshire." Mr. Rodd says that the writer was 
 " an Inns'-of-Court-Man." 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 73 
 
 was received into the play-house as a servitour, and 
 by this means had an opportunity to be what he after- 
 wards proved. He was the best of his family, but the 
 male line is extinguished. Not one, for fear of the 
 curse abovesaid, dare touch, his gravestone, though his 
 wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in 
 the same grave with him." 
 
 Next, chronologically, comes the contribution pre- 
 served to us by a Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of 
 Sapperton, 1 in Gloucestershire. The Reverend William 
 Fulman, who died in 1688, bequeathed certain of his 
 biographical collections to this Reverend Davies. 
 Davies died in 1708, leaving many annotations to 
 his friend's manuscripts. Among these annotations 
 he writes the following of William Shakespeare: 
 " William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon 
 Avon, in Warwickshire, about 1563-4, much given 
 to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, 
 particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, 
 and some times imprisoned, and at last made him 
 fly his native country to his great advancement. 
 But his revenge was so great that he is his < Justice 
 Clodpate' 2 and calls him a great man, and that, in al- 
 lusion to his name, bore three lowses rampant for his 
 arms. From an actor he became a composer. lie died 
 April 23, 1616, aetat fifty-three, probably at Stratford 
 — for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd. 
 
 1 His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Eev. William Pulman 
 (in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all in the li- 
 brary of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 
 
 2 Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in " Merry "Wives of 
 Windsor." 
 
 7 
 
74> THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 p. 520) on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one 
 who shall remove his bones. He died a papist." 
 
 Whatever these may be worth — for, of course, like 
 the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay — it 
 is fair to include them in a collection of what the law 
 calls "general reputation," "general report," or 
 " common fame," and it is fair to offset this collection, 
 at least, against that " common fame" and " common 
 reputation" which has grown up during the last 
 hundred years or so concerning William Shakespeare, 
 which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. 
 Much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with 
 a tradition, related by one John Jordan, a townsman 
 of Stratford, (who was known in the days of Malone 
 and the Ireland forgeries as " the Stratford poet,") 
 who claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent 
 to a tradition of an alleged drinking-bout of Shakes- 
 peare and others (as representing Stratford) against 
 the champions of Pebworth, Marston, Hillborough, 
 Grafton, Wixford, Broom, and Bidford, in which 
 William was so worsted that his legs refused to carry 
 him farther homeward than a certain thorn-tree, there- 
 after to come in for its share of worshipful adoration 
 from the Shakespearean sticklers. But the tradition 
 is of no value except as additional testimony to the 
 impression of his boon companions, associates, and 
 contemporaries, that William Shakespeare was a jolly 
 dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his 
 wench — was almost any thing, in short, except the 
 student of history, antiquity, and classic manners, no 
 less than the scholar of his own times, that he has 
 been created since by those who knew him not. 
 Nothing travels faster in rural communities, as we 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 75 
 
 have remarked, than a reputation for " book-learn- 
 ing;" let us continue our search for Shakespeare's. 
 When an interest in the Shakespearean drama 
 began to assert itself, and people began to inquire 
 who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the 
 Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At 
 the outset they ran full against this village " ne'er-do- 
 weel " and rustic wag, who worked down into a man 
 of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and 
 properties in London, and spent it royally in Strat- 
 ford, drinking himself into his grave some seven 
 'years before the first collection of what the world 
 in time was to credit him with, (but improved and en- 
 larged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes- 
 perean drama — first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie 
 Ward may have been dazzled by the open house of 
 the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year 
 is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we 
 think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes 
 and outlying lands in Stratford, than by the " two 
 plays a year," in and about the days when from four 
 to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (ac- 
 cording to Philip Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker 
 and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in 
 his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he 
 entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), 
 and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. 
 The prodigality which dazed the simple Stratford 
 dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something 
 less than the income named; and such an income, too, 
 would tally with William Shakespeare's own estimate 
 of his wordly goods in his Will. 
 
 But the statement is the nearest and best evidence 
 
76 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 we have at hand, and so let it be accepted. And so, 
 running up against this William Shakespeare, these 
 commentators were obliged to stop. But there were 
 the dramas, and there was the name " William Shakes- 
 peare " tacked to them ; it was William Shakespeare 
 they were searching for; and, since the William 
 Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the 
 one they wanted, they straightway began to construct 
 one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history 
 and local tradition only stimulated them, They must 
 either confess that there was no such man, or make 
 one; they preferred to make one. 
 
 First (for Howe has only — in his eight honest pages 
 of biographical notice — narrated certain gossip or 
 facts, on the authority, perhaps, of Betterton, and 
 does not claim to be an explorer, and Heminges and 
 Con dell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical 
 allusion whatever) came Edmund Malone. With the 
 nicest and most painstaking care he sifted every 
 morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories, 
 chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report — 
 but in vain. The nearer he came to the Stratford 
 " Shaughraun," the further away he got from a match- 
 less poet and an all-mastering student. But, like those 
 that were to come after him, instead of accepting the 
 situation, and confessing the William Shakespeare who 
 lived at Stratford not mentionable in the same breath 
 with the producer of the august text which had in- 
 spired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at 
 the stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the 
 chroniclers who could so overlook prodigies. Far 
 from concluding that — because he finds no such name 
 as William Shakespeare in the national Walhalla — 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 77 
 
 therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes, 
 rather, that the Walhalla builders do not understand 
 their business. He says : 
 
 " That almost a century should have elapsed from 
 the time of his [William Shakespeare's] death, with- 
 out a single attempt having been made to discover 
 any circumstance which could throw a light on the 
 history of his life or literary career, . . are circum- 
 stances which can not be contemplated without 
 astonishment. 1 . . Sir William Dugdale, born in 
 1605, and educated at the school of Coventry, twenty 
 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, and whose work, 
 < The Antiquities of Warwickshire,' appeared in 
 1646, only thirty years after the death of our poet, 
 we might have expected to give some curious memo- 
 rials of his illustrious countryman. But he has not 
 given us a single particular of his private life, con- 
 tenting himself with, a very slight mention of him in 
 his account of the church and tombs of Stratford- 
 upon-Avon. The next biographical printed notice 
 that I have found is in Fuller's ' Worthies,' folio, 
 1662; in ' Warwickshire,' page 116 — where there is 
 a short account of our poet, furnishing very little 
 information concerning him. And again, neither 
 Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 8vo, 16875 
 Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 
 1699— add anything to the meager accounts of Dug- 
 dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was 
 himself a native of Oxford, and was born but four- 
 teen years after the death of our author, should not 
 
 ^lalone's "Life:" "Plays and Poems," Loudon, 1821, vol. ii, 
 p. 4. 
 2 Ibid., p. 5. 
 
78 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 have collected any anecdotes of Shakespeare, has 
 always appeared to me extraordinary. Though 
 Shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the 
 'Athense Oxoniensis/ that diligent antiquary could 
 easily have found a niche for his life as he has done 
 for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of 
 Davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for 
 such an insertion." 
 
 The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching 
 among the poets for one by the name of "William 
 Shakespeare, when there was no such name among 
 the poets. He found him not, because he was not 
 there. He might with as much propriety have 
 searched for the name of Grimaldi in the Poets' 
 Corner, or for Homer's on the books of the "Worship- 
 ful Society of Patten-makers. To be sure, in 
 writing up Stratford Church, Sir William Dugdale 
 can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakes- 
 peare, any more than a writer who should set out to 
 make a guide-book of Westminster Abbey could 
 omit description of the magnificent tomb of John 
 Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in 
 that of the cicerone of the Abbey is the merit of the 
 tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. 
 It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, 
 and contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans 
 would have us accept — would have us to swallow, or 
 rather bolt, with our eyes shut — namely, the spectacle 
 (to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the 
 world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly 
 unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out 
 among his fellows in a crowded city of some two 
 hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 79 
 
 certain master spirits whose history we have intact 
 to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of 
 with no difficulty — without making any impression 
 on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, 
 except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, 
 besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen 
 years he is forgotten as if he had never been ; and — 
 except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village 
 church, finds his name on a stone — passed beyond 
 the memory of a man in less than the years of a 
 babe ! The blind old Homer at least was known as 
 a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities 
 which competed for the tradition of his birth when 
 criticism revealed the merit of his song — though he 
 might have begged his bread in their streets — at 
 least did not take him for a tinker ! It is not that 
 the Shakespearean dramas were not recognized as 
 immortal by the generation of their composer that is 
 the miracle ; neither were the songs of Homer. Per- 
 haps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule 
 than the exception. The miracle is, that in all the 
 world of London and of England nobody knew that 
 there was any Shakespeare, in the very days when 
 the Drama we hold so priceless now was being pub- 
 licly rendered in a play-house, and printed — as we 
 shall come to consider further on — for the benefit of 
 non-theater-goers ! 
 
 But, it is said, the fire that destroyed the Globe 
 Theater — and again, the great fire of London — burned 
 up all personal records of the immortal Shakespeare. 
 Then, again, there is the lapse of time — the ordinary 
 wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes 
 of the commercial center of the world. But how 
 
80 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry 
 and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about 
 Chaucer? Did the great tire of London affect his 
 chronicle and his labors? The records of Horace, 
 and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had 
 more than a great fire of London to contend with. 
 But they have survived the ruin of empires and the 
 crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and 
 the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and 
 might of the Shakespearean page, how greater than 
 Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and Terence 1 If it 
 all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not 
 a riddle. It is the simplest of facts — the simple fact 
 that the compilers of the Shakespearean pages worked 
 anonymously, and concealed their identity so success- 
 fully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and 
 defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the 
 research of this nineteenth century. 
 
 But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not de- 
 terred by his failure to find a poet of the name of 
 Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that name 
 there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds — 
 and he has the credit of being the first to undertake 
 the task — to construct an immortal bard. And a very 
 pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too ! — one that, 
 with such minor variations as have, from time to time, 
 suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative 
 turn of mind, has been a standard immortal William 
 all along. For they who seek will find. Had Mr. 
 Malone searched for the Stratford " shaughraun," who 
 ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a 
 profession as any other, for the man makes the pro- 
 fession, and not the profession the man) ; who re vis- 
 
PART tf I.— THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 81 
 
 ited his native haunts — on the lookout, not for kings 
 and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes — 
 bat for clowns and drunkards and misers to dove- 
 tail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that passed 
 under his adapting pen ; 1 had he searched for the 
 
 1 It is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue and 
 choruses of the "Henry V." and " Henry VIII." are apologies 
 for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly of the multitude 
 they catered to. As to the internal testimony of the authorship 
 of these compositions, any reader can judge for himself. We 
 have expressed our own opinion as being that William Shakes- 
 peare might be credited with the characters of Nym and Bar- 
 dolph; especially of the Corporal, whose part consists of the 
 phrase, "There's the humor of it," intruded at each convenient 
 interval; and it is possible that Shakespeare, in fitting up the 
 matter in hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the 
 moment. There seems to be reason for believing that this ex- 
 pression did happen to be a favorite at about that time; and 
 that Shakespeare was not the only one who rang the changes on 
 it as a season to stage material. Witness the following: 
 
 Cob. Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as another, sir! 
 
 Cash. Thy rheum, Cob ? Thy humor, thy humor! Thou mistak'st. 
 
 Cob. Humor? Mack, I think it be so indeed! What is that humor ? Some 
 rare thing, I warrant. 
 
 Cash. Marry, I tell thee, Cob, it is a gentlemanlike monster, bred in the 
 special gallantry of our time by affectation, and fed by folly. 
 
 Cob. How must it be fed ? 
 
 Cash. Oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. Didst thou never hear 
 that? It's a common phrase, " Feed thy humor." 
 
 Every Man in his Humor, iii. 4. 
 
 Couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable 
 Chiefly to such as had the happiness 
 Daily to see how the poor innocent word 
 Was racked and tortured. 
 
 Every Man Out of his Humor. 
 
 "Humor" was, it would seem by this, the over-used and 
 abused word of these times ; just as for example " awful " might 
 be said to be an over-used and abused word during our own 
 times. 
 
82 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Stratford butcher's son, who was the Stratford wag 
 as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep with- 
 out making a speech to his admiring fellow -villagers, 
 here he was at his hand. But he was searching, not 
 for a butcher's son, but for a poet — for a " courtier's, 
 soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, 
 
 The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
 The glass of fashion and the mold of form, 
 The observed of all observers " — 
 
 for " an amazing genius which could pervade all na- 
 ture at a glance, and to whom nothing within the lim- 
 its of the universe appeared to be unknown;" 1 and 
 his instinct should have assured him that — however the 
 works which such a genius had left behind him might 
 travel under the name of the butcher's boy — it was 
 not the pen of the butcher-boy that had written them ; 
 that the composer of pages " from which, were all the 
 arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered," 2 was 
 
 1 Whalley. 
 
 2 Ibid. A curious instance of this familiarity — to be found in 
 the Shakespearean dramas — with the least noticed facts of 
 science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped the critics, we 
 might allude to here: In one of Jules Verne's realistic stories 
 wherein he springs his romantic catastrophes upon scientific 
 phenomena — "Michael Strogoff" — he makes Michael fall among 
 enemies who sentence him to be blinded. The blinding is to 
 be accomplished with a heated iron, but Michael sees his mother 
 at his side, and, tears suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is 
 neutralized, and fails to destroy the sight. So, in " King John," 
 Act IV., Scene 1, Arthur says to Hubert: 
 
 The iron of itself, though heat red-hot, 
 Approaching near these eyes would drink my tears 
 And quench his fiery indignation. 
 
 This may be mere coincidence, but the dramas are crowded with 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 83 
 
 no " jack-of- all-trades," and could not have lived and 
 publicly presented bis compositions nightly, year in 
 and year out, in the glare of a metropolis crowded 
 with courtiers, play-goers, and students — in the age 
 and da}'S of Bacon and Raleigh and Elizabeth — un- 
 known s .ve to a handful of his pot-fellows, and faded 
 out of the world, unknown and unnoticed, fading from 
 the memory of men, without the passing of an item 
 in their mouths ! 
 
 Most wonderful of all, this utter ignoring of Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare among the poets, if unjust, provoked 
 no remonstrance from the immediate family or any 
 kin of the Stratford lad. Either the Shakespeares, 
 Arclens, and Hathaways were wonderfully destitute 
 of family pride, or else the obscurity accorded their 
 connection was perfectly just and proper. No voice 
 of kin or affinity of William Shakespeare (at least we 
 may say this with confidence) ever claimed immortality 
 for him ; although it can not be said that they had no 
 opportunity, had they wished to do so, for William 
 Shakespeare's granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was alive 
 until 1670; his sister, Joan Hart, till 1646; and his 
 daughters, Susannah Hall and Judith Queeny, until 
 1662. So that Dugdale, at least, if not Wood and the 
 rest of them, would not have had to go far to confirm 
 any rumors they might have stumbled upon as to the 
 
 such coincidences, and for that, if for that only, are marvelous. 
 In either case, according to the Shakespereans, we have only to 
 go on, for the rest of time, in discovering new truths in nature 
 and facts in science, only to find that the Stratford butcher's 
 boy knew all about them three hundred years ago — was famil- 
 iar with all that we have yet to learn, and that to his unlettered 
 genius our wisdom was to be sheer foolishness. 
 
84 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 acquirements and accomplishments of the man Shakes- 
 peare; but it seems that not even the partiality of 
 his own kin, nor family fame, nor pride of ancestry, 
 ever conceived the idea of palming off their progeni- 
 tor upon futurity as a giant of any build. If there is 
 any exception to this statement, it would appear to be 
 as follows : 
 
 I. It is recorded by Oldys that, one of his (Shakes- 
 peare's) " younger brothers, who lived to a great 
 age, when questioned, in his last days, about Wil- 
 liam, said he could remember nothing of his perform- 
 ance but seeing him ' act a part in one of his own 
 comedies, wherein, being to j>ersonate a decrepit old 
 man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and 
 drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be 
 supported and carried to a table at which he was 
 seated among some company, and one of them sang 
 a song.' " Mr. Fullom has demonstrated from the 
 Shakespeare family records, that Oldys must have 
 been mistaken as to any brother of William Shakes- 
 peare's having furnished this reminiscence; but, 
 admitting it as the statement of a surviving brother, 
 it stands for what it is, and it certainly is not the rec- 
 ord or tradition of one whose popular memory in 
 men's minds was that of an immortal prodigy. 1 
 
 1 We take this quotation from Mr. Grant White's article on 
 Shakespeare in Appleton's " American Cyclopcedia." Mr. 
 White's admirable contributions to our Shakespearean literature 
 entitle his opinion to great weight in any mooted question as to 
 William Shakespeare; and we must confess that some portions 
 of his paper we have just mentioned almost suggest him as 
 agreeing with us as to his subject. Mr. White says, in another 
 place : " Young lawyers and poets produced plays rapidly. Each 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 85 
 
 II. An epitaph was placed over the remains of Su- 
 sannah Hall, presumably by one of the family, which 
 read: 
 
 " Witty above her sex, but that's not all: 
 Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall. 
 Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this 
 Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss." 
 
 Whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant 
 that either William Shakespeare or Mistress Hall, or 
 both, were " witty above their sex" or " wise to sal- 
 vation," cannot, at this date, be determined : but it 
 would seem that this is all the immediate family of 
 William Shakespeare have ever contributed to our 
 knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him 
 was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contempo- 
 raries. 
 
 But Mr. Malone — and, being the first investigator, 
 he would, doubtless, have been followed, as he has 
 been, whatever the result of his inquiries — Mr. Ma- 
 lone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to whose 
 
 theatrical company not only ' kept a poet,' but had three or four, 
 in its pay. At the time of his leaving Stratford the drama was 
 rising rapidly in favor with all classes in London, where actors 
 were made much of in a certain way. And where there was a 
 constant demand for new plays, ill-provided younger sons of the 
 gentry, and others who had been bred at the universities and the 
 inns-of-court, sought to mend their fortunes by supplying this 
 demand." And again: "We are tolerably well informed by 
 contemporary writers as to the performances of the eminent act- 
 ors of that time, but of Shakespeare's we read nothing." Mr. 
 White admits, a few lines below the sentence just quoted, that 
 Shakespeare's position in the stock at the Blackfriars was "gen- 
 eral utility." We should rather call it, from the evidence, "first 
 old man." 
 
86 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 pages lie had recourse, not only assumed all he could 
 not find authority for, but undertook to tell us the 
 precise dates at which his Stratford lad composed the 
 plays themselves. Among other achievements he con- 
 structed an admirable "chronology" of the Shakes- 
 pearean plays; which — with such fanciful variations 
 as have been made to it from time to time since — is an 
 authority with the Shakespeareans even to this day. 
 To be sure, Mr. Malone did not rely entirely upon ex- 
 ternal evidence for this apochrypha. He often appeals 
 to the text, as when, for example, he settles the elate 
 at which the "Merchant of Venice" was .composed — 
 as 1594, because Portia says : 
 
 " Even as a flourish when true subjects bow 
 To a new crowned monarch," 
 
 referring of course, says Mr. Malone, (and this guess- 
 work he not only called " commentary," but has ac- 
 tually succeeded in making all his successor " com- 
 mentators" accept him as final) to the coronation of 
 Henry IV., of France ! Again, in the " Merry Wives 
 of "Windsor" he finds the words, (Act I, scene iii) 
 " Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores." " This 
 shows," says Mr. Malone, " that this comedy must 
 have been written after Sir Walter Ealeigh's return 
 from Guinia, in 1596." And so on. 
 
 We will not rehearse the scope and burden of Mr. 
 Malone's painstaking and wonderful labors, but, from 
 one instance of the credulity which, once it has over- 
 mastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate 
 reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and 
 silly search, we can judge of the calm historical value 
 of his " discoveries." In 1808, Mr. Malone published 
 
PAET IT. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 87 
 
 a pamphlet — " An Account of the Incidents from which 
 the Title and Part of the Story of 'The Tempest' 
 were derived, and the Date ascertained." 1 It seems 
 that Mr. Malone finds reference to a hurricane that 
 once dispersed a certain fleet of a certain nobleman, 
 one Sir George Somers, in July, 1609, on a pas- 
 sage, with provisions, for the Virginia Colony; the 
 above nobleman, and a Sir Thomas Gates, having been 
 wrecked on the island of Bermuda. This discovery 
 is warranty enough for Mr. Malone, and he goes on 
 gravely to argue that William Shakespeare not only 
 wrote his "Tempest" to commemorate this particular 
 
 1 By Edmond Malone. London : printed by C. & R. Baldwin, 
 Newbridge street, 1808. 
 
 The "Tempest" is the most purely fanciful and poetical of 
 the Shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to 
 show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it; that 
 it is all real: the "Magic Island," a real island; the magician 
 Prospero, a real portrait; the " monster," a real, living curiosity, 
 which happened to be on exhibition in England in the days 
 when the play either was written or about to be written, (it makes 
 no difference to these gentlemen which) and the storm at sea — 
 as if the brain which conceived the play could not have con- 
 ceived — what is not, now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon 
 thing in the world — a storm at sea !— a real historical hurricane ! 
 
 In 1839, the Reverend Joseph Hunter, following in the Malone 
 footsteps, published "A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin. Date, 
 etc., of Shakespeare's Tempest," in which the Magic Island is 
 the island of Lampedusa: first, because it is uninhabited; sec- 
 ondly, because it is small; thirdly, because it lies on the route 
 between Naples and the coast of Africa, so that had a prince been 
 traveling from one to the other, and wrecked on an island be- 
 tween, he could have been conveniently wrecked on this one 
 without going out of his course; fourthly, because it bore 
 the reputation (Mr. Hunter does not say with whom) of being 
 
88 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 tempest — and, as will be seen by an examination of 
 the premises, the relation between the occurrence and 
 the play is confined merely to the word "tempest" 
 and goes no further — but that he (Shakespeare) did 
 not place the scene of his shipwreck on the Bermudas, 
 "because he could spread a greater glamour over the 
 whole by not alluding to so well-known islands as the 
 Bermudas." Mr. Malone further remarks naively 
 that, " without having read Tacitus, he (Shakespeare) 
 well knew that ( omne ignotum pro magnifico est ' ! " 
 Without pausing to wonder how Mr. Malone knew 
 that Shakespeare of Stratford had never read Tacitus 
 — (a slander, by the way, on the omniscient Shakes- 
 peare — the man who studied Plautus in early man- 
 uscript, the author of " Julius Csesar " — that he 
 had not read a simple Latin historian !) — or to dwell 
 on the most marvelous coincidence between the wreck 
 of Sir George Somers and that of Prince Ferdinand 
 
 haunted; fifthly, because there was a cell upon it, which Pros- 
 pero might have found most opportune for his ghostly resi- 
 dence; and sixthly, that the island of Malta gets fire-wood from 
 it. This last fact being strongest in the way of proof, because 
 we are told that Prospero impressed Ferdinand into his service 
 and kept him piling logs of wood. 
 
 But it was reserved for Mr. Edward Dowden, in 1881, to locate 
 the island beyond the necessity of farther conjecture, and to 
 give us accurate sailing directions for reaching it. " Prospero' s 
 Island," he tells us, "was imagined by Shakespeare as within 
 two days' quick sail of Naples," for " Ariel is promised his free- 
 dom after two days" (Act I, scene ii). "Why two days? The 
 time of the entire action of the Tempest is only three hours. What 
 was to be the employment of Ariel during two days ? To make 
 the winds and seas favorable during the voyage." (Dowden's 
 Shakespeare's Mind and Art. New York : Harper & Brothers. 
 1881. p. 373.) 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 89 
 
 (the coincidence, according to Malone, being, that one 
 was wrecked on the Bermuda and the other wasn't); 
 or ask if a storm at sea was so rare an occurrence as 
 to be eas'ly identified; or to note that "the tempest" 
 in the play of that name is an episode which covers 
 only about a dozen lines of text, and which has abso- 
 lutely nothing to do with the rest of the argument — ■ 
 without pausing for this, or to remark that Mr. Malone 
 might have taken to himself the i omne ignotum pro 
 magnifico est" of Tacitus more appositely than lie ap- 
 plied it either to Sir George Somers or the Bermudas, 
 had he reflected as generously as he took it for granted 
 — it is as well to take our leave of Mr. Malone and his 
 labors at this point, with a compliment to their zeal 
 and impressment which must be withheld from their 
 results. 1 
 
 And the world would doubtless be as well off could 
 we also here take leave of the rest of the Shakespeare- 
 makers. But we are not allowed to do so. From the 
 time of Malone onward, the Shakespeare-making, 
 Shakespeare-mending, and Shakespeare-cobbling have 
 gone on without relaxation. Each fresh rencontre 
 with an emergency in the Shakespearean text has ne- 
 cessitated at least one and often several new Shakes- 
 peares. And they have been prepared and forthcom- 
 ing as fast as wanted. Was it found that the bard had, 
 of all his worldly goods, left the wife of his bosom no 
 recognition save the devise of a ramshackle old bed- 
 stead? A score of gentlemen hurried to the front to 
 prove that, by law, history, logic, custom, and every 
 
 1 DeQuincy accepts this "origin" "with great alacrity." 
 8 
 
90 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 thing else, in those days a " secon'd-best bed " was 
 really the most priceless of possessions ; of fabulous 
 value, and a fortune in itself; and that in no other 
 way could her immortal husband have so testified his 
 tender regard and appreciation of Mrs. Shakespeare— 
 the sweet Ann Hathaway of old, who had thrown 
 herself away on a scapegrace butcher's son ! The fact 
 (as it appears, on inspection of the instrument itself, 
 to be) that Mrs. Shakespeare was not even alluded to 
 in the first draft of the testament — her name and the 
 complimentary devise of the precious husband's prec- 
 ious " second-best bed " having been written in as " a 
 poet's after-thought," and not appearing in the first 
 draft at all — does not affect their statements in the 
 least! They have even gone so far as to ascertain 
 that William was no truant lord to willingly desert his 
 lonesome lady. According to the very latest authority 
 we are able to cite, the fault of the separation was 
 wholly her own. We are assured by a very recent ex- 
 plorer that Mrs. Shakespeare " did not accompany her 
 husband to London, objecting to the noise and turmoil 
 of that city." x Unless it be assumed, therefore, that 
 investigation is reliable in proportion to the distance 
 from its subject at which it works, it would seem to 
 
 1 " Shakespeare and his Contemporaries." By William Tegg, 
 F. R. H. S. London: William Tegg & Co., 1879. Chapter I., 
 " Sketch of the Life of Shakespeare," p. 4. As every circum- 
 stance connected with William Shakespeare and Stratford is of 
 interest in the connection, we may as well note that, according 
 to Mr. Grant White, when William Shakespeare first went to 
 London, he went into the office of a cousin of his, who was an 
 attorney in that city. Like Mr. Tegg, Mr. White gives himself 
 as an authority for this item. See his " Shakespeare " in John- 
 ston's Encyclopaedia. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 91 
 
 appear that, even if the William Shakespeare we have 
 portrayed were our own creation, the creation is actu- 
 ally a nearer resemblance to the William Shakespeare 
 known to those nearest to him in residence and time; 
 than the inspired genius of the Shakespeareans, who, 
 from Malone downward, have rejected every shred .of 
 fact they found at hand, and weaved, instead, their 
 warp and woof of fiction (and that it is charming and 
 absorbing fiction, we are eager to admit) around a 
 vision of their own. 
 
 Nor have the Shakespeareans rested their labors 
 here. Having created a Shakespeare to fit the plays, 
 it was necessary to proceed to create a face to fit the 
 Shakespeare, and a cranial development wherein might 
 lodge and whence might spring the magic of the works 
 he ought to have written. This may, very fairly, be 
 called " the young, ladies' argument." * " Look on his 
 portrait," say the Shakespeareans; " look at that mag- 
 nificent head ! " — and they point to the Chandos por- 
 trait — "is not that the head of a genius?" "Was 
 there ever such a head?" We shoald say, yes, there 
 might have been such another head created, even ad- 
 mitting the Chandos portrait to be the very counter- 
 feit head of William Shakespeare. But it does not 
 appear, on taking the trouble to look into the matter, 
 either that the Chandos picture is a portrait, or that 
 — with one exception — any other of the pictures, casts, 
 masks, busts, or statues of William Shakespeare are 
 any thing but works of art, embodying the individual 
 
 1 So the young ladies of New York were of opinion that Stokes 
 should not be hanged for the murder of Fisk, " because he was 
 so awfully good-looking." 
 
92 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 inspiration — the ideal of the artist, who conceives, in 
 every case, his own " Shakespeare;" (and if we were 
 called upon for proof that " Shakespeare" is quite as 
 much of an ideal to the most of us as a " Hamlet," or 
 a "Lear," we could cite, perhaps, nothing more con- 
 vincing than the latitude which is allowed to artists 
 with any ( f the three — " Shakespeare," "Hamlet," or 
 "Lear," and the elaborate criticism to which a new 
 "portrait" of either of them is subjected — criticism, 
 which, in the case of a portrait of William Shakespeare, 
 in no case pretends to be historical, but is always ro- 
 mantic, or sentimental, or picturesque : as to the proper 
 pose of a poet, or the correct attitude for a man re- 
 ceiving efflatus directly from the gods; never as to the 
 stage manager of the Blackfriars, or the husband of 
 Anne Hathaway, or the son of John Shakespeare, of 
 Stratford.) 
 
 It appears that, as a matter of fact, there never w T as 
 but one picture of the Elizabethan Manager which 
 ever enjoyed any thing in the semblance of a certifica- 
 tion to its authenticity ; and that certification was in 
 the very unsatisfactory form of rhyme, in the shape of 
 a set of verses said to have been written by Ben Jon- 
 son (and, as we propose to show, are quite as likely to 
 have been placed under the particular picture without 
 Jonson's authority as with it) ; while, that they were 
 written to lit the particular picture in question (for they 
 are in the form of a sort of apostrophe to some picture 
 or portrait, and will be hereafter quoted), there seems 
 to be no information sufficient to form a belief either 
 way. If they w^ere written for that particular picture, 
 and if that particular picture is a speaking likeness, 
 then the phrenological, or at least the physiognomical, 
 
PART II.— THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 93 
 
 argument must droop away and die; for the person rep- 
 resented has as stupefied, stultified, and insignificant 
 a human countenance as was ever put upon an en- 
 graver's surface; and, as a matter of fact, no Shakes- 
 pearean has jet been found to admit it as the image of 
 his dream. But, of course, this is mere matter of pe^ 
 sonal opinion, and entitled to no weight w r hatever in 
 the discussion. The question is — Is there any authentic 
 portrait of William Shakespeare, as there is of Eliza- 
 beth, Bacon, Raleigh, Southampton, and other more 
 or less prominent characters of the age in which 
 William Shakespeare is known to have lived and died ? 
 Let us do the best we can toward investigating this 
 question. 
 
 We have before us a volume, " An Enquiry into the 
 Authenticity of Various Pictures and Prints, which, 
 from the Decease of the Poet to our own Times, have 
 been offered to the Public as Portraits of Shakespeare. 
 Containing a Careful Examination of the Evidence on 
 which they claim to be received ; by which the Pre- 
 tended Portraits have been rejected, the Genuine con- 
 firmed and established," etc., etc. By James Boaden, 
 Esq. 1 We must content ourselves with a simple re- 
 view of Mr. Boaden's labors. He was a friend and 
 disciple of Malone's, and a Shakespearean ; a believer 
 in the poet ; and he writes under the shadow of the 
 mighty name — the shadow out from under which we 
 of this age have stepped, and so become able to in- 
 spect, not ouly the facts of history uncurtained by that 
 shadow, but the shadow itself. But we will take every 
 
 1 London. Printed for Robert Triphook, 23 Old Bond Street, 
 
 1824. 
 
94 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 one of Mr. Boaden's statements for granted, neverthe- 
 less, and draw our opinions, when we venture on any, 
 from the portraits which he has given in his book. At 
 least Mr. Boaden is not a " Baconian," and not a 
 " Raleigh man," and, whenever he finds it necessary 
 to speak of Shakespeare's history, he follows Malone's 
 own version. For convenience, we will change Mr. 
 Boaden's numeration of the " portraits," preserving 
 the designation, however, which he assigns them. 
 
 E~o. 1. William Shakespeare dies in Stratford in 
 1616. In 1623, appears, on the title-page of Hemin- 
 ges and CondeU's first folio of the plays, the portrait 
 by Martin Droesbout. It is an engraving, and, Mr. 
 Boaden believes, a good engraving, of some original 
 picture from which it must have been taken ; u for," 
 he says, "there were good engravers in those days; 
 for Chapman's 'Homer' was published in that year, 
 with a very fine engraving of Chapman." 
 
 Under this engraving is printed a copy of Jonson's 
 lines, as follows : 
 
 TO THE READER. 
 
 This figure that thou here seest put, 
 
 It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; 
 
 Wherein the graver had a strife l 
 
 With nature to outdo the life : 
 
 0, could he but have drawn his wit 
 
 As well in brasse as he hath hit 
 
 His face : the print would then surpasse 
 
 All that was ever done in brasse. 
 
 But, since he can not, reader, look, 
 
 Not on his picture, but his booke. 
 
 (1) Look, when a painter would surpasse the life, 
 His art's with nature's handiwork at strife. 
 
 Venus and Adonis. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 95 
 
 In this picture the head of the subject is represented 
 as rising out of an horizontal plain of collar appalling 
 to behold. The hair is straight, combed down the 
 sides of the face and bunched over the ears; the fore- 
 head is disproportionately high; the top of the head 
 bald; the face has the wooden expression familiar in 
 the Scotchmen and Indians used as signs by tobacco- 
 nists' shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare that 
 would be but a sorry advertisement for the humblest 
 establishment in that trade; and which we would be 
 quite as unlikely to look for in the Stratford scapegrace 
 as in the immortal bard of the Shakespeareans. It is 
 of this picture that Boaden quotes somebody's remark 
 that " it is lucky these metrical commendations are not 
 required to be delivered on oath." And Steevens says, 
 on the supposition that Ben Jonson, and not the en- 
 graver, put the copy of verses on the title-page be- 
 neath the effigy: " Ben Jonson might know little 
 about art, care less about the resemblance, and, never 
 having compared the engraving from the picture, have 
 rested satisfied with the recollection that the original 
 was a faithful resemblance ; and that, no doubt, the en- 
 graver had achieved all that his art could perform. 5 ' 
 
 No. 2. The edition of the poens of 1640 is accom- 
 panied with what is known as "Marshall's picture;" 
 which so closely follows, as to face, forehead, hair, 
 beard, and collar, the engraving above described, as to 
 suggest that it was a copy either of that engraving, or 
 of the unknown picture from which that was taken. 
 But, if a copy, it is certainly, from a pictorial point of 
 view, an improvement. It looks much more like a 
 man. The simpleton stare around the eyes is toned 
 down, and the wooden aspect is modified into some- 
 
96 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 thing like life. Marshall has taken liberties with the 
 dress of No. 1, throwing in a sort of tunic over the 
 left shoulder, hitching on an arm with a gauntleted 
 hand grasping a sprig of laurel, etc., etc. 
 
 No. 3. The Felton Head. — " In the catalogue of the 
 fourth exhibition and sale b\^ private contract," says 
 Boaden,"(page 81),"at the European Museum, King 
 Street, St. James Square, 1792," this picture was an- 
 nounced to the public in the following words : 
 
 " No. 359 — a curious portrait of Shakespeare, painted in 1597." 
 
 On the 31st of May, 1792, a Mr. Felton bought it 
 for five guineas, and, on requiring its credentials, re- 
 ceived the following letter : 
 
 To Mr. S. Felton, Drayton, Shropshire — Sir: The head of 
 Shakespeare was purchased out of an old house, known by the 
 sign of " The Boar," in Eastcheap, London, where Shakespeare 
 and his friends used to resort; and report says was painted by a 
 player of that time, but whose name I have not been able to learn. 
 
 This letter was signed "J. Wilson," who was the 
 conductor of the European Museum. This "J. Wil- 
 son" appears to have been the original Barnum. Al- 
 though Prince Hal and Falstaff are said in the play 
 to have affected "The Boar's head in Eastcheap," it 
 does not appear, except from Mr. "J. Wilson," that 
 " Shakespeare and his friends" ever resorted thither. 
 There was an old inn in Eastcheap, but it was not 
 called " The Boar's Head." There was an inn by that 
 name, however, in Blackfriars, near the theater, from 
 which the manager might have borrowed it. Then, 
 again, Mr. " J. Wilson " seemed to have forgotten the 
 great fire in London in 1666, which, "in a few hours. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 9Y 
 
 in a strong east wind, left the whole of Eastcheap a 
 mass of smoking ruins, and the wretched inhabitants 
 could think of saving nothing but their lives." Mr. 
 Wilson subsequently amended his story so as to read 
 that " it was found between four and five years ago at 
 a broker's shop at the Minories by a man of fashion, 
 whose name must be concealed," etc., etc. Mr. Stee- 
 vens, who scouted the other pictures as spurious, ac- 
 cepted this picture, for a time, as the original of the 
 engravings we have called No. 1 and No. 2; but fin- 
 ally, the whole thing exploded and was forgotten. 
 
 No. 4. The Bust in Stratford Church.— This waa 
 carved by nobody knows whom, from nobody knows 
 what, nobody knows when; for the statement that it 
 was cut by " Gerard Johnson," an Amsterdam "tomb- 
 maker," is invariably accepted, but can be traced to no 
 historical source. Says Boaden (page 81), "The per- 
 formance is not too good for a native sculptor." In 
 1623 Leonard Digges alludes to it in a few verses well 
 known. It seems to have been originally colored, but 
 there is no testimony as to the original colors. In 1748, 
 one hundred and twenty-five years after Digges, John 
 Hall, a Stratford artist, "restored" it, painting the 
 eyes a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. 
 This was "a good enough" Shakespeare for all prac- 
 tical purposes for the next half-hundred years or so. 
 But in 1793 came Mr. Malone. He caused the bust 
 — in deference, probably, to a purer taste and a sense 
 of churchly propriety — to be covered completely with 
 a thick coat of white paint. 1 From this bust, Mr. 
 
 1 While these pages are going through the press (April, 1879), 
 however, we find a statement that within a year or two (and 
 9 
 
98 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Boaden says, a Mr. Bullock once took a cast, which, 
 is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of 
 the plays, in which case it is entitled "Cast of the 
 head of William Shakespeare, taken after death," 
 which may or may not — for Mr. Boaden can not tell 
 us who this "Mr. Bullock" was — be the German 
 "Death Mask" noticed further on, (at any rate the 
 statement " taken after death" — William Shakespeare 
 being unquestionably dead at the time — is literally 
 true.) 
 
 The bust represents its subject as possessing a mag- 
 nificent head, admirably proportioned, with no pro- 
 truding "bumps." The face is represented as break- 
 ing into a smile. According to this effigy, Shakes- 
 peare must have had an extraordinarily long upper 
 lip, the distance between the base of the nose and the 
 mouth being remarkably out of proportion with the 
 other facial developments; there seems to be a little 
 difficulty, too, about the chin, which is pulled out into 
 what appears to be a sort of extra nose; but, neverthe- 
 less, the Stratford bust represents a fine, soldierly-look- 
 ing man, with a fierce military mustache cocked up 
 at the ends, and a goatee. If Ben Jonson — knowing 
 his friend William Shakespeare to have been the mar- 
 tial and altogether elegant- looking gentleman the 
 Stratford bust represents him — authorized the verses 
 we have already quoted to be placed under the " Droe- 
 shout engraving,'* it was a deliberate libel on his part, 
 and as gross as it was deliberate, and only perhaps to 
 
 since the writer of these pages visited it) one Simon Colling 
 has applied a bath to the bust — removing Malone's whitewash, 
 and revealing the identical auburn hair and hazel eyes which 
 tradition had asserted to be underneath. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 99 
 
 be explained by Jouson's alleged secret enmity to, or 
 jealousy of, William. Shakespeare, his rival playwright, 
 which we shall be called to examine at length further 
 on. 1 
 
 No. 5. "The Chandos Portrait." This picture, so 
 termed because once the property of the Duke of 
 Chandos, is the best known of all the so-called por- 
 traits — being, in fact, the one from which the popular 
 idea of Shakespeare is derived; therefore, when a man 
 is said to resemble Shakespeare, it is meant to be con- 
 veyed that he bears a likeness to the Chandos picture. 
 Mr. Malone announced that it was painted in 1607, 
 but never gave any other authority than his own ipse 
 dixit for the statement, not even taking the trouble to 
 refer, like Mr. J. Wilson, to "a man of fashion, whose 
 name must be concealed." Mr. Boaden says (page 42) 
 that he once saw it, and compared it " with what had 
 been termed a fine copy, I think by Piamberg, and 
 found it utterly unlike." " Indeed," he continues, " I 
 never saw anything that resembled it." He also says 
 (pages 41-42) that "the copies by Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 and Mr. Humphrey were not only unlike the original, 
 but were unlike each other, one being smiling and the 
 other grave." That is to say, that not only have the 
 romancers constructed "biographies," but the artists 
 have kept up with them; and we may, every one of 
 us, select our own Shakespeare to-day — poet or pot- 
 man, scholar or clown, tall or short, fair or dark; we 
 may each suit our own tastes with a Shakespeare to 
 our liking. Mr. Boaden continues (page 49): "It" 
 (the Chandos) " was very probably painted by Burbage, 
 
 1 Post Part III. The Jonsonian testimony. 
 
100 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 the great tragedian, who is known to have handled 
 the pencil; it is said to have been the property of Jos- 
 eph Taylor, our poet's Hamlet, who, dying about 1653, 
 at the advanced age of seventy, left the picture by will 
 to Davenant. At the death of Davenant in 1663, it 
 was bought by Betterton, the actor, and when he died 
 Mr. Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, gave Mrs. 
 Barry, the actress, forty guineas for it. From Mr. 
 Keck it passed to Mr. Nichol, of Southgate, whose 
 daughter married the Marquis of Caernarvon. 
 
 Steevens, whom Boaden quotes (page 43), declined 
 to be convinced by this genealogy, and said, " Gos- 
 sip rumor had given out that Davenant was more 
 than Shakespeare's godson. 1 What folly, therefore, to 
 suppose that he should possess a genuine portrait of 
 the poet, when his lawful daughters had not one ! Mrs. 
 Barry was an actress of acknowledged gallantry ; as 
 she received forty guineas for the picture, something 
 more animated might have been included though not 
 specified in the bargain," etc., etc. Steevens was 
 fond of calling this picture " the Davenantico-Bet- 
 
 1 There is a story that once, on the occasion of one of Shakes- 
 peare's visits to Stratford, a villager, meeting young Davenant 
 in the street, asked him where he was going. " To the inn, to see 
 my godfather Shakespeare," said the lad. "Beware how you 
 take the name of God in vain, my lad," said the other. The al- 
 lusions to William's gallantries are numerous. On the Stratford 
 parish records there is entry of the birth of one " Thomas Green, 
 alias Shakespeare." The tale of the interrupted amour, at the 
 theater, of " Richard the Third" and "William the Conqueror," 
 as is apt to be the case, is about the most widely familiar of the 
 Shakespearean stories, and unnecessary to be repeated here. 
 But Davenant was proud to claim the dishonor of his mother, 
 and Shakespeare for his father, to his dying day. 
 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 101 
 
 tertono-Barryan-Keckian-Nicolsian-Chandosian por- 
 trait." " There are," says Boaden (page 53), " a few 
 circumstances relating to the picture of which some 
 notice should be taken in this examination. There is, 
 it seems, a tradition that, no original picture of 
 Shakespeare existing, Sir Thomas Clarges caused a" 
 (i. e., this) " portrait to be painted from a young man 
 who had the good fortune to resemble him " (i. e., 
 Shakespeare. Query: How did Sir Thomas know that 
 the young man resembled Shakespeare ?). Mr. Malone 
 traced this story to " The Gentleman's Magazine" for 
 August, 1759, and called on the writer for his authority ; 
 but the writer, whoever he was, never gave it, any 
 more than Malone gave his authority for announcing 
 its date to be 1607 ; but Malone himself says that "most 
 reports of this kind are an adumbration of some fact, 
 and indication of something in kind or degree similar 
 or analogous." 
 
 No. 6. This is a portrait, so called, by Zuccharo, which 
 need not detain us, since Mr. Boaden himself demon- 
 strates very clearly that it was not in any event painted 
 from life, and, not improbably, did not originally claim 
 to have been intended for Shakespeare at all. 
 
 Mr. Boaden's No. 7 is the " Cornelius Jansen pic- 
 ture," and to this Mr. Boaden pins his earnest faith. 
 He says this "is uoav in the collection of the Duke of 
 Somerset;" but he appears to make no attempt to 
 connect it with William Shakespeare except as follows : 
 Cornelius Jansen is said to have painted the daughter 
 of Southampton — ergo, he might have been South- 
 ampton's family painter, and Southampton might have 
 been desirous to possess a portrait of his friend Shakes- 
 peare done by his own painter — ergo, Jansen might 
 
102 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 have had William Shakespeare for a sitter ! This is 
 all the authority for the authenticity. But that it is — 
 judging from the engraving in Mr. Boaden's book — a 
 magnificent picture, we think there can be no question. 
 
 On the supposition that the Chandos is an authentic 
 likeness of Shakespeare, this Jan sen certainly bears a 
 strong Shakespearean resemblance. In it the hair is 
 curling, as in the Chandos, not straight, as in the 
 Droeshout and the Marshall engravings. The mus- 
 tache, which is cut tight to the face without being 
 shaved, as in the Droeshout, and strong and heavy, as 
 in the bust, is lighter than the Chandos, while the 
 beard is fuller. There is nothing of the tremendous 
 upper lip represented in the bust. 
 
 Mr. Boaden (page 195) describes it as an eye-witness, 
 he having had access to it for the purposes of the book 
 before us. He says : " It is an early picture by Cor- 
 nelius Jansen, tenderly and beautifully painted. Time 
 seems to have treated it with infinite kindness, for it is 
 quite pure, and exhibits its original surface. . 
 The portrait is on panel, and attention will be required 
 to prevent a splitting of the oak, in two places, if my 
 eyes have not deceived me." 
 
 As for Earlom, who copied the picture, Boaden says : 
 " He had lessened the amplitude of the forehead ; he 
 had altered the form of the skull; he had falsified the 
 character of the mouth; and, though his engraving 
 was still beautiful, and the most agreeable exhibition 
 of the poet, I found it would be absolutely necessary 
 to draw the head again, as if he had never exercised 
 his talent upon it" (page 195). Mr. Boaden speci- 
 fies further the picture said to have once decorated 
 the pair of bellows belonging to Queen Elizabeth's 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 103 
 
 own private apartments, besides still one other, both of 
 which he rejects as spurious. 
 
 Thus, it has taken an army of novelists, painters, 
 engravers, and essayists to erect simple William 
 Shakespeare of Stratford into the god he ought to have 
 been; and, on the best examination we are enabled to 
 make, and according to the Shakespeareans themselves, 
 there is only one picture of William Shakespeare ex- 
 tant which has the even assumed advantage of having 
 been pronounced a likeness by any one who ever saw 
 William Shakespeare himself in his (William Shakes- 
 peare's) lifetime. Even if — as Mr. Steevens surmises 
 — this eye witness never saw the engraving, but only 
 the original portrait from which it was copied, the 
 Droeshout still enjoys an authentication possessed by 
 no other so-called likeness, and, if rejected — as it in- 
 fallibly is by all devout Shakespeareans — there remains 
 nothing of certitude, nothing even of the certitude of 
 conjecture, as to the features of the Stratford boy, 
 whoever he was, and whatever his works. One fur- 
 ther effort was, however, made, so lately as 1849, to 
 clinch this "young lady's argument,'' by yet one more 
 genuine discovery. This time it was a " Becker 6 death 
 mask ! ' " A plaster mask of an anonymous dead face 
 is found in a rubbish-shop in Mayence, in 1849. Re- 
 garded as a mask of William Shakespeare, it bears a 
 certain resemblance to the Stratford bust; and, re- 
 garded as a mask of Count Bismarck (for example), it 
 would be found to bear a very strong resemblance to 
 Count Bismarck. (We write from an inspection of 
 photographs only, never having seen the mask.) Hav- 
 ing always been annoyed that a creature so immortal 
 
104 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 as they had created their Shakespeare left no death- 
 mask, the Shakespeareans at once adopt this anony- 
 mous mask as taken from the face of the two-days de- 
 funct William Shakespeare, who died in 1616. Credat 
 Judwus! Either "William Shakespeare, at his death, 
 was known to be an immortal bard or he was not. If 
 he was, how could the sole likeness moulded of de- 
 parted greatness be smuggled away from the land that 
 was pious to claim him as its most distinguished son 
 and nobody miss it, or raise the hue and cry? If he 
 was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask 
 from the family who cared enough about the dead 
 man's memory to go to the expense of it? But, at 
 any rate, in 1849 it falls into the hands of jealous be- 
 lievers. They search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, 
 and for the date of their hero's death, and they find 
 both. Had they made up their minds to find a scrap 
 of Shakespearean cuticle, we may be sure it would have 
 been there. Professor Owen, of the British Museum, 
 declared that, if the fact of the mask having origin- 
 ally come from England could be established, there 
 was " hardly any sum of money which the Museum 
 would not pay for the mask itself." But the missing 
 testimony has not been supplied, though doubtless it 
 is incubating. For now and then we see a newspaper 
 paragraph to the effect that old paintings have turned 
 up (in pawn-shops invariably) which "resemble the 
 death-mask," thus accustoming us to the title, which, 
 in time, we shall doubtless come to accept- — as we have 
 come to accept Shakespeare himself — from mere force 
 of habit. The last of these discoveries is in Australia, 
 farther off than even Mayence, " said to resemble the 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 105 
 
 Becker death-mask." 1 The Stratford portrait of 
 Shakespeare claims no authority further than a re- 
 semblance to the accepted ideal, and the terra-cotta 
 bust in the possession of the Garrick club was "found 
 to order," and represents a man who, it would seem, 
 bore not even a resemblance to the accepted Shake- 
 spearean features. 
 
 We should, perhaps, mention that Mr. Boaden sur- 
 mises that the Droeshout picture is a portrait of Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare the actor, in the character of " Old 
 Knowell," and that the Stratford bust was caused to 
 be executed by Dr. Hall, a son-in-law of its subject, 
 and was the work of one Thomas Stanton, who fol- 
 lowed a cast taken after death. But, as Mr. Boaden 
 admits, this is his surmise only. However insuper- 
 able, therefore, in the run of cases, the " young la- 
 dies argument" to prove from the pictures that Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare was not author of the plays is quite 
 weak enough; but, as an argument to prove that he 
 was such author, it is weakness and impotence itself. 
 
 It now becomes necessary to ask the ordinary ques- 
 tion which a court would be obliged to ask concerning 
 any exhibit produced before it, and claimed as authentic 
 or authoritative : namely, Where did the plays called 
 Shakespeare's come from ? how did they get into print ? 
 who, if anybody, delivered the "copy" to the printer, and 
 vouched for its authorship? It is manifest that we have 
 no business here with any question of criticism, or as 
 to an authenticity between different editions of the 
 
 1 See the "Academy," London, May 31, 1879, p. 475. We un- 
 derstand that the mask is at present in possession of the British 
 Museum. 
 
106 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 same play; but the plays were written to be played; 
 how did they come to be published so that millions of 
 readers, who never entered a playhouse where they 
 were performed, read and still read them? 
 
 In order to arrive at any supposition as to these con- 
 siderations which would be of value to our purpose in 
 these papers, it will be necessary to glance at the state 
 of literary property in the days between 1585 and 
 1606. Now, in those days, there was absolutely no 
 legal protection for an author's manuscript. Once it 
 had strayed beyond the writers hand it was practically 
 " publici juris " — any body's property. The first law of 
 copyright enacted in England was the act of Anne, of 
 April 10, 1710, more than one hundred years after the 
 last date at which commentators claim the production 
 of a Shakespearean play. Even the first authoritative 
 pronunciation of a competent tribunal as to literary 
 property at common law (which preceded, of course, 
 all literary property definable by statute) was not made 
 until 1769, fifty-nine years later. But the Court of 
 Star Chamber (of obscure origin, but known to have 
 been of powerful jurisdiction in the time of Henry 
 VII.) was in the height of its ancient omnipotence in 
 those years. And of the various matters of which it 
 took cognizance, one of the earliest was the publishing, 
 printing, and even the keeping and reading of books. 
 Under date of June 23, 1585 — the year that many com- 
 mentators assign as that in which William Shakes- 
 peare first turned up in London — this Star Chamber, 
 which had already issued many such, issued a decree 
 that none should " print any book, work, or copy, 
 against the form or meaning of any restraint con- 
 tained in any statute of laws of this realm," except, 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 107 
 
 etc., etc. Twenty-nine years before — in 1556 — Philip 
 and Mary bad erected ninety-seven booksellers into a 
 body called "The Stationers' Company," who were to 
 monopolize the printing of books, if they so chose. 
 They had given them power and authority — and their 
 second charter, in 1558, confirmed them in it — to print 
 such books as they obtained, either from authors' man- 
 uscripts or translations, and to see very carefully that 
 nobody else printed them. Their power was absolute 
 — they had their "privilegium ad imprimendum 
 solum," and in the pursuit of any body who interfered 
 with it they were empowered to "break locks, search, 
 seize," and, in short, to suppress any printed matter 
 they did not choose to license, wherever they pleased. 
 This the Worshipful Company of Stationers did not 
 fail to do; they pursued, and the Star Chamber con- 
 victed. The disgraceful record of infamous and inhu- 
 man prosecutions and punishments for reading, keep- 
 ing, selling, or making books might well detain us 
 here, did our scope permit. 1 Whatever literature ac- 
 complished in those clays it accomplished by stealth, in 
 defiance of the implacable and omnipotent Star Cham- 
 ber and its bloodhound, the Stationers' Company, who 
 ran in its victims. 
 
 It can not, we think, be doubted, by a student of 
 those times, 2 that whatever literary property existed 
 
 1 See " Omitted Chapters of the History of England," by Andrew 
 Basset, 1864 
 
 2 "The person who first resolved on printing a hook, and en- 
 tered his design on that register, became thereby the legal pro- 
 prietor of that work, and had the sole right of printing it." — 
 Carte, quoted in " Reasons for a Further Amendment of the Act 
 54, George III., c. 15," London, 1817. 
 
 John Camden Hotten, " Seven Letters, Etc., on Literary Prop- 
 
108 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 at common law then existed in the shape of a license 
 to print a work under permission of the Stationers' 
 Company; that no estate or property obtained in any- 
 thing except the types, ink, paper, in the license to use 
 them all together to make a book, and in the resulting 
 volume ; and that what we understand by " copyright" 
 to-clay — namely, an author's or a proprietor's right to 
 demand a royalty or percentage, or to exercise other 
 control over the work when once printed and pub- 
 lished — was altogether unconceived and unclaimed. 
 Whatever compensation the author of a work was 
 able to obtain, he doubtless obtained beforehand, by 
 sale of his manuscript, and dreamed not of setting up 
 a tangible property as against any one who had ob- 
 tained the Stationers' Company's license to print it. 
 The Stationers' Company, at the outset of their career, 
 opened a record, in which it entered the name of every 
 book it licensed — the date, and the name of the person 
 authorized to print it. 1 It was not until 1644, twenty- 
 eight years after William Shakespeare's death (so far 
 as we can ever know) that John Milton, in his "Are- 
 opagitica " — the greatest state paper in the republic 
 
 erty," London, Hotten, 1871, describes the modern Stationers' 
 Company as entrusted with " a vested interest over somebody 
 else's property, a prescriptive right to interfere with the future 
 work of other people's hands." 
 
 1 We are aware that this statement as to the condition of au- 
 thors' rights in the days of Elizabeth will not pass unchallenged; 
 but a review of the reported cases, as well as the extant records 
 of the Stationers' Company, will, we think, support our conclu- 
 sion. The first reported case of piracy was in 1735, when the 
 Master of the Rolls enjoined publication of " The whole Duty of 
 Man" (Morgan's "Law of Literature," vol. ii., p. 672). 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 109 
 
 of letters, the declaration of independence, and the 
 bill of rights of the liberty of literature — asserted 1 for 
 the first time " the right of every man" to "his several 
 copy, which God forbid should be gainsayd." 
 
 Once in their hands, printers did what they pleased 
 with a manuscript; abridged it if they found it too 
 long, and lengthened it if they found it too short. 
 Thomas Nashe says, that, in a play of his, called " The 
 Isle of Dogs," four acts, without his consent "or the 
 least guesse of his drifte or scope," were added by the 
 printers. 2 The printers also assigned the authorship of 
 the work to any name they thought would help sell 
 the book, and dedicated it to whom they pleased. 
 (Just as the first printer of the sonnets we call Shakes- 
 peare's, dedicated them to "W. H.," which two 
 initials have supplied the Shakespeareans with an 
 excuse for at least as many dozen octavo volumes 
 of conjecture as to who " W. H." was.) Sometimes 
 the author thus despotically assigned to the work 
 rebelled. Dr. Heywood recognized two of his own 
 compositions in a collection of verses called " The 
 Passionate Pilgrim," printed by one Jaggard, in 1599, 
 upon the title-page to which, this Jaggard had placed 
 the name of William Shakespeare as author. Hey- 
 wood publicly claimed his own, but William Shakes- 
 peare never denied or affirmed; his name, however, 
 was removed by the printer from the title-page of the 
 
 1 For the text of the "Areopagitica" and copious notes as to the 
 history of the days which called it out, see edition of J. W. 
 Hale's, Clarendon Press Series, Macmillan & Co., Oxford, 1874. 
 
 2 In a pamphlet, "The Prayse of the Eed Herring" cited by 
 Farmer, in his " Learning of Shakespeare," page 45. 
 
110 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 third edition of the book, in 1612. 1 But, as a rule, the 
 Stationers' Company were too powerful, and the author 
 too poor, to bring the trick to exposure. 
 
 It was under these circumstances, and in times like 
 these, that the Shakespearean plays began to appear in 
 print. Where did they come from ? They were written 
 to be played. According to all accounts they were very 
 valuable to the theater which produced them. Every 
 personal and selfish interest of the proprietors, whether 
 of the theater or of the manuscript plays, dictated that 
 they should be kept in secret — least of all that they 
 should be printed and made accessible to the public 
 outside of the theater, who otherwise, to see them, 
 must become patrons of the house where they were 
 performed. That the author or authors of the plays 
 could have made them of more profit by selling them 
 to the printers than to the players is doubtful; that 
 they personally entered them — or such of them as were 
 entered — on the books of the Stationers' Company, is 
 certainly not the fact ; the only persons to whose inter- 
 est it was to print them were the printers themselves, 
 and, in all probability, it was the printers who did cause 
 them to be printed. But where did these printers pro- 
 cure the "copy" from which to set up the plays they 
 printed? The question will never be answered. The 
 manuscripts might have been procured by bribing indi- 
 vidual actors, each of whom could have easily furnished 
 a copy of his individual part, and so the whole be made 
 up for the press. The fact that the plays never were 
 printed without more or less of the stage directions or 
 "business" included, lends probability to this theory: 
 
 1 Shakespeare, by R. G. White. Vol. 1., page lxxvii. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. Ill 
 
 but, as to whether a play made up in this fashion would 
 have resulted in any thing like what we possess to-day, 
 we have considered further on. Mr. Grant White ad- 
 mits, 1 as must everybody who examines into the mat- 
 ter, that whatever the printers printed was unauthor- 
 ized and surreptitious. But, having admitted this 
 much, Mr. White is too ardent a Shakespearean not 
 to make some effort to throw a guise of authenticity 
 around the text he has so lovingly followed. In the 
 article we have just quoted from in our foot-note, he 
 says, "It is not improbable that, in case of great and 
 injurious misrepresentation of the text of a play by" 
 this surreptitious method of publication, "fair copies 
 were furnished by the theatrical people at the author's 
 request in self-defence." Perhaps these plays might 
 have found their way into print just as the comedy 
 of "Play" found its way into print in 1868, 2 or the 
 play of "Mary Warner, 3 at about the same date. At 
 any rate the editors of the first folio speak of the 
 " stolne and surreptitious copies " which had preceded 
 them. 
 
 1 " Such of his plays as were published during his lifetime seem 
 to have been given to the press entirely without his agency ; in- 
 deed, his interest was against their publication. ... It was 
 the interest of all concerned, whether as proprietors, or only as 
 actors, or, like himself, as both, that the theaters should have the 
 entire benefit of whatever favor they enjoyed with the public. 
 But the publishers, or stationers, as they were then called, eagerly 
 sought copies of them for publication, and obtained them sur- 
 reptitiously : sometimes, it would seem, by corrupting persons 
 connected with the theater, and sometimes, as the text which 
 they printed shows, by sending short-hand writers to the per- 
 formance." 
 
 2 Palmer v. DeWitt, 47 New York K. 532. 
 
 3 Crowe v. Aiken. 2 Bissel R. 208. 
 
112 THE SHAKESPEAKEAN MYTH. 
 
 The first and second editions of "Hamlet," says Mr. 
 White, " in 1603 and 1604, might have been the result 
 of such maneuvers on the part of the printers and the 
 stenographers, or those who had access to the manu- 
 scripts of the author. However this may be, twenty of 
 Shakespeare's plays were published by various station- 
 ers during his lifetime ; they are known as the quartos, 
 from the form in which they are printed. They are 
 most of the m full of errors. . . . Some of them seem 
 to have been put in type from stage copies, or, not im- 
 probably, from an aggregation of the separate parts 
 which were in the hands of the various actors." In 
 other words, Shakespeare's works were so imperfectly 
 printed, against his will, during his lifetime, that he 
 himself authorized other imperfect — Mr. White says 
 they were imperfect — versions to be likewise printed! 
 
 Mr. White might have looked nearer home to more 
 purpose. Nobody knows, nobody can know better 
 than he, that what is called the "accepted" or "re- 
 ceived" text of Shakespeare (if there is, to speak 
 minutely, any such to-day) has been arrived at and 
 made up piecemeal, and in the course of time, by the 
 commentators selecting from the folios, and other 
 original editions, such "readings" as the judgment 
 of scholarship or the taste of criticism has, on the 
 whole, adopted; and any body who cares to take the 
 trouble to examine these original editions can see as 
 much for himself. To suppose that this text, as it 
 stands to-day, is the text as its author or authors wrote 
 it, is, it seems to us, to suppose at least ten thousand 
 coincidences, every one of which is, to say the least, 
 improbable. 
 
 Before proceeding any further, let us recapitulate 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 113 
 
 the three historical certainties to which we have ar- 
 rived. First, that the state of the law was favorable, 
 (indeed, it would be impossible to conceive of a state 
 more favorable), to literary imposture or incognito. 
 Second, that nobody stands on record as claiming to 
 know the authorship of these plays, except the print- 
 ers, who were able to sell them by using the name of the 
 manager of a popular theater ; and, therefore, whose 
 interest it was to affix that name to them ; and, Third, 
 that there was never a period in which it was so rea- 
 sonably an author's interest to be anonymous, or pre- 
 serve his incognito, as these very years covered by the 
 lifetime of William Shakespeare; when, between the 
 Stationers' Company and the Star Chamber, it was a 
 fortunate author, printer or reader, who escaped hang- 
 ing, disemboweling, and quartering, with only the 
 loss of ears or liberty. 
 
 Who wrote these plays? London was full of play- 
 wrights, contemporary with William Shakespeare, 
 many of them his friends and familiars ; possibly, all 
 of them submitting their manuscripts to his editorial 
 eye. We have their works extant to-day. 
 
 Ben Jonson was a poet and a pedant; Greene 1 , a 
 university-bred man. And we may go through the list 
 and verify the records of them all, and find in each 
 some quality or training from which to -reasonably ex- 
 pect fruitage. But nobody has ever ventured to haz- 
 ard so wild a theory as that any of them wrote the 
 anonymous immortal plays to which the best of their 
 own acknowledged masterpieces are mere rubbish. 
 But a butcher's boy, lately from Stratford, happens to 
 be manager of a contemporary theater. He, there- 
 10 
 
114 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 fore, must be the writer, and there can not be the 
 slightest doubt of it. The story that this boy ever 
 stole deer is rejected as resting on insufficient evidence. 
 But no evidence is required to prove his authorship 
 of the topmost works in the history or the literature 
 of England. We have seen the monopoly that overruled 
 the press. "We have seen that the Stationers' Company 
 insisted upon recording the name and ownership of 
 every printed thing; and their record-books are still ex- 
 tant, and bear no trace of any such claimant as William 
 Shakespeare. We have weighed the surmises of the 
 Shakespeareans as to these times, and seen their proba- 
 ble value; aud have found it just as impossible to con- 
 nect the immortal fragments we call the Shakespearean 
 plays to-day with William Shakespeare, of Stratford, 
 as we have already found it to imagine him as having 
 access to the material, the sealed records, and the hid- 
 den muniments employed in their construction. Is 
 there any more evidence to be examined? 
 
 But were these plays, so printed outside, the same 
 plays as those acted inside the theater ? When we re- 
 call the style of audiences that assembled in those days 
 (M. Taine says the spectators caroused and sang songs 
 while the plays progressed; that they drank great 
 draughts of beer; and, if they drank too much, burned 
 juniper instead of retiring; anon, they would break 
 upon the stage, toss in a blanket such performers as 
 pleased them not, tear up the properties, etc., etc.) — 
 when we recall this, it is not the easiest thing in the 
 world to imagine this audience so very highly de- 
 lighted, for instance, with Wolsey's long soliloquy 
 (which the actor of to-day delivers in a dignified, low, 
 and unimpassioned monotone, without gesture), or 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 115 
 
 Hamlet's philosophical monologues, or Isabella's pious 
 strains. Some plays were highly popular inside those 
 theaters. "Were these the ones ? Mr. Grant White has 
 all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, 
 when he insists that the theater most jealously guarded 
 the manuscripts of the plays that were making its 
 fortune ; and that it would have been suicide in it to 
 have circulated them outside, in print. But may not 
 the echo of the popularity of certain plays called 
 "Hamlet," "King John," "Macbeth," etc., have in- 
 duced others, outside the theater, to have circulated 
 plays, christened with these names (or with and under 
 the popular name of Shakespeare), for gain among 
 the "unco guid" who would not, or the impecunious 
 who could not, enter the theater door? There is no 
 need of opening up so hopeless a speculation — a spec- 
 ulation pure and simple, that can never, in the nature 
 of things, be confronted by data either way. But the 
 fact does remain that these marvelous plays appeared 
 in print contemporaneously with the professional 
 career of an actor named William Shakespeare, and 
 in the same town where he acted ; that, if they were 
 his, it would have been to his interest to have kept 
 them out of print; and that their appearance in print 
 he most certainly did not authorize; and who can 
 claim that one guess is not as good as another, where 
 history is silent, and tradition askew, and the truth 
 buried under the dust of centuries, overtopped by the 
 rubbish of conjecture? We repeat, we have no war- 
 rant to intrude upon the domain of criticism. The 
 Shakespearean text, as we possess it to-day, is too price- 
 less, whatever its source, to be rudely touched. But, 
 so far as is revealed by the record of its appearance 
 
116 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 among printed literature, there is no evidence, internal 
 or external, as to William Shakespeare's production of 
 it, and as to its origin we are as hopelessly in the dark 
 as ever. 
 
 Dubious as is the chronicle of those days as to other 
 matters, it is singularly clear as to what was printed 
 and what was not. For those were the sort of days 
 when men whose names were not written in the books 
 of the Stationers' Company printed at the peril of 
 clipped ears and slit noses, or worse; and those books 
 are still extant. But, by the fatality which seems to 
 follow and pervade the name of William Shakespeare, 
 this record, like every other, national or local, yields 
 nothing to the probe but disappointment and silence 
 as to the man of Stratford and the actor of Blackfriars. 
 
 We will, presently, consider as to whether the same 
 intellect composed the " Hamlet " at one sitting, and 
 at another, located Bohemia on the sea-coast; and 
 whether, on inspection, it might not be strongly sug- 
 gested that the two conceptions indicated geniuses of 
 quite different orders and not one and the same per- 
 son ; that one showed the hand-marks of a poet and 
 the other the hand-marks of the stage-manager, etc. 
 If the limits of this work permitted, we believe the 
 same hand-marks might be collected from the treat- 
 ment of the text of every play. For instance, the 
 " Comedy of Errors " is supposed to occur during the 
 days when Ephesus was ruled by a duke, and follows 
 — as we have already shown — the unities of the Me- 
 nsechmi of Plautus. But the ignoramus who doctored 
 the paraphrase for the Blackfriars stage found it con- 
 venient, to bring on his stage effect, to introduce a 
 Christian monastery into Ephesus at about that time, 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 117 
 
 with a lady abbess who could refuse admission to the 
 duke himself, so inviolable and sacred was the sanc- 
 tuary of consecrated Christian walls ! The monastery 
 was as convenient to bringing all the befogged and 
 befooled and sadly mixed up personages of the comedy 
 face to face at the moment, as was the seashore and the 
 bear, in " A Winter's Tale," to account for the princess 
 Perdita among the shepherds, and so in they all go. 
 These, and the like brummagem and ruses de con- 
 venances, are simple enough to understand, and detract 
 in no degree whatever from the value of the plays : 
 they can be retired or retained at pleasure, and no 
 harm done, if we only remember to whom and to 
 what they are assignable. But, if we forget that, and 
 insist that the very same pen which wrote the dialogue 
 wrote the setting — wrote every entrance, exit, and 
 direction to the scene-shifters and stage- carpenters, 
 and, therefore, that every dot and comma, every call and 
 cue, every "gag" and localism, is as sacred as holy 
 writ, no wonder the scholars of the text are puzzled! 
 For example, we find that Mr. Wilkes, and Mr. 
 Harper, in the " American Catholic Review " for 
 January, 1879 — who otherwise believe the author 
 of the Shakespearean plays to have been a roman 
 catholic — are almost persuaded that he must have 
 been a protestant, because he finds occasion to make 
 mention of an " evening mass." But let us assure 
 Messrs. Wilkes and Harper that they need neither 
 abandon nor adopt a theory on rencontre with so 
 trivial a phenomenon. If William Shakespeare felt 
 the need of an " evening mass " at any time, we may 
 be fairly sure, from our experience of that worthy, 
 that he put one in. He had bolted too many camels 
 
118 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 in his day to hesitate at such a gnat as that! The 
 creator of a convent in old Ephesus and of a sea- 
 coast to Bohemia was not one to stick at a trifling 
 " evening mass ! " 
 
 The gentlemen above mentioned, believe the author 
 of the plays to have been a romanist, not because the 
 reverend Richard Davies, writing soon after 1685, 
 distinctly says " he died a Papist," (for any statement 
 made anywhere within a hundred years of William 
 Shakespeare's lifetime is " mere gossip," aud it is 
 only the biographies we write now-a-days that are to 
 be relied upon), but mainly because the liturgy and 
 priesthood of that church are invariably treated with 
 respect in the plays, while dissenting parsons are 
 poked fun at without stint. Doubtless, in the modern 
 drama the same rule will be perceived to obtain. The 
 imperious liturgy and priesthood of the roman or of 
 the stately anglican church appear to be beyond the 
 attempts of travesty; while the snivel and preach 
 of mere puritanism has always been too tempting an 
 opportunity for "Aminadab Sleek" and his type — 
 to be resisted, and such a fact would justify very 
 little conclusion either way. Besides, there is no call 
 to insist that the stage, in epitomizing life into the 
 compass of an hour, shall preserve every detail; 
 nothing less than a Chinese theater could answer a 
 demand like that. There is a dramatic license even 
 broader than the license accorded to poetry, and we 
 would doubtless find the drama a sad bore if there 
 were not. William Shakespeare, during his mana- 
 gerial career, appears to have understood this as well 
 as any body; nor have the liberties he took with 
 facts and chronology befogged any body, except the 
 
PAET II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 119 
 
 daily lessening throng of investigators, who helieve 
 him to be the original of the masterpieces he cut 
 into play-books for his stage. 
 
 But did William Shakespeare ever try his hand at 
 verse-making? There is considerable rumor to the 
 effect that, during the leisure of his later life, no less 
 than in the lampooning efforts of his vagrom youth, 
 he did turn his pen to rhymes. And the future may 
 yet bring forth a Shakespearean honest enough to 
 collect these verses — as they follow here — and to 
 entitle them — 
 
 THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS 
 OF 
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 EPITAPH ON ELIAS JAMES. 1 
 
 When G-od was pleased, the world unwilling yet, 
 
 Elias James to nature paid his debt, 
 
 And here reposeth ; as he liv'd he dyde; 
 
 The saying in him strongly verified — 
 
 Such life, such death; then, the known truth to tell, 
 
 He lived a godly lyfe, and dyde as well. 
 
 EPITAPH ON SIR THOMAS STANLEY. 2 
 
 Ask who lyes here, but do not weepe: 
 
 He is not dead, he doth but sleepe; 
 
 This stony register is for his bones, 
 
 His fame is more perpetual than these stones, 
 
 x On the authority of "a MS. volume of poems by Herrick 
 and others, said to be in the handwriting of Charles I., in the 
 Bodleian Library. 
 
 2 On the authority of Sir William Dugdale (" Visitation 
 Book"), who says, " The following verses were made by William 
 Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian." This appears to be 
 our author's longest and most ambitious work. 
 
120 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 And his own goodness, with himself being gone, 
 Shall live when earthly monument is none. 
 
 Not monumental stone preserves our fame 
 
 Nor skye aspyring pyramids our name; 
 
 The memory of him for whom this stands 
 
 Shall outlive marble and defacer's hands, 
 
 When all to Time's consumption shall be given; 
 
 Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven. 
 
 EPITAPH ON TOM-A-COMBE, OTHERWISE THINBEARD. * 
 
 Thin in beard and thick in purse, 
 Never man beloved worse ; 
 He went to the grave with many a curse, 
 The Devil and he had both one nurse. 
 
 WHOM I HAVE DRUNKEN WITH. 2 
 
 Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, 
 Haunted Hillsborough and hungry Grafton ; 
 With dancing Exhall, Papist Wixford, 
 Beggarly Bloom and drunken Bidford. 
 
 DAVID AND GOLIATH. 3 
 
 Goliath comes with sword and spear, 
 
 And David with a sling ; 
 Although Goliath rage and swear 
 
 Down David doth him bring. 
 
 ON JOHN COMBE, A COVETOUS RICH MAN, MR. WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE 
 WRIGHT THIS ATT HIS REQUEST WHILE HEE WAS TETT L1VEING FOR HIS 
 EPITAPHE. 4 
 
 Ten in the hundred lies here engraved ; 
 ' Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved; 
 
 x On the authority of Peck, "Memoirs of Milton," 4to, 1740. 
 
 2 On the authority of John Jordan. There is a strong poetic 
 license here — according to the well-known legend, William had 
 really only drunk with Bidford; the quantrain is probably the 
 work of Jordan and not Shakespeare. 
 
 3 On the authority of Stratford local tradition. 
 4 Ashmolean MS., cited by Halliwell. The pun is on the War- 
 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 121 
 
 If any one asks, " Who lies in this tomb ? " 
 
 " Ho ! ho ! " quoth the Devil, " 'tis my John a Combe." 
 
 BUT BEING DEAD, AND MAKIN T G THE POOR HIS HEIRES, HEE AFTER 
 WRIGHTES THIS FOR HIS EPITAPHE. 1 
 
 Howere he lived judge not, 
 
 John Combe shall never be forgott 
 
 While poor hathe memmorye, for he did gather 
 
 To make the poor his issue, he their father, 
 
 As record of his tilth and seedes, 
 
 Did crown him in his later needes. 
 
 Finis. W. Shak. 
 
 LAMPOON ON SIR THOMAS LUCY. 2 
 
 Sir Thomas was too covetous, 
 To covet so much deer, 
 
 wickshire pronunciation, "Ho! ho!" quoth the Devil, "'tis my 
 John has come ! " See Aubrey's version : 
 
 " Ten in the hundred the Devil allows, 
 Bat Coombs will have twelve he swears and vows," etc. 
 
 1 Ashmolean MS. same as preceding. Both the above are 
 given by Mr. Grant White. Shakespeare, vol. I, p. ci. 
 
 2 This is given to us by Mr. S. W. Fullom (History of William 
 Shakespeare, Player and Poet; with New Facts and Traditions. 
 London: Saunders, Oatley & Co., 1864, p. 133, with the following 
 note : " The manner in which this fragment was recovered is not 
 different from that to which we owe so many local ballads, known 
 only to the common people. About 1690, Joshua Barnes, the 
 Greek Professor at Cambridge, was in an inn at Stratford, when 
 he heard an old woman singing these stanzas, and, discerning 
 the association with Shakespeare, offered her ten guineas to re- 
 peat the whole ballad. This, however, she was unable to do, 
 having forgotten the remaining portion." Mr. Fullom says these 
 verses "reveal the Shakespearean touch," and alludes to a scan- 
 dal touching Lady Lucy's infidelity to her husband. 
 
 The following additional verses were furnished by John Jor- 
 dan, who altered the above stanza into the same meter, and as- 
 11 
 
122 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 When horns enough upon his head 
 Most plainly do appear. 
 
 Had not his worship one deer left ? 
 What then ? he had a wife 
 
 serted the whole to be Shakespeare, as unearthed and restored 
 by himself: 
 
 He's a haughty, proud, insolent knight of the shire 
 At home nobody loves, yet there's many that fear; 
 If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it — 
 Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 
 
 To the Sessions he went, and did lowdly complain 
 His park had been robbed and his deere they were slain; 
 This Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it— 
 Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 
 
 He sayd 'twas a ryot, his men had been beat, 
 His venison was stol'n and clandestinely eat: 
 So Lucy is lowsie as some volke miscall it — 
 Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 
 
 So haughty was he when the fact was confessed 
 He sayd 'twas a wrong that could not be redressed; 
 So Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it — 
 Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 
 
 Though luces a dozen he wear on his coat, 
 His name it shall lowsie for Lucy be wrote; 
 For Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it — 
 We'll sing lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 
 
 If a juvenile frolic he can not forgive, 
 We'll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live; 
 And Lucy the lowsie a libel may call it — 
 We'll sing lowsie Lucy whatever befall it. 
 
 Mr. Collier (Shakespeare, K. G. White, Ed. 1854, p. cciii), gives 
 
 the following four verses as by William Shakespeare: 
 
 r 
 
 ON THE KING. 
 Crown have their compass, length of days their date, 
 Triumphs their tomb, Felicity her fate; 
 Of naught but earth can earth make us partaker, 
 But knowledge makes a king most like his maker. 
 
 but gives no other authority for it than " a coeval manuscript." 
 The world has, very regrettingly, come to look with such suspi- 
 cion on Mr. Collier's discoveries, that this relic, until confirmed, 
 will hardly be accepted as genuine. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 123 
 
 Took pains enough to find him horns 
 Should last him all his life. 
 
 ANOTHER VERSION OF THE LAMPOON. 1 
 
 A Parliament member, a justice of peace, 
 At home a poor scarecrow, at London an asse; 
 If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, 
 Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it. 
 
 He thinks himself greate, 
 
 Yet an asse is his state : 
 We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. 
 If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it, 
 Sing, lowsie Lucy, whate'er befalle it. 
 
 Some lampoon was affixed by young William to 
 Sir Thomas Lucy's park gate, and enraged the baro- 
 net to such a degree that — according to Capell — he di- 
 rected a lawyer at Warwick to commence a prosecu- 
 tion against the lad. The Lucy note, however, makes 
 no mention of the lawyer, only stating that young 
 Shakespeare deemed it prudent to quit Stratford, 
 " at least for a time." The long ballad of six stanzas 
 (which we give in the foot-note) was written by John 
 Jordan, a harmless rustic who lived at Stratford in 
 the days of Malone and Ireland, i. e. in the last years 
 of the eighteenth century, and went about claiming 
 to have inherited the mantle of Shakespeare. The 
 "Piping Pebworth" verses, and perhaps the whole 
 story,were written by him. At any rate, he seems to 
 have succeeded in obtaining immortality by mixing 
 his own efforts so successfully with the Shakespearean 
 
 1 According to Capell, Oldys, and Grant White. (See Mr. 
 White's Shakespeare, Vol. I. p. xxxviii.) Oldys leaves out the 
 "0" in the fourth and eighth lines. Mr. Fullom (cited above) 
 declares this version to be spurious. (See note 3, p. 121.) 
 
124 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 remains as to make them all one in the local tradi- 
 tions. The above, with the 
 
 INSCRIPTION FOR HIS OWN TOMB. 
 
 Good frend, for Jesvs' sake forbeare, 
 To digg y e dust encloased here. 
 Blesse be y e man y* spares thes stones, 
 And cvrst be he y t moves my bones. 
 
 (which was originally placed on the stone over Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare's vault in the chancel of Trinity 
 Church, Stratford — was recut in the new stone which 
 was found necessary fifty years ago, and now ap- 
 pears with the verbal contractions as given above) 
 are all the literary compositions which, according to 
 the local traditions of Stratford, his home, where he 
 was born, lived, and died — where alone, for a century 
 or more after his death his reputation was cherished — 
 William Shakespeare ever produced. There is noth- 
 ing in them inconsistent with the record of the man 
 himself; and, so far as we know, have never been re- 
 jected by the Shakespeareans themselves. It certainly 
 would not be honest, in our present appeal to his- 
 tory, to insert in this edition — we may fairly call it 
 " The Stratford Edition " — of Master Shakespeare's 
 poetry, all that he edited for the stage; or, worse yet, 
 borrowed and dressed up, and — according to Robert 
 Greene — passed for his own. 
 
 We are very far from desiring even to do justice to 
 poor Robert Greene, if in so doing we shall detract a 
 hair's weight from the merits of William Shakespeare. 
 But it is not impossible to say a good word even for 
 Greene. Although his language is not within such 
 bounds of propriety as the Shakespeareans could wish, 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 125 
 
 modern research has amply proved that he told the 
 truth, and that William Shakespeare borrowed, or 
 rather seized upon and adopted, without compensation, 
 the work by which Greene earned his bread. For 
 Greene's language, Chettle, Greene's editor, makes 
 haste, sometime afterward, when William Shakespeare 
 had been taken up by "divers of worship" to apolo- 
 gize, as far as an editor can apologize for an author. 
 We shall see, further on, how William Shakespeare 
 was shrewd enough to make himself useful to these 
 "divers of worship," and in those days, and for a cen- 
 tury after, no slavery was so abject as the slavery of 
 letters to patronage. So, of course, Chettle hastened 
 to make his peace with them too. But the truth 
 remains, nevertheless, that poor Greene told only 
 the truth. It is fashionable with the Shakespeareans 
 to sneer at Greene, because he was "jealous" of 
 Shakespeare. He appears to have had reason to 
 be jealous! But no name is bad enough to bestow 
 on him. Mr. Grant White says : " Robert Greene, 
 writing from the fitting deathbed of a groveling de- 
 bauchee, warns three of his literary companions to 
 shun intercourse with," etc., " certain actors, Shakes- 
 peare among the rest." If Robert Greene died from 
 over-debauch, it is no more than Shakespeare himself 
 died of, according to the entry in the diary of the 
 Rev. John Ward. "It is not impossible," says Mr. 
 White, "even that this piece of gossiping tradition is 
 true." Mr. White is right to call it "gossiping tradi- 
 tion," for it is piece and parcel of all the other men- 
 tion of William Shakespeare of Stratford. If it were 
 not for " gossiping tradition," we had never heard, and 
 Mr. White had never written, of that personage. But 
 
126 • THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Mr. White makes no reservation of " gossiping tra- 
 dition" in the case of Kobert Greene. Greene dies 
 "on the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee," 
 because he was jealous of William Shakespeare, and 
 was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself as to 
 call that "jack of all trades" an " upstart crowe, beau- 
 tified with our feathers," etc. It seems that poor 
 Robert Greene's dying words— if they were his dying 
 words — were his ante-mortem legacy of warning and 
 prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. But 
 they have not been heeded. His " upstart crowe " 
 has not only kept all his borrowed feathers, but is ar- 
 rayed each passing day with somebody's richer and 
 brighter plumage. If Robert Greene could speak from 
 the dust, he doubtless could tell us — as Jonson and the 
 rest mi^ht have told us in their lifetimes, if thev 
 only would — whose all this plumage really was and is. 
 But all are dust and ashes together now — dust and 
 ashes three centuries old— and, as Miss Bacon said, 
 "Who loses any thing that does not find" the secret of 
 that dust? However, not a Shakespearean stops to waste 
 a sigh over the memory of poor Robert Greene, 1 who 
 saw his bread snatched from his mouth by a scissorer 
 of other men's brains, and who was too human to see 
 
 1 " Robert Greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetry or 
 rhetoric than his fellows (Nash, Peele, and William Shakespeare), 
 was, from his miscellaneous and discursive reading, a very useful 
 man in his coterie." Dr. Latham speaks of his book as " A 
 Groats Worth of Rest, purchased with a Million of Repentance," 
 which certainly makes better sense than " a groat's worth of 
 wit," etc., as usually written. Which is right? Greene died 
 in 1592. 
 
PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 127 
 
 and hold his peace ; but over the drunken grave of the 
 Stratford pretender — who was vanquished in his cups 
 at Bidford and Pebworth, and lay all night under the 
 thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the last — 
 they weep as for one cut off untimely, as Dame Quickly 
 over the lazared and lecherous clay of Sir John Fal- 
 staff: "Nay, sure, he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever a 
 man went to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a finer end, 
 and went away an it had been any Christom child." 
 But let us not assume the appearance of unkindness 
 to William Shakespeare. He lived a merry lifer; and, 
 so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his 
 own wife, poor Eobert Greene, and perhaps the delin- 
 quent for malt delivered. He loved his own, but that 
 is no wrong. And, we must not forget that, so far as 
 the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save 
 by his silence, the works a too nattering posterity has 
 assigned him. 
 
 The appeal to history not only declines to set aside, 
 but affirms, with costs, the verdict rendered upon the 
 evidence. And the sum is briefly this : If William 
 Shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle ; every 
 thing else being equal, the presumption is against a 
 miracle; but, here, every thing else is not equal, for all 
 the facts of history are reconcilable with history and 
 irreconcilable with the miracle; if history is history, 
 then miracle there was none — in other words, if there 
 were one miracle, then there must have been two. If 
 there had lived no such man as William Shakespeare, 
 that "William Shakespeare" would be as good a name 
 as any other to designate the authorship of the Shakes- 
 pearean page, who will consider it worth while to 
 
128 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 question ? But to credit the historical man with the 
 living page demands, in our estimation, either a willful 
 credulity, or an innocence that is almost physical blind- 
 ness! 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 129 
 
 [PART III. 
 
 THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 
 
 UT what is the summing up on the other 
 
 side ? Merely the following copy of verses : 
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED, THE AUTHOR, MASTER 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US. 
 
 To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name 
 
 Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ; 
 
 While I confess thy writings to be such 
 
 As neither man nor muse can praise too much. 
 
 'Tis true and all men's suffrage. But these ways 
 
 Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; 
 
 For seeliest ignorance on these may light, 
 
 Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; 
 
 Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance 
 
 The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; 
 
 Or crafty malice might pretend this praise 
 
 And think to ruin where it seemed to raise. 
 
 These are as some infamous bawd or whore 
 
 Should praise a matron ; what could hurt her more? 
 
 But thou art proof against them, and, indeed, 
 
 Above the ill fortune of them, or the need, 
 
 I, therefore, will begin : Soul of the age, 
 
 The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage ! 
 
 My Shakespeare rise ! I will not lodge thee by 
 
 Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie 
 
 A little further to make thee a room. 
 
 Thou art a monument without a tomb, 
 
 And art alive still while thy book doth live 
 
 And we have wits to read and praise to give. 
 
 That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses, 
 
 I mean with great but disproportioned muses. 
 
130 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 For if I thought my judgment were of years, 
 
 I should commit thee surely with thy peers, 
 
 And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, 
 
 Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line; 
 
 And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 
 
 From thence to honor thee I would not seek 
 
 For names : but call forth thundering iEschylus, 
 
 Euripides and Sophocles to us. 
 
 Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, 
 
 To life again to hear thy buskin tread 
 
 And shake a stage ; or, when thy socks were on 
 
 Leave thee alone for the comparison 
 
 Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
 
 Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show 
 
 To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. 
 
 He was not of an age, but for all time ! 
 
 And all the muses still were in their prime 
 
 When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm 
 
 Our ears ; or like a Mercury to charm. 
 
 Nature herself was proud of his designs, 
 
 And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines! 
 
 Which were so richly spun and woven so fit 
 
 As, since she will vouchsafe no other wit, 
 
 The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, 
 
 Neat Terence, witty Plautus, how not please, 
 
 But antiquated and deserted lie 
 
 As they were not of nature's family. 
 
 Yet must I not give nature all ; thy Art, 
 
 My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part; 
 
 For though the poet's matter Nature be, 
 
 His art doth give the fashion; and that he 
 
 Who casts to write a living line must sweat 
 
 (Such as thine are), and strike the second heat 
 
 Upon the muse's anvil ; turn the same 
 
 And himself with it, that he thinks to frame, 
 
 Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, 
 
 For a good poet 's made, as well as born; 
 
 And such wert thou ! Look how the father's face 
 
PART III. — THE J0NS0NIAN TESTIMONY. 131 
 
 Lives in his issue, even so the race 
 
 Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines 
 
 In his well-turned and true-filled lines: 
 
 In each of which he seems to shake a lance 
 
 As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance. 
 
 Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were 
 
 To see thee in our waters yet appear, 
 
 And make those flights upon the banks of Thames 
 
 That did so take Eliza and our James ! 
 
 Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage 
 
 Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage, 
 
 Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like 
 
 night 
 And despairs day, but for thy volume's light. 
 
 This is all there is of Jonson's labored verses, of 
 which very few Shakespeareans care to quote more 
 than isolated passages of a line or two each. But 
 taking them either as a whole (with their involved met- 
 aphors and most execrable and inapposite pun about 
 Shakespeare's lines " shaking a lance at Iguorance ") — 
 or in spots (whichever spots the Shakespeareans prefer), 
 what sort of historical proof does this poem afford? 
 What sort of testimony is this as to a fact ? Is it the 
 sort we accept in our own personal affairs — in our bus- 
 iness — in our courts of justice — in matters in which 
 we have any thing at stake, or any living interest? 
 Will any insurance company pay its risk on the ship 
 Dolphin, on being furnished, by the Dolphin's owners, 
 with a thrilling poem by Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Tup- 
 per, describing the dreadful shipwreck of the Dolphin, 
 the thunderous tempest in which she went down — the 
 sky-capping waves, rent sails, creaking cordage, etc., 
 etc. ? Will any jury of twelve men hang a thirteenth 
 man for murder on production, by the State, of a har- 
 rowing copy of verses, dwelling on midnight assassina- 
 
132 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 tion, stealthy stabs, shrieking victims, inconsolable 
 widows, orphans, and the like? And shall we require 
 less or more proof, in proportion as the fact to be 
 proved is nearer or more remote ? 
 
 However, since the Shakespeareans rest their case 
 on these verses, (for any one who cares to examine for 
 himself will find the residue of the so-called u contem- 
 porary testimony," which is usually in rhyme, to be 
 rather criticism — that is to say eulogy, for we find 
 very little of any other sort of literary criticism in 
 those clays- — as to the compositions than chronicle as 
 to the man) we can well afford to waive these ques- 
 tions, and cross-examine Ben Jonson and his verses 
 without pressing any objection to their competency. 
 
 For criticism of the works is what Meres's 1 opinion 
 that "the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous 
 and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his ' Yen us 
 and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets 
 among his private friends. ... As Plautus and 
 Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy 
 among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English 
 is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. . . 
 As Epius Stoio said that the Muses would speake with 
 Plautus' tongue, if they would speake Latin, so I say 
 that the Muses would speake with Shakespeare's fine- 
 filed phrase, if they would speake English," etc., etc., 
 etc., amount to ; and so Weever's 
 
 " Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue, 
 I swore Apollo got them, and none other" — 
 
 probably means, if it means any thing, precisely what 
 it says, namely, that when he read the plays, he swore 
 
 ^'Palladis Tamia." 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 133 
 
 that they were certainly Apollo's. And if the comments 
 of Henry Chettle, Sir John Davies, Leonard Digges, 
 Hugh Holland, and the rest, do not read to the same 
 effect, they have a meaning beyond what they express. 
 But panegyric is not history — at least it can not over- 
 ride history. 
 
 Between the affirmative theory of the Stratfordian 
 authorship, then, and the demonstration of its utter 
 impossibility and absurdity, there actually remains but 
 the single barrier of the Jonsonian testimony, con- 
 tained in the copy of verses entitled " To the Memory 
 of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, 
 and what he hath left us," written by Mr. Ben Jon- 
 son, and prefixed to the famous folio of 1623. If this 
 testimony should ever be ruled out as incompetent, 
 there w T ould actually remain nothi-ng except to lay the 
 Shakespearean hoax away, as gently as might be, 
 alongside its fellows in the populous limbo of ex- 
 ploded fallacies. 
 
 However, let it not be ruled out merely on the 
 ground that it is in rhyme. We have no less an 
 authority than Littleton — " auctoritas philosopho- 
 rum, medicorum et poetarum sunt in causis allegan- 
 dse et tenendse " l — to the effect that the testimony, 
 even of poets, is sometimes to be received. It is to be 
 ruled out rather by a process akin to impeachment of 
 the witness — by its appearing that the witness, else- 
 where in the same controversy, testifies to a state of 
 facts exactly opposite. For the truth is that, what- 
 ever Ben Jonson felt moved to say about his "pal" 
 William Shakespeare, whenever, " as a friend, he 
 
 l "Co. Lit.," 264 A. 
 
134 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 dropped into poetry/' he was considerably more 
 careful when he sat himself down to write " cold 
 prose." Just as " Bully Bottom," fearing lest a lion 
 should " fright the ladies," and " hang every mother's 
 son " of his troupe, devised a prologue to explain that 
 the lion was no lion, but only Snug the Joiner, "a 
 man as other men are," so Master Ben Jonson, how- 
 ever tropical and effusive as to his contemporary in 
 his prosody, in his prologue in prose was scrupulous 
 to leave only the truth behind him. Mountains — 
 Ossa piled on Pelion — of hearsay and lapse of time ; 
 oceans of mere opinion and "gush " would, of course, 
 amount to precisely nothing at all when ranged along- 
 side of the testimony of one single, competent, con- 
 temporary eye-witness. T$o wonder the Shakespear- 
 eans are eager to subpoena Ben Jonson's verses. But, 
 all the same, they are marvelously careful not to sub- 
 poena his prose. 
 
 And yet this prose is extant, and by no means inac- 
 cessible. When Jonson died, in 1637, he left behind 
 him certain memoranda which were published in 1640, 
 and are well-known as "Ben Jonson's Discoveries." 
 One of these memoranda — for the work is in the dis- 
 jointed form of a common-place book of occasional 
 entries — is devoted to the eminent men of letters in 
 the era spanned by its author's own acquaintance or 
 familiarity. It runs as follows : 
 
 Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had 
 equaled to their empire. Imperium par imperio. We have had 
 many, and in their several ages (to take in the former sseculum), 
 Sir Thomas More, the elder Wiat, Henry, Earl of Surry, Chah 
 oner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were, for their times, admirable; 
 and the more because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nich* 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 135 
 
 olas Bacon was singular and almost alone in the beginning of 
 Elizabeth's time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in dif- 
 ferent matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and 
 in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. 
 The Earl of Essex, noble and high, and Sir Walter Raleigh not 
 to be contemned, either for judgment or style. Sir Henry Sa- 
 ville, grave and truly lettered. Sir Edwin Sandys, excellent 
 in both. Lord Egerton, a grave and great orator, and best when 
 he was provoked. But his learned and able, but unfortunate succes- 
 sor, is he that hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue 
 which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty 
 Rome. 1 In short, within this view, and about this time, were all 
 the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now 
 things daily fall; wits grow downward and eloquence grows back- 
 ward. So that he may be so named and stand as the mark and 
 anyv of our language. 2 
 
 Only fourteen years before, this Ben Jonson had 
 published the verses which made William Shakespeare. 
 Only fourteen years before he had asserted — what the 
 world has taken his word for, and never questioned 
 from that day to this — that his "best beloved" Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare had been the " soul of the age" — 
 "not for an age, but for all time" — and his works 
 "such as neither man nor muse can praise too much !" 
 We have no means of knowing the precise date at 
 which Ben Jonson's grief for his dead friend cooled, 
 
 Mudge Holmes ("Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, 
 p. 650) italicises these words to point the allusion to Bacon, and 
 to notice that the passage in "The Discoveries," immediately pre- 
 ceding the above, is a direct allusion to Bacon, while the phrase 
 " insolent Greece and haughty Rome "occurs in line thirty-nine 
 of the verses eulogistic of William Shakespeare. 
 
 2 " Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter : as they 
 have flowed out of his Daily Readings, or had their Reflux to his 
 Peculiar Notion of the Time." By Ben Jonson. " Works," by 
 Peter Whalley, vol. vii. , p. 99. 
 
136 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 and his feelings experienced a change. But he leaves 
 behind him, at his death, this unembellished memoran- 
 da, this catalogue " of all the wits " living in his day, 
 who, in his opinion, " could honour a language or help 
 study," and in this catalogue he inserts no such name 
 as William Shakespeare; William Shakespeare, the 
 name — not only of the "soul" and epitome of all that 
 — only about fourteen years ago — he had deemed 
 worth mentioning among men "born about this time;" 
 but of his late most intimate and bosom friend! Had 
 the "Discoveries" preserved an absolute silence con- 
 cerning William Shakespeare, the passage we have 
 quoted might, perhaps, have been considered a studied 
 and deliberate slur on his dead friend's memory, on the 
 part of Jonson, made for reasons best known to Jon- 
 son himself. But they are not silent. They devote a 
 whole paragraph to William Shakespeare — but in the 
 proper place ; that is to say, not among " the wits who 
 could honour a language or help study," but among 
 the author's personal acquaintance. This is all there 
 is of this paragraph as to the real William Shakes- 
 peare : 
 
 I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor 
 to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatever he penned) he 
 never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, " would he had 
 blotted out a thousand!" which they thought a malevolent 
 speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, 
 who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, 
 wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine own candour (for 
 I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idola- 
 try, as much as any). He was (indeed) honest and of an open 
 and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and 
 gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility that 
 sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. Sufflaminan- 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 137 
 
 dus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own 
 power, would that the rule of it had been so too ! Many times he 
 fell into those things could not escape laughter ; as when he said 
 in the person of Caesar — one speaking to him — " Caesar, thou dost 
 me wrong;" he replied, "Caesar never did wrong, but with just 
 cause," and such like ; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed 
 his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be 
 praised than pardoned. 1 
 
 That is every word which a man who " loved him " 
 could say of William Shakespeare ! — that he was a 
 skilled and careful penman, " never blotting out a 
 line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to 
 be checked; that, in playing the part of Caesar on the 
 stage, somebody interpolated the speech, " Caesar, thou 
 dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response ; 2 and 
 that he (Jonson) wished he (Shakespeare) had blotted 
 out a thousand of his lines. Blot out a thousand 
 Shakespearean lines ! — a thousand of the priceless lines 
 of the peerless book we call " Shakespeare!" Fancy 
 the storm which would follow such a vandal proposi- 
 tion to-day ! Ben Jonson does not specify which thou- 
 sand he would have expurgated, but would be satisfied 
 with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of 
 the writings of his " soul of the age," the man " not 
 of an age, but for all time! " And yet it is on the un- 
 corroborated word of this man Jonson that we build 
 monuments to the Stratford lad, and make pilgrimages 
 to his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel 
 about the spelling of his name ! If there is not a 
 
 1 "Works," cited ante, vol. vii., p. 91. 
 
 2 Possibly this may have occurred in playing the very version 
 of the "Csesar" we now possess, though there are, of course, no 
 such lines to be found there. 
 
 12 
 
138 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 strong smack of patronage in this prose allusion to 
 Shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect its 
 flavor. Very possibly the fact was that, so far from 
 having been an admirer of William Shakespeare, Ben 
 Jonson saw through his pretensions, and only through 
 policy sang his praises against the stomach of his sense. 
 For Ben Jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of 
 the day (we have history as authority for that), was 
 poor and a borrower, over head and ears in debt to 
 Shakespeare ; he was a stock actor on the rich mana- 
 ger's boards, and could not take the bread out of his 
 own mouth. But the poor scholar, and still poorer 
 actor, could yet indulge himself, and take his covert 
 fling at the rich charlatan : 
 
 u Though need make many poets, and some such 
 As art and nature have not bettered much, 
 Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage 
 As he dare serve the ill customs of the age : 
 Or purchase your delight at such a rate 
 As for it, he himself must justly hate. 
 To make a child now swaddled, to proceed 
 Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed — 
 Past threescore years, or with three rusty swords 
 And help of some few foot and half foot words — 
 Fight, over York and Lancaster's long jars, 
 And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars! 
 He [that is, Ben himself] rather prays you will be pleased to see 
 One such to-day, as other plays should be; 
 
 [that is, one he wrote himself] 
 Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas, 
 Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please." 
 
 Ben says this himself — in the prologue to his " Every 
 Man in his Humour." 
 
 Again, in the "Induction" to his "Bartholomew 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 139 
 
 Fair," he has this fling at " The Tempest : " ". If there 
 be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help 
 it," he says, "nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to 
 make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget 
 tales, tempests, and such like drolleries." 1 
 
 But that Jonson never himself believed, or expressed 
 himself as believing, that William Shakespeare was a 
 poet (except in this rhymed panegyric which Hemin- 
 ges and Condell prefixed to the first folio), there is still 
 further and perhaps stronger proof. Three years after 
 William Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson paid a visit to 
 William Drummond of Hawthornden, and spent with 
 him the greater part of the month of April, 1619 (or, 
 as some fix it, the month of January, in that year). 
 Drummond was a poet himself, and, it is said, his poet- 
 ical reputation was what had attracted Jonson to 
 make the visit. At any rate, he did visit him, and 
 Drummond kept notes of Jonson's conversation. 
 These notes are in the form of entries or items, 
 grouped under Drummond's own headings or titles, 
 such as : 
 
 11 HIS ACQUAINTANCE AND BEHAVIOR WITH POETS LIVING WITH HIM." 
 
 Daniel was at jealousies with him. 
 
 Drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of him. 
 
 That Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own 
 
 verses. 
 
 1 " The Tempest" of that day in William Shakespeare's hands, 
 then, was a "drollery." See some curious evidence going to 
 prove that, while the titles of the plays always remain the same, 
 the plays themselves may have been different at different times. 
 post VI, " The New Theory." Dr. Carl Elze (Essays on Shakes- 
 peare. London. Macmillans. 1874), thinks that Jonson meant 
 a hit at Shakespeare when he says, in Volpone, " all our English 
 authors will steal." 
 
140 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 That Sir John Roe loved him ; and when they, too, were ush- 
 ered by my Lord Suffolk from a mask, Roe wrott a moral Epistle 
 to him which began : That next to Playes, the Court and the State were 
 the best. God threateneth Kings, Kings Lords, (as) Lords do us. 
 
 He beat Marston and took his pistol from him. 
 
 Sir W. Alexander was not half kinde unto him, and neglected 
 him, because a friend to Drayton. 
 
 That Sir R. Aiton loved him dearly. 
 
 Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the satyres 
 of Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall. 
 
 That Markam (who added his Arcadia) was not of the number 
 of the Faithfull, (i. e Poets), and but a base fellow. 
 
 That such were Day and Middleton. 
 
 That Chapman and Fletcher were loved by him. 
 
 Overbury was first his friend, then turn'd his mortall enimie." 
 
 etc., etc. 
 
 There are, in all, between two and three hundred 
 entries of a similar character. JSTow, in one of these 
 entries, Jonson is represented as saying that he " es- 
 teemeth Done the first poet in the world in some 
 things;" but there is nothing put in Jonson's mouth, 
 in the whole category, about the " Star of Poets," 
 save that, in another place, is the following item : 
 
 " That Shakspeer wanted arte," 
 
 and, further on, the following : 
 
 " Shakespeare wrote a play, brought in a number of men say- 
 ing they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, when there is no 
 see neer by some 100 miles." x 
 
 These notes were first printed by Mr. David Laing, 
 who discovered them among the manuscripts of Sir 
 
 1 Works of Ben Jonson. By William Grifford. Edited by Lt. 
 Col. Francis Cunningham. Vol. III., p. 470. London. I. C. Hot- 
 ten, 74 & 75 Picadilly. 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTMONY. 141 
 
 Robert Sibbald, a well-known antiquary and physi- 
 cian of Edinburgh. They were preserved in the form 
 of a copy in Sibbald' 8 baud writing. Sibbald was a 
 friend of the Bishop Sage, who edited Drummond's 
 works in 1711. These notes were believed by Sir 
 Walter Scott to be genuine, and, by his advice, were 
 printed first in the "Archaeological Scotica," in or 
 a bo ut 1723. At any rate, they were never printed by 
 Sibbald himself, nor used by him in any way which 
 suggested a motive for forgery, and, internally, they 
 agree with Ben Jonson's own " Discoveries," especi- 
 ally as to his (Jonson's) estimate of William Shakes- 
 peare. 
 
 This beneficiary of Shakespeare's (whom he honors 
 this side idolatry, but whom Ave are not fearful of pass- 
 ing the bounds of idolatry in worshiping to-day) — 
 who declares that both Bacon and Shakespeare have 
 surpassed all the heroic and tragic poets of Greece 
 and Rome — is an overworked rhymester, who makes 
 not only his tropes but his rhymes do double duty. 
 The couplet: 
 
 " Though need make many poets, and some such 
 As art and nature have not bettered much " — 
 
 needs only a little hammering over to become the 
 
 "While I confess thy writings to be such 
 As neither man nor muse can praise too much " — 
 
 of the mortuary verses which— as we say — made 
 Shakespeare Shakespeare. When the rich manager's 
 alleged works were to be collected, the poor scholar, 
 who had borrowed money of him in his lifetime, was 
 called upon for a tribute. But the poor scholar for- 
 
142 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 bore to draw on the storehouse of his wits, though 
 willing to hammer over some of his old verses for the 
 occasion. He once assured posterity, in rhyme, that 
 they must not "give nature all," but remember his 
 gentle Shakespeare's art, how he would "sweat and 
 strike the second heat upon the muse's anvil" (in 
 other words, bring by long toil the firstlings of his 
 genius to artificial perfection). And yet he deliberately 
 tells Drummond, long years after, and puts it down in 
 black and white over his own signature, that this same 
 Shakespeare " wanted art," and that the great trouble 
 with him was that he talked too much. Is it possible 
 that the ideal Shakespeare, the mighty miracle-work- 
 ing demigod, is only the accidental creation of a man 
 who was poking fun at a shadow? Let us not pro- 
 ceed to such a violent surmise, but return to a serious 
 consideration of Mr. Ben Jonson's unimpassioned 
 prose. 
 
 If the paragraph from the " Discoveries" last above 
 quoted — which estimates William Shakespeare pre- 
 cisely as history estimates him, namely, as a clever 
 fellow, and a player in one of the earliest theaters in 
 London — is. not to be regarded as a confession that 
 Ben Jonson's verses were written (or rewritten) more 
 out of generosity to his late friend's memory — rather 
 in the exuberance of a poetic license of apotheosis — 
 than with a literal adherence to truth; 1 then it must be 
 conceded that the result is such a facing both ways as 
 
 *A confession, say the Baconians, that Jonson, as long as 
 Bacon lived, was eager to serve him by shouldering on his in- 
 cognito — in poetry — while he was under no compunction to do so 
 in his own posthumous remains. See post V, The Baconian 
 Theory. 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 143 
 
 hangs any Jonsonian testimony in perfect equilibrium 
 as to the Shakespearean controversy, and entitles Ben 
 Jonson himself, as a witness for anybody or to any 
 thing, to simply step down and out. For, admitting 
 that his poetry is just as good as his prose — and prob- 
 ably the Shakespeareans would care to assert no more 
 than that — it is a legal maxim that a witness who 
 swears for both sides swears for neither; and a rule 
 of common law uo less than of common sense that 
 his evidence must be ruled out, since no jury can be 
 called upon to believe and disbelieve one and the same 
 witness at the same time. And so we are relieved 
 from accounting for the " Jonson testimony," as did 
 Lord Palmerston, by saying : " 0, those fellows always 
 hang together; or, its just possible Jonson may have 
 been deceived like the rest;" 1 or by asking ourselves 
 if a score of rhymes by Ben Jonson, a fellow crafts- 
 man (not sworn to, of course, and not nearly as tropi- 
 cal or ecstatic as they might have been, and yet been 
 quite justifiable under the rule nil nisi) — are to out- 
 weigh all historic certainty? If Jonson had written a 
 life, or memoir, or "recollections," or "table-talk," of 
 William Shakespeare, it might have been different. 
 But he only gives us a few cheap lines of poetical 
 eulogy; and eact is one thing, and poetry — unless 
 there is an exception in this instance — is conceded to 
 be altogether another. 
 
 But since numberless good people are suspicious of 
 rules of law as applied to evidence, regarding them as 
 over-nice, finical, and as framed rather to keep out 
 truth than to let it in, let us waive the legal maxim, 
 
 1 Frazer's Magazine, November, 1865, p. 666. 
 
144 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 and admit the Jonsonian testimony to be one single, 
 consistent block of contemporary evidence. But, no 
 sooner do we do this, than we find ourselves straight- 
 way floundering in a slough of absurdities far greater, 
 it seems to us, than any we have yet encountered. To 
 illustrate : It is necessary to the Shakespearean theory 
 that in the days of Elizabeth and James there should 
 have been not only a man, but a genius, a wit, and a 
 poet, of thename of "William Shakespeare; and that 
 all these — man, genius, wit, and poet — should have 
 been one and the same individual. Taking all the 
 Jonsonian testimony, prose and poetry, together, such 
 an individual there was, and his name was William 
 Shakespeare, as required. But — still following Jon- 
 son's authority — at the same period and in the same 
 town of London there was a certain gentleman named 
 Bacon, who was "learned and able," and who had, 
 moreover, " filled up all numbers — and" in the same 
 days "performed that which may be compared either 
 to insolent Greece or haughty Rome." We have, 
 then, not only a " wit and poet" named Shakespeare, 
 but a " wit and poet" named Bacon; and, since Jon- 
 son is nowhere too modest to admit that he himself 
 was a " wit and poet," we have, therefore, actually 
 not one but three of a kind, at each other's elbows in 
 London, in the golden age of English literature. We 
 have already seen that, of this trio, two — Bacon and 
 Shakespeare, if we are to believe the Shakespeareans 
 — were personally unknown to each other. It is 
 worth our while to pause right here, and see what this 
 statement involves. 
 
 They are all three — Bacon, Jonson, and Shakes- 
 peare — dwelling in the same town at the same mo- 
 
PART lit. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 145 
 
 ment ; are, all three, writers and wits, earning their 
 living by their pens. Ben Jonson is the mutual 
 friend. He is of service to both — he translates Bacon's 
 English into Latin for him, 1 and writes plays for 
 William Shakespeare's stage, and, as we have seen, he 
 ultimately becomes the Boswell of both, and runs 
 from one to the other in rapture. His admiration for 
 Bacon, on the one hand (according to his prose), 
 amounts to a passion; his admiration for Shakespeare, 
 on the other hand (according to his poetry), amounts 
 to a passion. He declares (in prose) that Bacon " hath 
 filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue, 
 which may be compared and preferred either to in- 
 solent Greece or haughty Home." He declares (in poetry) 
 of Shakespeare that he may be left alone — 
 
 "... for comparison 
 Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come." 
 
 And yet he never, while going from one to the 
 other, mentions Shakespeare to Bacon or Bacon to 
 Shakespeare; never "introduces" them or brings 
 them together; never gives his soul's idol Bacon any 
 " order" to his soul's idol Shakespeare's theater, that 
 this absolutely inimitable Bacon (who has surpassed 
 insolent Greece and haughty Rome) may witness the 
 masterpieces of this absolutely inimitable Shakespeare 
 
 1 Jonson assisted Dr. Hackett, afterward Bishop of Litchfield 
 and Coventry, in translating the essays of Lord Bacon into Latin. 
 (Whalley, " Life of Ben Jonson," Vol. I. of works, cited ante.) 
 Jonson was at this time " on terms of intimacy with Lord 
 Bacon." — (W. H. Smith, " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 29.) 
 13 
 
146 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 (who has likewise surpassed insolent Greece and 
 haughty Rome) ; this Boswell of a Jonson, go-be- 
 tween of two men of repute and public character, 
 travels from one to the other, sings the praises of each 
 to the world outside (using the same figures of speech 
 for each), and, in the presence of each, preserves so 
 impenetrable a silence as to the other, that of the two 
 public characters themselves each is absolutely ignor- 
 ant of the other's existence ! And yet they ought to 
 have been close friends, for they borrowed each other's 
 verses, and loaned each other paragraphs to any ex- 
 tent. Persons there have been who asser'ed, as we 
 shall see, on merely the internal evidence of their 
 writings, that Bacon and " Shakespeare " were one 
 and the same man, and that what appeared to be "par- 
 allelisms " and coincidences in Bacon and " Shakes- 
 peare" were thus to be accounted for. But, admit- 
 ting their separate identity, it is certain either that 
 the natural philosopher borrowed his exact facts from 
 the comedies of the playwright, or that the playwright 
 borrowed the speeches for his comedies from the na- 
 tural philosopher; either of which looks very much 
 like, at least, a speaking acquaintance. For, as we 
 shall see further on, 1 some of these "parallelisms" are 
 not coincidences, but something very like identities. 
 
 It will not lighten this new difficulty to rnle out the 
 prose and leave in the poetry, for we can not anni- 
 hilate Francis Bacon nor yet William Shakespeare 
 from their places in history. If, however, the Jonson- 
 ian poetry ivere wiped out, the Jonsonian prose would 
 receive, at least, a negative corroboration, as follows: 
 
 1 Post, part V, The Baconian Theory. 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 147 
 
 At the same time that Bacon and Shakespeare are liv- 
 ing, unknown to each other respectively, in London, 
 there also dwell there three other gentlemen — Sir 
 Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Tobie 
 Matthew. We, therefore, actually have four well- 
 known gentlemen of the day in London, gentlemen 
 of elegant tastes — poets, men about town, critics — who, 
 if the town were being convulsed by the production 
 at a theater of by far the most brilliant miracles of 
 genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in the 
 nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as 
 to the circumstance. We do not add to this list South- 
 ampton, Essex, Rutland, Montgomery, and the rest, 
 because these latter have left no memorandum or 
 chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript 
 behind them. But the first four have left just pre- 
 cisely such memoranda of their times as are of assist- 
 ance to us here. Bacon, in his " Apothegms," Spenser 
 in his poems, 1 and Raleigh and Matthew in their re- 
 
 1 Spenser's well-known lines in "Colin Clout's come Home 
 again," written in 1591, are: 
 
 •' And there, though last not least, is Aetion, 
 A gentler shepherd may nowhere he found , 
 Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, 
 Doth— life himself— heroically sound." 
 
 "jEton" is generally assumed by commentators to stand in 
 the verse for " Shakespeare." But it is difficult to imagine how 
 this can possibly be more than mere speculation, since Spenser 
 certainly left no annotation explanatory of the passage, and it 
 does not identify itself as a reference to Shakespeare. In " The 
 Tears of the Muses," line 205, there is an allusion which on a 
 first glance appears so pat, that the Bard of Avon has long been 
 called " our pleasant Willy " on the strength of it. It runs : 
 
 " A.nd he, the man whom Nature's self had made, 
 To mock herself and truth to imitate 
 
148 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 mains — especially Matthew — who, like Bacon, kept a 
 diary, who wrote letters and postscripts, and was as 
 fond of playing at Boswell to his favorites as Jonson 
 himself — appear to have stumbled on no trace of such 
 a character as "Shakespeare" in all their saunterings 
 about London. Especially on one occasion does Sir 
 Tobie devote himself to a subject-matter wherein, if 
 there had been any "Shakespeare" within his ken, 
 lie could very properly — and would, we think, very 
 naturally — have mentioned him. In the " Address to 
 the Reader," prefixed to one of his works, l he says, 
 speaking of his ow T n date, " We have also rare com- 
 positions made among us which look so many fair 
 ways at once that I doubt it will go near to pose any 
 other nations of Europe to muster out in ai^ age four 
 men who, in so many respects, should be able to excel 
 
 With kindly counter under mirnick shade, 
 Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late ; 
 With whom all joy and jolly merriment 
 Is also deaded, and in dolour drent." 
 
 But, since Spenser died some seventeen years before Shake- 
 speare, and if — as must be supposed from their flippancy — these 
 lines point to the enforced or voluntary retirement or silence of 
 some writer, rather than to his death — they appear more nearly 
 to refer to Sidney than to Shakespeare. And this now appears 
 to be conceded. (See Morley's "English Men of Letters: Spens- 
 er," by Dean Church. American edition, Harpers, New York, 
 1879, p. 106.) Besides, "The Tears of the Muses" was written 
 in 1580, when Shakespeare was a lad of sixteen, holding horses 
 at the theater door. " Will," or " Willy," appears to have been 
 the ordinary nickname of a poet in those days-. — E. G\ White's 
 "Shakespeare," vol i., p. 57, note.) 
 
 1 " A Collection of Letters made by Sir Tobie Matthew, with a 
 Character of the Most Excellent Lady Lucy, Countess of Car- 
 lisle. To which are added Many Letters of his Several Persons 
 of Honour, who were contemporary with him." London, 1660. 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 149 
 
 four such as we are able to show — Cardinal Wolsey, 
 Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis 
 Bacon. For they were all a kind of monsters in their 
 various ways," etc. 
 
 Besides, these four — or, dismissing Spenser, who 
 was a poet exclusively — then three, Bacon, Raleigh, and 
 Tobie Matthew — however else dissimilar, were any 
 thing but blockheads or anchorites. They were men 
 of the court and of the world. They mingled among 
 their fellow-men, and (by a coincidence which is very 
 useful to us here) none of them were silent as to what 
 they met and saw during, their careers. They both 
 live and move in the very town and in the very days 
 when this rare poetry which Emerson says "the great- 
 est minds value most" was appearing. But, if Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare was the author of it all, how is it 
 possible to escape the conviction that not one of them 
 all— not Bacon, a man of letters himself, a student of 
 antique not only, but of living and contemporary lit- 
 erature, and overfond of writing down his impressions 
 for the benefit of posterity (even if wanting in the 
 dramatic or poetic perception, the scholarship of the 
 plays could not have escaped him; and had these plays 
 been the delight and town talk of all London, as Mr. 
 Grant White says they were, some morsel of them 
 must have reached his ear or eye) — not Raleigh, court- 
 ier, gallant, man-about-town, "curled darling," and 
 every thing of that sort (who probably was not afraid 
 to go to a theater for fear of injuring his morals) — not 
 Tobie Matthew, who was all this latter with less of 
 responsibility and mental balance — ever so much as 
 heard his (Shakespeare's) name mentioned ? That not 
 one of these ever heard of a name that was in every- 
 
150 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 body's mouth — of a living man so famous that, as we 
 shall presently consider, booksellers were using his 
 name to make their wares sell, that his plays were fill- 
 ing the most fashionable theater in London from cock- 
 pit to the dome; whose popularity was so exalted that 
 the great Queen Elizabeth herself stepped down from 
 the throne and walked across his stage to do him 
 honor, to whom in after days, her successor King was 
 to write an autograph letter (for these must all be con- 
 sidered in the argument, though, as we have seen, the 
 King James story is only one of the " yarns," 1 cooked 
 for occasion by commentators, or the growth of rumor 
 — in orthodox procession from " might have been" to 
 "was" — and so, doubtless, is the other) is a trifle in- 
 credible to a mind not already adjusted to swallow any 
 and every fable in this connection' rather than accept 
 the truth of history ! To be sure, it is not absolutely 
 impossible that these three men should have been cog- 
 nizant of William Shakespeare's existence without 
 mentioning him in their favors to posterity. But, under 
 all the circumstances, it is vastly improbable. At any 
 rate, we fancy it would not be easy to conceive of 
 
 x The story of Elizabeth's order for " FalstafF in Love," result- 
 ing in the production of " The Merry Wives of Windsor" (which 
 would prove that, whatever else she was, Elizabeth was no An- 
 thony Comstock), is, to our mind, another sample of the same 
 procession. Hazlitt (Lit. of Europe, Part iii., chap. 6, sec. iii., 
 note,) is especially incredulous as to the King James letter. The 
 truth is that Shakespeare, far from being flattered by James, was 
 actually in disgrace, and not so much as to be mentioned in that 
 monarch's hearing, from having permitted a representation of the 
 sacred person of royalty on his stage, as is authenticated by the 
 well-known lines of Davies: 
 
 Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport, etc., etc. 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 151 
 
 three Englishmen in London to-day, in 1881 — let us 
 say Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne 
 — without collusion, writing down a list of their most 
 illustrious contemporaries, and not one of them men- 
 tioning Mr. Tennyson! Or, assuming that Tennyson 
 is the admitted first of poets of the Victorian age (as 
 Mr. Ben Jonson and all the commentators at his heels, 
 down to our own Mr. Grant White, tell us that " Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare" was the admitted first of poets of 
 his contemporary Elizabethan age), it would not be 
 the easiest thing in the world to conceive three chron- 
 iclers — Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swin- 
 burne—sitting themselves down to an enumeration, 
 not of their illustrious contemporaries in general, but 
 of their contemporaneous men of letters only, and, by 
 a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first 
 of poets of their day! Either, then, it seems to us we 
 are to infer that three such men as Raleigh, Bacon, 
 (who, Emerson says, "took the inventory of the hu- 
 man understanding, for his time,") and his satellite 
 Matthew, had never so much as heard that there was 
 any Shakespeare, in an age which we moderns wor- 
 ship as the age of Shakespeare, or that there was no 
 " Shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare" was the name of an actor and man- 
 ager in the Globe and Blackfriars play-houses, of a 
 man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors 
 and co-managers in those establishments, to enumera- 
 tion among the illustrious ornaments of an illustrious 
 age, the stars of the golden age of English ! 
 
 Of course, it can be well urged that all this is mere 
 negative evidence; that not only three but three mil- 
 lion of men might be found who had never mentioned 
 
152 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 or ever heard of Shakespeare, without affecting the 
 controversy either way. But, under the circumstances, 
 in view of what the Shakespearean plays are, and of 
 what their author must have been, and of when and 
 where these three men — Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew 1 
 — lived and flourished, the chronicles left by these 
 three men — Bacon, Ealeigh, and Matthew — constitute, 
 at the very least, a "negative pregnant" not to be 
 omitted in any review of our controversy that can lay 
 the faintest claim to exhaustiveness or sincerity; and, 
 moreover, a negative pregnant which — if we admitted 
 all the Ben Jonson testimony, in prose and poetry, as 
 evidence on the one side — could not be excluded as evi- 
 dence on the other. In which event it is fairest to the 
 Shakespeareans to rule Ben out altogether. 2 Besides, 
 Ben is what the Scotchmen call "a famous witness" 
 (if the commentators, who enlarge on Shakespeare's 
 bounty and loans to him, can be relied upon), as being 
 under heavy pecuniary obligation to the stage mana- 
 ger, and so his testimony is to be scrutinized with the 
 
 J And we might add to these Sir John Davies, Selden, Sir John 
 Beaumont, Henry Vaughn, Lord Clarendon and others. 
 
 2 It is fair to note that another " negative pregnant" arises here, 
 to which the Shakespeareans are as fairly entitled as the other 
 side to theirs. Sir Tobie Matthew died in 1655. He survived 
 Shakespeare thirty-nine years, Bacon twenty-nine years, and Ral- 
 eigh thirty-seven years! Left in possession of the secret of 
 the Baconian authorship, how could such a one as Matthew 
 let the secret die with him ? Although we do not meet with it 
 among the arguments of the Shakespeareans, this strikes us as 
 about the strongest they could present, except that the answer 
 might be that at the date of Matthew's death, 1655, the Shakes- 
 pearean plays were not held in much repute, or that Matthew 
 might have reserved his unbosoming of the secret too long; but 
 it is only one fact among a thousand. 
 
PAKT III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 153 
 
 greatest care, though he certainly did not allow his 
 obligations to over- master him when writing the "Dis- 
 coveries." But, in any event, it would be easier to be- 
 lieve that Ben Jonson once contradicted himself for 
 the sake of a rhyme, and to "do the handsome thing" 
 by the memory of an old friend and unpaid creditor, 
 than to swallow the incredible results of a literal ver- 
 sion of his prose and poetry, read by the light of the 
 Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew remains. And the con- 
 clusion of the matter, it seems to us, must be: either 
 that the poetry was the result of his obligations to 
 William Shakespeare and to William Shakespeare's 
 memory, or that, having sworn on both sides, Mr. Ben 
 Jonson stands simply dehors the case — a witness for 
 neither. 
 
 It is not, then — it is very far from being — because 
 we know so little of the man Shakespeare that we 
 disbelieve in his authorship of the great works as- 
 cribed to him. It is because we know so much. No 
 sooner did men open their histories, turn up the rec- 
 ords and explore the traditions and trace the gossip 
 of the Elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in 
 the face. Long before any " Baconian theory " arose 
 to account for these anomalies: at the instant these 
 plays began to be valued for any thing else than their 
 theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the 
 man to his verse" began to be troublesome. " To be 
 told that he played a trick on a brother actor in a 
 licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, 
 does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote 
 ' Lear,'" cried Mr. Hallam. 1 "Every accession of in- 
 
 1 " I laud," says Hallam, " the labors of Mr. Collier, Mr. Hunter, 
 and other collectors of such crumbs, though I am not sure that 
 
154 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 formation we obtain respecting the man Shakespeare 
 renders it more and more difficult to detect in him the 
 poet," cries Mr. "William Henry Smith. 1 "I am one 
 of the many," testifies Mr. Furness, " who have never 
 been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare 
 and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary space 
 of each other; are there any other two things in the 
 world more incongruous ? " 2 It was necessary, there- 
 fore, ill order to preserve a belief in the Shakespearean 
 authorship, either that William Shakespeare should 
 be historically known as a man of great mental power, 
 a close student of deep insight into nature and morals 
 — a poet, philosopher, and all the rest — or else that, by 
 a failure of the records, history should be silent alto- 
 gether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time 
 have made it impossible to recover any details what- 
 ever as to his tastes, manners, and habits of life. In 
 such a case, of course, there would remain no evidence 
 on the subject other than that of the plays themselves, 
 which would, of course, prove him precisely the myri- 
 ad-minded genius required. In other words, it was 
 only necessary to so cloud over the facts as to make the 
 " Shakespearean miracle" to be, not that William 
 Shakespeare had written the works, but — that history 
 should be so silent concerning a " Shakespeare ! " So 
 long as the Shakespeareans could cry, u Behold a mys- 
 
 we should not venerate Shakespeare as much if they had left 
 him undisturbed in his obscurity. ... If there was a Shake- 
 speare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of heaven, and 
 it is of him we desire to know something." 
 
 1 " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 886. 
 
 2 In a letter to Judge Holmes, printed at p. 628, third edition, 
 of the latter's " Authorship of Shakespeare." 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 155 
 
 terious dispensation of Providence — that, of the two 
 mightiest poets the world lias ever held — Homer and 
 William Shakespeare — we know absolutely nothing ! " 
 — so long as they could assign this silence to the havoc 
 of a great deluge or a great fire, just so long the name 
 "William Shakespeare" was as good and satisfactory 
 a name as any other, and nobody could propose a bet- 
 ter. But they can cry so no longer. It is not because 
 we know so little, but because we know so much about 
 the Stratford boy, that we decline to accept him as the 
 master we not only admire and love, but in whose 
 pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery an- 
 ticipated. As a matter of fact, through the accident 
 of his having been a part-proprietor in one of the 
 earliest English play-houses, we know pretty accu- 
 rately what manner of man he was. We know almost 
 every thing -about him, in short, except — what we do 
 know about Homer — that the works now attributed to 
 him were his. Homer, at least, we can trace to his 
 " Iliad" and his " Odyssey," as he sang them in frag- 
 ments from town to town. But neither to his own pen 
 nor his own lips, and only problematically (as we shall 
 see further on) to his own stage, can we trace the plays 
 so long assigned to William Shakespeare. Let the 
 works be placed in our hands for the first time anony- 
 mously; given the chronicles of the age of Eliza- 
 beth and James in which to search for an author of 
 these works, would any thing we found in either lead 
 us to pronounce William Shakespeare their author? 
 And has any thing happened since to induce us to set 
 aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of 
 faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion 
 to blindly and obediently believe that William Shakes- 
 
156 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 peare was not the man he was, lest we should be " dis- 
 respectful to our birthright?" 
 
 Nothing whatever has happened since, except the 
 labors of the commentators. By the most painfully 
 elaborate explorations on the wrong track, by ingeni- 
 ous postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers 
 illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering 
 carefully clear of the records, they have evolved a 
 butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a divinity student, a 
 a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker — but, after all, a 
 Shakespeare. That the error, in the commencement, 
 was the result of carelessness, there can be no doubt. 
 But that, little by little — each commentator, either in 
 rivalry for a new fact, and jealous to bo one item ahead 
 of his competitor (even if obliged to invent it out of 
 hand), or being too indolent to examine for himself, 
 or too subservient to authority to rebel — it grew to 
 vast proportions, we have only to look at the huge 
 " biographies " of the last half century to be assured. 
 It will not detain us long, as an example of these, to 
 briefly glance at the labors of one of the most intrepid 
 of the ilk to identify the traditional poet with the 
 traditional man. In 1839, Thomas De Quincy con- 
 tributed to the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" its ar- 
 ticle " Shakespeare." That about the story of the 
 prankish Stratford lad, who loved, and wooed and 
 won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smoky- 
 raftered cottage in Stratford town and the snug little 
 thatch at Shottery trudged every sunset to do his 
 courting, there lingers the glamour of youth, and love, 
 and poetry, no patron of the "Encyclopaedia" would 
 probabl} 7 have doubted. But that a staid and solemn 
 work, designed for exact reference, should have printed 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 157 
 
 so whimsical a fancy sketch as Mr. De Quincy sup- 
 plied to it, and that it should have been allowed to re- 
 maiu there, must certainly command surprise. There 
 can surely be complaint as to the variety of the per- 
 formance. Mr. De Quincy very ably and gravely spec- 
 ulates as to the size of the dowry old Hathaway gave 
 his daughter; as to whether old John Shakespeare 
 mortgaged his homestead to keep up appearances; and 
 whether that gentleman received the patronage of 
 Stratford corporation when (as there is no direct au- 
 thority for saying they did uot) they had occasion to 
 present a pair of gloves to some favored nobleman 
 (and this portion of the composition winds up with a 
 history of gloves and glove-making which cannot fail 
 to interest and instruct the reader). And his specu- 
 lations as to whether the messengers who sped to 
 Worcester for the " marriage-lines " did or did not ride 
 in such hot haste, in view of an expected but prema- 
 ture Susannah, that they gave vicious orthographies 
 of the names " Shakspeare" and "Hathaway" to the 
 aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially 
 pretty reading. But — with facilities in 1839 for writ- 
 ing a history of the Stratford lad, which the Stratford 
 lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors, two hun- 
 dred years and more before Mr. De Quincy, seem never 
 to have possessed — Mr. J)e Quincy quite surpasses him- 
 self in setting us exactly right as to William Shakes- 
 peare. And, first, as to the birthday. There has al- 
 ways been a sort of feeling among Englishmen that 
 their greatest poet ought to have had no less a birth- 
 day than the clay dedicated to their patron saint. The 
 Stratford parish records certifying to the christening 
 of William Shakespeare on the 26th day of April, 
 
158 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 1564 (which Mr. De Quincy forgets was " old style," 
 and so, in any event, twelve days before the corres- 
 ponding date in the present or " new style"), and the 
 anniversary of St. George being fixed for celebration 
 on the 23d of April, it had come to be unanimously 
 resolved by the commentators that, in Warwickshire, 
 it. was the custom to christen infants on the third 
 day after birth, and that, therefore, William Shakes- 
 peare was born on the anniversary of St. George, 
 April 23, 1564. To baptise a three-days-old baby, 
 in an English April, at a period five days earlier 
 than, in. the mild latitude of Palestine, the Israelites 
 thought it necessary to circumcise their infants, seems 
 a very un-English proceeding. So Mr. De Quincy, 
 who would rather perish than mislead, thinks, after 
 all, the birth might have been a day earlier. "After 
 all," he says, " William might have been born on the 
 22d. Only one argument," he gravely proceeds, '•' has 
 sometimes struck us for supposing that the 22d might 
 be the day, and not the 23d, which is, that Shakes- 
 peare's sole granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was mar- 
 ried on the 22d of April, ten years exactly from the 
 poet's death, aud the reason for choosing this clay 
 might have had a reference to her illustrious grand- 
 father's birthday, which, there is good reason for think- 
 ing, would be celebrated as a festival in the familv 
 for generations! " But even Mr. De Quincy appears 
 to concede that, in writing history, we must draw the 
 line somewhere ; for he immediately adds, "Still this 
 choice may have been an accident " (so many things, 
 that is to say, are likely to be considered in fixing a 
 marriage-day, besides one's grandfather's birthday !), 
 u or governed merely by reason of convenience. And, 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 159 
 
 on the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the 
 old belief that Shakespeare was born and died on the 
 23d of April. We can not do wrong if we drink to his 
 memory both on the 22d and 23d." 1 Mr. De Quincy's 
 proposition to drink twice instead of once ought to 
 forever secure his popularity among Englishmen; but 
 it remains, nevertheless, remarkable that a ponderous 
 encyclopaedia should admit this sort of work among its 
 articles on sugar, snakes, Sardinia, soap, Savonarola, 
 and its other references in SI Like his fellow Shakes- 
 peareans, Mr. De Quincy makes no use of Aubrey, 
 or the old clerk, or tbe Rev. Richard Davies, or 
 any one else who, having lived at dates inconven- 
 iently contiguous to the real William Shakespeare, 
 were aw 7 kward customers about whom it was best 
 to say nothing. He cannot claim never to have 
 heard of Aubrey, because he quotes him as saying 
 that William Shakespeare was " a handsome, well- 
 shaped man." But this is the only allusion he makes 
 to Aubrey or to any body else who lived within eye- 
 sight or ear-shot of the William Shakespeare who (we 
 admit), if a well-conducted person, ought reasonably to 
 have been the man Mr. De Quincy and his ilk turn 
 him out, and not the man his neighbors, or any body 
 who happened to be born within a hundred years 
 
 1 Mr. De Quincy's own estimate of this performance we take 
 from a preface to the article itself, in the American edition of 
 his collected works (Boston: Shepard & Gill, 1873), vol. xv., p. 
 11: "No paper ever cost me so much labor; parts of it have 
 been recomposed three times over." And again, "William 
 Shakespeare's article cost me more intense labor than any I 
 ever wrote in my life and, I believe, if you will examine it, you 
 will not complain of want of novelty." We should say not. 
 
160 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 of him, knew him. As to the difficulties Cole- 
 ridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, 
 Emerson, Gervinius, Hallam, Holmes, William Henry 
 Smith, Furness, and Delia Bacon find so insurmount- 
 able — namely, as to where the material of the plays 
 came from — Mr. De Quincy skips over these with 
 his airy two terms at the little grammar-school on 
 Stratford High Street! (The identical desk which 
 William occupied during this period of attendance at 
 that institution of learning was promptly supplied by 
 the Stratford guides, upon hearing Mr. De Quincy's 
 discovery.) " Old Aubrey," two hundred years nearer 
 his subject, was careful to give his school-master's 
 story "for what it was worth," admitting that his 
 authority for the statement that William Shakespeare 
 was a school-master was only a rumor, founded on the 
 statement of one " Beeston ; " but who was " Bee- 
 ston? " Some of our modern commentators have con- 
 jectured that possibly William, being a sort of model 
 or head boy, was trusted to hear some of the little 
 boys' lessons, which gave rise to the " school-master " 
 story. But Mr. De Quincy allows no demurrer nor 
 doubt to his assertions in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 
 And for these "two terms" (of course), no further 
 authority than himself being necessary, he vouchsafes 
 none. Such dry things as references are gracefully 
 compensated for by favoring the reader in search for 
 Shakespearean data with two dissertations upon 
 the loveliness of female virtue, one of which covers 
 fourteen pages octavo. 1 His cue has had prolific fol- 
 
 x Of Sheppard & Gill's reprint (pp. 41, 69-83). But if Mr. De 
 Quincy could have lived until November, 1879, even he might 
 have been taught something. The Eev. John Bayley, in an 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 161 
 
 lowing. Eow-a-days our "biographies" of William 
 Shakespeare are huge tomes of Elizabethan and 
 other antiquarian lore, commentary, conjecture, argu- 
 mentation ; that stupefy us, as it were, by mere bulk 
 and show of research, into accepting the whole rather 
 than plunge into so vast and shoreless a sea of appa- 
 rent labor, and, therefore, alleged learning. For such 
 is the indolence of man, that the bulkier the book the 
 less likely is it to be read or refuted. And so, in 
 view of the great eye-filling books labeled " biogra- 
 phies" of William Shakespeare — volumes commensu- 
 rate with the idea of a life which might, in time at 
 least, have compassed the mighty works — one need 
 not doubt that " William Shakespeare " was the 
 name of the marvelous man who wrote the plays. 
 
 But, when one left the fiction of Mr. De Quincy and 
 his ilk, and was forced to confront the William 
 Shakespeare who wrote the Lucy lampoon and the 
 epitaph on Elias James, who stuck calves and stole 
 
 article on " The Religion of Shakespeare," in the " Sunday Maga- 
 zine" (New York: Frank Leslie, November, 1879, p. 518), says 
 of William Shakespeare," " During the last years of his life it is 
 stated that he and his family attended the parish church where 
 the Rev. Richard Byfield, an eminent Puritan minister, and 
 father of the distinguished commentator on the Epistle to the 
 Colossians, commenced his ministry, a. d. 1606." Of course, the 
 reverend contributor to the "Sunday Magazine" does not in- 
 form us where this fact " is stated," but concludes from the fact 
 (he is sure it is a fact) that Shakespeare was " during the last 
 years of his life the constant hearer of this eminent and ener- 
 getic preacher of the gospel," and that " we may reasonably 
 hope for the best of consequences." So simple a process has 
 Shakespeare-making become ! 
 14 
 
162 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 deer, the difficulty only recurred with redoubled em- 
 phasis. 
 
 It is not, of course, because William stuck the 
 calves and stole the deer, because he wrote the 
 lampoon or the epitaph, nor because he was son (or 
 apprentice, as some say), to a butcher or a glover, a 
 tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to 
 have been unequal to the Shakespearean authorship. 
 There never yet was cradle too lowly to be the cradle 
 of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. George 
 Stephenson was a colliery-stoker, Turner was the son 
 of a barber, and Faraday the son of a horseshoer. 
 Coleridge was a charity-lad, and the number of tan- 
 ners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose 
 names history could not be written, is something amaz- 
 ing. We may trace the genius of Turner from the first 
 impulse of his pencil to its latest masterpiece, but we 
 can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum or 
 described the Edison phonograph. He knew and 
 practiced what he was taught (albeit he taught him- 
 self), and died quite contented to leave his own works 
 behind him. Robert Burns was fully as unlettered 
 and as rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove 
 the mighty miracle of genius. His history, up to a 
 certain point, is the very duplicate of the history of 
 William Shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy 
 of Stratford village. Both were obscure, schoolless, 
 and grammarless. But, in the case of Robert Burns, 
 this heaven-born genius did not set him straightway 
 on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the 
 past, and forecast the future, or guide his untaught 
 pen to write of Troy and Egypt, of Athens and 
 Cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit civiliza- 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 163 
 
 tions and manners of nations born and buried and 
 passed into history a thousand years before he had 
 been begotten, the very names of which were not 
 dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his 
 philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details 
 of forgotten polities and commercial customs, such as, 
 for instance, the exceptional usage of a certain trade 
 in Mitylene, the anomalous status of a Moorish mer- 
 cenary in command of a Venetian army, of a savage 
 queen of Britain led captive by Rome, or a thane of 
 Scotland under one of its primitive kings — matters of 
 curious aud occult research for antiquaries or dilettante 
 to dig out of old romances or treatises or statutes, 
 rather than for historians to treat of or schools to 
 teach ! In the case of Eobert Burns we are content 
 not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us be con- 
 tent if the genius of Robert Burns could glorify the 
 goodwives' fables of his wonted firesides and set in 
 aureole the homeliest cipher in his vicinage, until a 
 field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a Venus! 
 It were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this 
 fire from heaven, at once and on the instant invest a 
 letterless peasant-lad with all the lore and law which 
 the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and 
 buried and forgotten — with all the learning that the 
 past had gathered into great tomes and piled away in 
 libraries. And yet, if Robert Burns had sung of the 
 Punic wars or the return of the Heraclides, some 
 Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight would doubt- 
 less — with history staring him in the face — have arisen 
 to put his index-finger upon the sources of his au- 
 thority. Judging by the record in the case of William 
 Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty 
 
164 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 over which a Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight 
 can not easily clamber. 
 
 If William Shakespeare was a born genius, a true 
 son of nature, his soul overflowing with a sense of 
 the beauty of life and of love, and of all around him, 
 we might expect to find his poems brimful of the 
 sweet, downcast eyes of his Anne, of sunny Stratford 
 fields, of Shottery and the lordly oaks of Charlecote 
 — to find him, " Fancy's child," w T arbling " his native 
 wood-notes wild," indeed ! But of Troy, Tyre, and 
 Epidamnium, of Priam and Cressid and Cleopatra, of 
 the propulsion of blood from the vital heart, and of 
 the eternal mysteries of physics, who dreams that 
 " sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child " could sing in 
 the very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns 
 and times, or within the mathematical exactitude of 
 sciences that had not yet been treated of in books? 
 Or, again, John Bunyan is a case in point. John 
 Bunyan was as squalid and irredeemable a tinker as 
 ever flourished in the days when " a tinker was a rogue 
 by statute." l And yet he, according to Macaulay, pro- 
 duced the second of the two books of which England 
 should be proudest. 2 What was the miracle in the case 
 of John Bunyan ? He produced a book which, " while 
 it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, 
 is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. . . . 
 This is the highest miracle of art, that things which 
 
 Cockayne vs. Hopkins, 2 Lev., 214. 
 
 2 " Though there were many clever men in England during the 
 latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds 
 which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent de- 
 gree. One of these minds produced the ' Paradise Lost,' and 
 the other the ' Pilgrim's Progress.' " 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 165 
 
 are not should be as though they were; that the im- 
 aginations of one mind should become the personal 
 recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker 
 has wrought." But this great praise was not abstracted 
 from Macaulay by wealth of antique learning, univer- 
 sal accuracy of information, or vivid portraiture of 
 forgotten civilizations. There was no trace of Bun- 
 yan's perfect familiarity with Plato and Euripides, 
 with Galen, Paracelsus, Plautus, Seneca, and the long 
 line of authors down to Boccaccio, Rabelais, Saxo- 
 Grammaticus, and the rest! The critic did not find 
 in Bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the 
 sonorous speech of the ancients, or the elegant and 
 punctilious Norman of the court. " The Bunyan vo- 
 cabulary," says Macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the 
 common people. There is not an expression, if we 
 except a few technical theological terms, which would 
 puzzle the rudest peasant." In short, we need not 
 pause, marvelous as are the pages of the " Pilgrim's 
 Progress," to ask of John Bunyan, as indeed we must 
 ask of William Shakespeare, the question, " how 
 knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" 
 Peerless as the result all is, there is nothing in the 
 writings of John Bunyan which can not be accounted 
 for by natural (that is to say, by what we have been 
 obliged by the course of human experience to accept 
 as not impossible) causes. "The years of Bunyan's 
 boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit 
 was in the highest vigor over all England. ... It is 
 not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature 
 had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which 
 amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted 
 by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports 
 
166 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and 
 his sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly 
 away with him. . . . He enters the Parliamentary 
 army, and, to the last, he loves to draw his illustra- 
 tions of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns, 
 trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each 
 under its own banner. . . . His ' Greatheart,' his 
 ' Captain Boanerges,' and his ' Captain Credence ' are 
 evidently portraits of which the originals were among 
 those martial saints who fought and expounded in 
 Fairfax's army. . . . He had been five years a preacher 
 when the Kestoration put it in the power of the Cav- 
 aliers ... to oppress the Dissenters. . . . He was 
 flung into Bedford jail, with pen and paper for com- 
 pany," 1 etc., etc. Here are the school and the ex- 
 perience, and the result is writings " which show a 
 keen mother wit, a great command of the homely 
 mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English 
 bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual expe- 
 rience." 2 Moreover, here is a scholar like Macaulay 
 striving to account for the extraordinary phenomenon 
 of a "Pilgrim's Progress" written by a village tinker. 
 But in the case of the at least equally extraordinary 
 phenomenon of the Shakespearean drama, the creation 
 of a village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born 
 to the Shakespeareans who deems it necessary or profit- 
 able to try his hand at any such investigation. " Where 
 did he get his material? " " Oh, he picked it up around 
 Stratford, somehow ! " " But his learning ?" " Oh, he 
 found it lying around the theater somewhere ! " Prob- 
 
 14, Bunyan," in " Encyclopaedia Britannica," by Macaulay. 
 2 Ibid. 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 167 
 
 ably there were encyclopedias to be fished out of the 
 mud of the bank-side in those days, of which we can 
 find no mention in the chroniclers ! And so, although 
 scarcely a commentator on the glowing text has not 
 paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of 
 this material, leading him on to vaster and more mag- 
 nificent treasuries at every step, so far as we are able 
 to discover, not one of them has attempted to trace 
 the intellectual experience of the man who wrought 
 it all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. 
 Not one of them has paused to ask the Scriptural ques- 
 tion, "How knoweth this man letters, having never 
 learned ? " For, it can not be too incessantly reiterated, 
 the question is not, " Was Shakespeare a poet?" but, 
 "Had he access to the material from which the plays 
 are composed ? " Admit him to have been the greatest 
 poet, the most frenzied genius in the world; where 
 did he get — not the poetry, but — the classical, philo- 
 sophical, chemical, historical, astronomical, geological, 
 etc., etc., information — the facts that crowd these 
 pages ? 
 
 And let us not be credited, in these pages, with a 
 malignant rejection of every tradition or anecdote that 
 works to William Shakespeare's renown, and a cor- 
 responding retention of every tradition or anecdote to 
 his disparagement. For example, if it is asked, Why 
 reject the story of King James's autograph letter, and 
 retain the story of the trespass on Sir Thomas Lucy's 
 deer? the answer must be : first; because, while there 
 is nothing improbable in the latter, there is much of 
 improbability in the former. King James was a king, 
 and kings rarely write autograph letters to subjects. 
 The Lord Chamberlain may give a sort of permission 
 
168 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 to a haberdasher to call himself haberdasher to Queen 
 Victoria ; but it would be vastly improbable that Queen 
 Victoria should write an autograph letter to the hab- 
 erdasher to that effect. Second, because the poaching 
 story (to use a legal test) appears to be so old that the 
 memory of man runneth not to a time when it was 
 not believed ; whereas the King James story first ap- 
 peared in the year 1710, in a biographical notice af- 
 fixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one Ber- 
 nard Lintot. Mr. Lintot gave no authority for the 
 statement whatever, except to say that it rested on the 
 word of " a credible person then living." But every- 
 body can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which 
 rival biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, strug- 
 gle to get hold of a new fact for their columns, and 
 nobody will wonder that, after Mr. Lintot, no " biog- 
 rapher" omitted to mention it. As a matter of fact, 
 the letter from King James and the letter from Queen 
 Elizabeth, produced by young Ireland, are equally 
 genuine correspondence. But the stories of the latter 
 class, while not beyond question, are at least not im- 
 probable, considering the record of the youth Shakes- 
 peare at Stratford, while those of the first are cer- 
 tainly improbable on their face, and can be in almost 
 every case traced to their exact source. 
 
 So the story of his holding horses, while by no means 
 authentic, (Mr White says it was not heard of until 
 the middle of the last century), is by no means im- 
 probable, seeing that the lad ran away to London — 
 — and Eowe and the old sexton both agree that he be- 
 gan — as self-made men do — at the bottom. The story 
 of Queen Elizabeth's crossing the stage and dropping 
 her glove, which Shakespeare picked up and pre- 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY, 169 
 
 sented with an impromptu, Mr. White himself smiles 
 at, with the remark that " the anecdote is plainly one 
 made to meet the craving for personal details of Shakes- 
 peare's life," 1 and he treats it as he does the " Florio" 
 in the British Museum, supposed to have "belonged to 
 William Shakespeare, because that name is written — 
 — after his mode — on a fly-leaf ; with a pleasant wish 
 that he were able to believe in it. 1 
 
 Far from being of the class that kings delight to 
 honor, it is simply impossible to turn one's researches 
 into any channel that leads into the vicinity of Strat- 
 ford without noticing the fact that the Shakespeare 
 family left, in the neighborhoods where it flourished, 
 one unmistakable trace familiar in all cases of vulgar 
 and illiterate families ; namely, the fact that they 
 never knew or cared, or made an effort to know, of 
 what vowels or consonants their own name was com- 
 posed, or even to preserve the skeleton of its pronun- 
 ciation. They answered — or made their marks — in- 
 differently to "Saxpir" or "Chaksper;" or to any 
 other of the thirty forms given by Mr. Grant White, 2 
 or the fifty-five forms which another gentleman of 
 elegant leisure has been able to collect. 3 
 
 In the records of the town council of Stratford, of 
 which John Shakespeare was no unimportant part, the 
 name is written in fourteen different forms, which may 
 be tabulated as follows : , 
 
 1 Shakespeare's Works. Boston, 1865. Vol.1., p. 80, in, and 
 see a note to the same volume, pp. 96-7, as to Ratzei's ghost, sur- 
 mised to be an allusion to Shakespeare. 
 
 1 lb., p. 128. 
 
 2 Shakespeare's Scholar, pp. 478-480. 
 
 8 George Russel French, Shakespeareana Geologicana, p. 348. 
 
170 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 4 times written Shackesper. 17 times written Shakspeyr. 
 
 3 times written Shackespere. 4 times written Shakysper. 
 
 4 times written Shacksper. 9 times written Shakyspere. 
 2 times written Shackspere. 69 times written Shaxpeare. 
 
 13 times written Shakespere. 8 times written Shaxper. 
 
 1 time written Shaksper. 18 times written Shaxpere. 
 
 5 times written Shakspere. 9 times written Shaxspeare. 
 
 In the marriage bond of November 28, 1582, it is 
 twice written, each time Shagspere. On the grave of 
 Susanna, it is Shakespere ; and. on the other graves of 
 the family, Shakespeare, except that under the bust it 
 is Shakspeare. That is to say, just as many orthogra- 
 phies as there are tombstones and inscriptions. Any 
 lawyer's clerk who bas had occasion to searcb for evi- 
 dence among the uneducated classes, knows how cer- 
 tainly a lower or bigher grade of intelligence will 
 manifest itself primarily in an ignorance of or indif- 
 ference to one's own name or a corresponding zeal for 
 one's own identity, and anxiety that it shall be accu- 
 rately "taken down." Whether this infallible rule 
 obtained in the days of the Shakespeares or not, or 
 whether a family, that was so utterly stolid as not to 
 know if their patronymic was spelled with a " c," a 
 "k," or an " x," could have appreciated and bestowed 
 upon their child a classical education (not to ring the 
 changes upon politics, philosophy, etc., right here), 
 is for the reader to judge for bimself. 
 
 Mr. W. H. Smith maintains that Shakespeare, like 
 the rest of his family, was unable to write, and had 
 learned, by practice only, to make the signature which 
 he was assured was his name. Mr. Smith founds his 
 theory on the fact that, in the "Will the word "seale" 
 (in the formula, " witness my seale," etc.) is erased, 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 171 
 
 and the word "hand" substituted. In a letter to Mr. 
 Spedding, 1 Mr. Smith claims that this erasure and sub- 
 stitution prove that the draughtsman who prepared 
 the Shakespeare "Will, knowing that the testator could 
 not write, did not suppose that he would sign his 
 name, and so prepared it for the superimposition of 
 his seal. " I know/' says Mr. Smith, " that you will 
 ingeniously observe that that might have been his be- 
 lief, but that the fact could better have been proved if 
 i h.and' had been erased and ' seale' inserted. But 
 Shakespeare, being proud of his writing, and, as. this 
 would probably be his last opportunity, insisted on 
 exhibiting his 'hand.'" According to Mr. Smith, 
 therefore, Ben Jonson's speech about " never blotting 
 out a line," was redundant. But, whether able to 
 write, or, like his ancestors and descendants, signing 
 with a mark, he clearly cared no more than they 
 how people spelled his name. A Mr. George Wise, 
 of Philadelphia, has been able to compile a chart ex- 
 hibiting one thousand nine hundred and six ways of 
 spelling the Stratford boy's name; 2 A commentary 
 on the efforts of Mr. Halliwell and others, to estab- 
 lish the canonical orthography, which might well re- 
 duce them to despair. The fact is, that there can no 
 more be a canonical spelling of the name Shakespeare 
 than there can be a canonical face of the boy William. 
 The orthography of Shakespeare, as now accepted, 
 and the face now accepted as belonging to William 
 of that name, are both modern inventions. Even the 
 
 1 See third edition Holmes' " Authorship of Shakespeare," 
 p. 627. 
 
 Philadelphia, 1858. See Essays on Shakespeare, Carl Elze; 
 translated by Schmitz (London, Macmillan's 1874), note to p. 371. 
 
172 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MFTH. 
 
 " best of that family" (according to the old clerk), 
 William, when called to sign his own last will and 
 testament (obliged by law to sign each of the three 
 sheets upon which it was engrossed) three times, 
 spelled his name a different way each time. His 
 daughter Judith lived and died without being able to 
 spell or write it at all; Milton, Spenser, Sidney, even 
 Gower and Chaucer (whom even our own Artemus 
 Ward pronounced " no speller"), had bat one way of 
 writing their own names — and never dreamed of 
 one thousand nine hundred and six. The name is now 
 supposed to have been simply " Jacques-Pierre" (James 
 Peter), which had been mispronounced — as English- 
 men mispronounce French — for unnumbered genera- 
 tions. 1 This is the present mispronunciation of Jac- 
 ques prevalent in Warwickshire. And, such being 
 the true origin of the name, it is, of course, natural to 
 find it as we do, written in two words " Shake-speare," 
 in those days. It is not William Shakespeare's fault 
 that he sprang from an illiterate family, but that — after 
 growing so rich as to be able to enjoy an income ot 
 $25,000 a year, he should never send his children — es- 
 pecially his daughter Judith — to school, so that the poor 
 girl, on being married, on the 11th clay of February, 
 1616, should be obliged to sign her marriage bond with 
 a mark, shows, we think, that he was not that immortal 
 he would have been had he written the topmost literature 
 
 1 " ' Thomas Jakes, of Wonersh ' was one of the list of gentry 
 of the shire 12 Henry IV., 1433. At the surrender of the Abbey 
 of Kenilworth 26 Henry VIII., 1535, the abbot was Simon Jakes, 
 who had the pension of £100 granted him." (Wilkes' " Shakes- 
 peare from an American Point of View." New York : D. Apple- 
 ton &Co., 1877, p. 464.) 
 
PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 173 
 
 of the world — the Shakespearean Drama ! But, still, 
 this most unsatisfactory person — this man who an- 
 swers, like Mr. Carroll's skipper, to " hi, or to any 
 loud cry " — 
 
 " To what-you-may-call-um or what-is-his-name 
 But especially thing-um-a-jig," 
 
 or to whatever the nearest actor or scene-shifter may 
 happen to hit on when he wants the poor little "su- 
 pernumerary," and " Joannes Factotum" — actually 
 lived to clamber astride of the most immortal birth- 
 right of his own or of any century, and has clung 
 thereon like another old man of the sea on Sinbad's 
 shoulders, and been carried down through these three 
 hundred years, and is being carried yet, down or up, 
 to an undeterminate immortality of fame that is the 
 true estate of somebody else ! For, not only has the 
 world not yet gotten its eyes half open, but it contu- 
 maciously refuses to open them to the facts in the 
 case, and prefers to hug as tightly as it ever did this 
 stupendous hoax — ("Shakespearean" indeed, in that 
 it has outlasted and outlived all the other hoaxes put 
 together — the witchcraft hoax, the Chatterton hoax, 
 the Ossian hoax, the moon hoax, and all the rest of 
 them) ; that has carried all sorts of parasite hoaxes, 
 like Ireland's, Collier's, and Cunningham's upon its 
 back, until their little day has been accomplished, and 
 they have dropped off, just as, one of these days, the 
 present hoax must drop off, and breathe its last, with- 
 out a single mourner to stand by the coffin, and con- 
 fess himself it's disciple. 
 
L74 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 TATIT IV. 
 
 EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES: THE DELIA 
 BACON THEORY. 
 
 HERE is a legal maxim to the effect that he 
 who destroys should be able to build up. 
 The anti-Shakespeareans have not neglected 
 to observe it. The days when William 
 Shakespeare first appeared in London, happened to be 
 the days when the Renaissance had reached England, 
 and the drama which began then for the first time to 
 be produced, was the English Renaissant Drama — just 
 throwing off the crudities of the old miracle and 
 mystery plays borrowed from the continent, and begin- 
 ning to be English and original. Moreover, letters 
 and learning, so long exclusively confined to the rich 
 and gentle, began to find expressions in other ranks. 
 "The mob of gentlemen who write with ease" w T ere, 
 one and all, beginning to use their pens. There were 
 no village newspapers with their " Poet's Corners," 
 and these writers sent their manuscripts through the 
 only channel at hand — the green-room door. 
 
 As these scores of manuscripts came in, William 
 Shakespeare, of Stratford, now Mr. Manager Shakes- 
 peare of the Blackfriars, read them over; took out a 
 scene here and an act there ; scissored them as he 
 pleased; made this "heavy" for the low comedian, 
 and that for the "first old man ;" adjusted the "love 
 business," made "practical" for his boards all the 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 175 
 
 nature and humor, and cut out all that came flat, stale, 
 and unprofitable from the amateur's hand ; even took 
 a little of each to make a new one, if necessary, (thus 
 retaining the indicia that this was written by a law- 
 yer, that by a physician, this by a soldier, that by a 
 chemist, etc., etc.). He did what Dumas, Boucicault 
 and Daly do to-day; he was, in other words, the 
 stage editor, not the author, of the Shakespearean 
 drama; though, that it should be called by his name, 
 is, perhaps, the least unusual thing about it. 
 
 Besides the gentlemen who used their pens, the very 
 recent dissolution of the monasteries had thrown mul- 
 titudes of "learned clerks," (the "clerical" profession 
 then including lawyers and physicians, and indeed all 
 book-learned men) upon their own resources for daily 
 bread, and there was only one depot for their work. Not 
 three, but three thousand men there were, other things 
 being equal, more competent by education at least, 
 than William Shakespeare to write the Shakespearean 
 drama. But other things, as we shall see, were not 
 equal. It is suggested, on the one hand, that William 
 Shakespeare wrote the plays ; on the other hand, that 
 Francis Bacon wrote them ; and, again, that Sir Walter 
 Raleigh wrote them. So far as mere dates go, any one 
 of the three might have written them. They were 
 all three in London, and on the ground when the 
 plays appeared. The truth is perhaps somewhere 
 among the three. Francis Bacon was the most learned 
 man of his time. He could and did read Greek in the 
 original, and he did have access to untranslated manu- 
 scripts, such as the " Menaechmi" of Plautus. He was 
 a philosopher, and he did come nearer to a prescience 
 of the philosophy of ages to be, than any man who 
 
176 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 ever lived — as witness his own acknowledged works. 
 Sir Walter Raleigh was a wit and a poet, a'gentleman, 
 a man of elegant nonchalance, a very Mercotio, to the 
 day of his execution. He was liberally educated, cul- 
 tured, and would have been all this in a more culti- 
 vated day than his own; moreover, he was idle and a 
 scribbler of belles-lettres. Perhaps he killed time by 
 writing speeches for the obsequious manager to put 
 into plays for his stage. Anonymous or pseudonymic 
 authorship has ever been a penchant of the gentle and 
 idle. Shakespeare, let us say, was a shrewd man of 
 business, who kept up with his times, as do managers 
 of theaters to-day ; he was quick to perceive where a 
 point might be made in his plays, and moreover he 
 employed — or perhaps was fortunate enough to secure 
 by way of friendship — a poet to turn his ideas into 
 speech for the mouths of his players. That he used 
 his pen to prepare the prompter's manuscript of the 
 pieces performed at his theater, we have already seen 
 there is reason to believe. That he ever composed, on 
 his own account, we have only a sort of innuendo of 
 certain of his brother actors and playwrights, and a 
 Stratford tradition, which we can trace to no other 
 source than the source of the belief outside — that is to 
 say, to the fact that the plays were produced under his 
 management in London. The innuendo dubs him a 
 poet ; the Stratford tradition makes him to have writ- 
 ten doggerel verses. But some have ventured to dis- 
 believe both the innuendo and the tradition. 
 
 Still, writing his life, as we do, from imagination, it 
 is much easier to imagine the three men — Bacon, Ral- 
 eigh, and Shakespeare — producing between them 
 "Hamlet," "Othello," or the "Comedy of Errors," 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 177 
 
 than to imagine "William Shakespeare alone doing it. 
 Especially since, apart from the internal evidence of 
 the plays, he "had his hands full" of work besides — 
 the work in which he earned his competency. It can 
 not be too clearly borne in mind that Shakespeare, in a 
 space of ten or twelve years, actually made wdiat is a 
 fair fortune to-day. That Bacon and Ealeigh, whose 
 ambitions did not lead them to seek renown as play- 
 wrights, should have contributed their share to the 
 plays — the first for gold wmich he needed, and the sec- 
 ond for pastime which he craved — is not remarkable; 
 we can see hundreds of young lawyers scribbling for 
 gold while waiting for practice, or young " swells " try- 
 ing their hand at comedies for the sport of the thing, 
 by opening our eyes to-day. That the shrewd and 
 successful manager should carefully pick into present- 
 able and playable shape for his stage, these produc- 
 tions of his young friends, is, likewise, the easiest 
 thing in the world to conceive of, or to see managers 
 doing to-day. Possibly, William Shakespeare, or some 
 other skilled playwright, took the dialogues — let us 
 say, for example — of Bacon and Raleigh, put them 
 into the form of plays, introduced a clown here or a 
 jade there, interpolated saws and localisms, gave the 
 characters their names, looked out for the " business," 
 arranged the tableaux — in short, did what Mr. Wal- 
 lack, or Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault would have to 
 do to-day to fit a play for the stage. It is thought that 
 Shakespeare himself did it, because the plays are said 
 to have been seen in his handwriting, and because, 
 from that fact or otherwise, they went by his name in 
 the days when they were first produced in London. 
 This sort of joint authorship would not only explain 
 
178 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 away the antagonism which grew up between the evi- 
 dence of the man Shakespeare and the evidence of the 
 Shakespearean plays, but account for the difficulties of 
 accepting any anti-Shakespearean theory. This would 
 explain the parallel passages in Bacon's writings and in 
 the plays, which Judge Holmes has so painstakingly 
 sorted out; the little inaccuracies of law and of gram- 
 mar, of geography and of history, in the plays them- 
 selves ; Mr. Greene's " sea-coast of Bohemia," or the in- 
 troduction of gunpowder at the seige of Troy — absurd- 
 ities which it is morally impossible to suppose of the 
 portrayer of antiquity who wrote "Julius Csesar," or the 
 knowledge that framed the historical plays. If, how- 
 ever, we consider them as the interpolations of a stage- 
 wright 1 aiming at stage effect, they are easily enough 
 accounted for. The stage wright saw an opportunity 
 for the introduction of a stage ship or shipwreck, hence 
 
 1 It is nothing less than marvelous that this simple explanation 
 should not have occurred to the wise men who have been, knock- 
 ing their heads against "the sea-coast of Bohemia" for the last 
 hundred years. That this error is a part of the "business" and 
 not of the play, is very evident from a casual reading of Act III., 
 Scene III. The stage direction for that scene is simply, " Scene — 
 a desert country near the sea," to be sure there is no stage direction 
 of any sort in the "first folio" but we may be sure that this was 
 the proper stage setting of the piece. And to fit it, Antigonus, 
 the first speaker, says to the mariner: "Art thou perfect, then 
 our ship hath touched the deserts of Bohemia?" Robert Green 
 makes the same mistake in his " Dorastus and Faunia." It was, 
 if any thing, a vulgar error of the time. There is no further al- 
 lusion to the troublesome geography in the play. So, too, the 
 gunpowder used at the seige of Troy is a part of the " business," 
 and should be assigned where it belongs — to the playwright and 
 not to the dramatist. Not only did the stage editor put it in, 
 but he took it out of Green's "Dorastus and Faunia." 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 179 
 
 he puts in the borrowed " sea-coast." He needs an 
 alarum of guns to impress his audience on the coming 
 evening with the fact that a fight is in progress. And 
 even if it should occur to him to doubt if there were 
 any guns at the siege of Ilium, he is pretty certain that 
 it will not occur to the groundlings or the penny seats, 
 from whose pocket all is grist that comes to his mill, 
 if he makes the guns and the cannon a part of the 
 "business." So, again, we have only to understand 
 this, and the characters of Nym and Bardolph — sup- 
 posed to have puzzled the critics since critics first be- 
 gan to busy themselves with, these dramas — is ex- 
 plained. Barclolph is only the low comedian, inserted 
 by the experienced manager to tickle the fricti ciceris 
 et nucis emptor, with his fiery nose, and corporal Kym 
 to break in with his "There's the humor of it," just 
 as Rip Van Winkle dwells upon his favorite toast, and 
 S >lon Shingle upon his ancestor who "fitted into the 
 Revolution." And to many minds this accounts for 
 the little dashes of obscene display, the lewd innuendo, 
 which came never from the same pen as the master- 
 strokes, but which they prefer to conceive of an actor 
 or manager interpolating to the delight of Monsieur 
 Taine's audience, and for the stolen delectation of the 
 maids of honor and city dames who went, in men's 
 clothes, to mingle with them. 
 
 This, too, might account for the poems dedicated 
 to Southampton. In the lax court and reign of the 
 Virgin Queen, there was at least one man bold and 
 reckless enough to stand patron to the " Venus and 
 Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece " — the noble 
 young libertine of nineteen, Southampton. Similarly, 
 there may have been but one man available upon 
 
180 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 whom to father them, and so the joint or several pro- 
 ductions of certain young men about town, "curled 
 darlings " who affected Shakespeare's green-room, 
 were sworn upon the complacent manager, who doubt- 
 less saw his profit in it. We have rumor, indeed, that 
 his profit was no less a sum than one thousand pounds. 
 But, as we have seen, and shall see further, this thous- 
 and pounds story is not only without authority, but 
 incredible: that Southampton's means did not jus- 
 tify him in giving away any such sum — that Shakes- 
 peare did not need it, and that none of Southampton's 
 coterie ever heard of it. 
 
 Whether Bacon wrote these works or not (and we 
 may say the same of Ealeigh), and whether the au- 
 diences before whom these Shakespearean dramas 
 were first presented could have estimated them as 
 what we of this age recognize them to be or not; 
 we may be sure that, had he chanced to light upon 
 them, Lord Bacon could have appraised them, and 
 the genius that created them, at their true worth. 
 But while Lord Bacon's writings teem with men- 
 tion of his own contemporaries (Mr. W. H. Smith 
 points out the fact that we owe about all we know of 
 Raleigh's skill in repartee to Bacon's "Apothegms"), 
 he nowhere alludes to such a man as William Shakes- 
 peare! — to William Shakespeare — who, if popular be- 
 lief is true, was his lordship's most immortal contem- 
 porary, the one mind mightier than Bacon's, and yet 
 not a rival or a superior in his own particular sphere, 
 of whom he could have been jealous. The truth 
 which makes this strange riddle plain is, according to 
 the Baconian theory, that (to use Sir Tobie Matthew's 
 words in his famous letter to his patron) " the most 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 181 
 
 prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation, and 
 of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, 
 though he be known by another," 1 in other words, that 
 Bacon was " Shakespeare." And, indeed, Sir Tobie 
 was fonder of nothing than of indulging in sly allu- 
 sions to Lord Bacon's secret, of which he had become 
 possessed. In another letter than that just quoted, he 
 says again to his lordship: "I will not promise to re- 
 turn you weight for weight, but measure for measure . 
 . . .and there is a certain judge in the world, who, in 
 the midst of his popularity toward the meaner sort of 
 men, would fain deprive the better sort of that happi- 
 ness which was generally done in that time." 2 
 
 Such considerations as these, as they came one by 
 one to light, began to suggest to thinking minds that 
 perhaps William Shakespeare was enjoying, by default, 
 estates belonging to somebody else. But it is curious 
 to see how gradually. In 1733, Theobald, a compe- 
 tent and painstaking scholar of the text, declares that 
 there were " portions of the plays which proved be- 
 yond a doubt that more than one hand had produced 
 them." More than fifty years after came Dr. Richard 
 Farmer (who wrote his famous letter on "The Learn- 
 ing of Shakespeare," in or about 1789), and appears to 
 have been the first actual anti- Shakespearean and un- 
 believer. Dr. Farmer sought — by demonstrating that 
 much of the learning of the plays could have been, 
 by sufficient research, procured at second-hand — to ac- 
 count for (what he could not overlook) the utter in- 
 adequacy of the historical man to the immortal work 
 
 1 Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," second edition, p. 175. 
 2 " Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 96. 
 
182 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 assigned him; just as if it were not, if any thing, an 
 increase (or say a substitution) of marvels to suppose 
 a busy actor and manager rummaging England for 
 forgotten manuscripts in the days when no public li- 
 braries existed, and when students lived in cloisters ; 
 or (let us say) that he knew precisely where to lay his 
 hand on every obscure tract, letter, or memorandum 
 ever drawn from a classical source ! And just as if the 
 encyclopaedic learning required was lessened by the 
 fact that the plot of the perfected play was borrowed 
 or rewritten from an older drama of the same name ! 
 For example of Farmer's argument, take the fol- 
 lowing. In the play of that name, Timon says : 
 
 "The sun's a thief, and with his great attention 
 Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief, 
 And her pale fire she snatches from the sun. 
 The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves 
 The moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief 
 That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen 
 From general excrement : each thing's a thief." 
 
 Now, exclaim the men who uphold the stage mana- 
 ger's ability to read Greek, the idea of this is from 
 Anacreon, and they give the ode in which William 
 Shakespeare found it. Not so fast, says Dr. Farmer. 
 He might have taken it from the French of Ronsard, 
 a French poet: because one Puttenham, in his "Arte 
 of English Poesie," published in 1589, speaks of some 
 one — of a " reasonable good facilitie in translation, who, 
 finding certain of Anacreon's odes very well translated 
 by Ronsard, the French poet — comes a minion and 
 translates the same out of French into English," and 
 " on looking into Ronsard I find this very ode of Anac- 
 reon among the rest ! " 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 183 
 
 Letting pass the far-fetched conjecture which aims 
 to prove that William Shakespeare could not read 
 Greek by showing that lie could reach French — or the 
 observation, that the sum of Dr. Farmer's arguments 
 (for the above is a sample of each and all of them) 
 amounts simply to this, that: though the manager knew 
 no Greek — he knew where every thing contained in 
 Greek was to be obtained in translation: the question 
 for us is simply, Why should the stage-manager have 
 recourse to either Anacreon or Eonsard for a meteor- 
 ological episode? This, and a thousand like passages, 
 are nothing but digressions, with nothing whatever to 
 do with the action or by-play of the comedy or trag- 
 edy in which they occur, and not apposite to any thing 
 else in the part of the speakers who pronounced them. 
 A scholar might be unable to keep them out ; but why 
 should a stage- manager — fitting a spectacle to the 
 actinsr necessities of his boards or to the humor of his 
 audience — put them in ? Whereas, if a scholar did write 
 the manuscript play and sell it to a stage-manager, it 
 is useless to ask why the stage-manager did not cut 
 out the digression or why he left it in, for that w T as a 
 mere matter of whim or circumstance, not worth our 
 while to speculate over. Dr. Farmer w^ent just far 
 enough to see that, if the William Shakespeare of his- 
 tory wrote the Book, something must be clone to ac- 
 count for his access to the material he wrought with. 
 If the Doctor had kept on a little further, the truth 
 would have dawned upon him. But, as it w T as, he (with- 
 out looking for them) observed traces of what he be- 
 lieved to be two hands in the Plays, and so followed 
 Theobald. He says of Hamlet, that he considered it 
 " extremely probable that the French ribaldry in the 
 
184 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 last scene of Hamlet was the work of another than 
 the author of the body of the work " — but the hint 
 was altogether lost on him. He looked no further, and 
 so lived and died unsuspicious of the truth — namely, 
 that it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was 
 William Shakespeare's. The " without blotting a line " 
 of Ben Jonson — not a mere form of speech, but a 
 fact, confirmed by Heminges and Condell, the editors 
 of the "first folio" of 1623, who say in their preface, 
 " we have scarce received from him a blot in his pa- 
 pers" — as we shall see further on, ought to have itself 
 awakened suspicion. Lope de Vega, the Spaniard, 
 who supplied his native stage with upward of two 
 thousand original dramas — who is computed to have 
 written upward of 21,300,000 verses, and who wrote 
 so hurriedly that he never had time to unravel his in- 
 trigues, but cut them all open " with a knife " in the 
 last act — probably did write u without blotting a line." 
 At least so Mr. Hallam thinks, adding that, " nature 
 would have overstepped her bounds, and have pro- 
 duced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with 
 this rapidity and invention, attained perfection in any 
 department of literature." * But in the case of these 
 marvelous Shakespeare plays, it was preferred to be- 
 lieve that nature had " produced the marvelous," 
 rather than accept the simple truth that what Hem- 
 inges and Condell and Ben Jonson saw, were the en- 
 grossed parts written out for each actor, and not the 
 first drafts of the poet, improvising as he wrote. 
 
 Except that Mr. Spedding,in the " Gentleman's Mag- 
 azine " for February , 1852, printed a paper " Who wrote 
 
 literature of Europe, part ii., ch. vi., § 8. 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 185 
 
 Shakespeare's Henry VIII?" — in which he claimed to 
 have found startling traces of two hands in that play, 
 (and possibly some other floating papers which have 
 escaped our search) — prior to the year 1852 it had 
 occurred to nobody (except Kitty, in w High Life Be- 
 low Stairs ") to ask the question, " Who Wrote Shakes- 
 peare?" But, in August of that year an anonymous 
 writer, in Chambers' " Edinburgh Journal," distinctly 
 and for the first time discussed the question, " Who 
 wrote Shakespeare? " — when, after going over much of 
 the ground we have already traversed, arrived, to his 
 own " extreme dissatisfaction," (as he says, at the con- 
 clusion), that William Shakespeare " kept a poet." It 
 is curious to find this anonymous writer dealing, as airily 
 as Lady Bab herself, with the question : and (while un- 
 conscious of the elaborate network of evidence he 
 might have summoned, and suggesting no prohable 
 author by name) actually foreshadowing the laborious 
 conviction which, four years later, Delia Bacon was to 
 announce. He surmises, indeed, that William Shakes- 
 peare was a sort of showman, whose interest in the 
 immortal plays was a purchased interest — precisely 
 what the law at present understands by " proprietary 
 copyright." "The plays apparently arise . . . 
 as the series goes on ; all at once Shakespeare, with a 
 fortune, leaves London, and the supply ceases. Is 
 this compatible with a genius thus culminating, on any 
 other supposition than the death of the poet and the 
 survival of the employer?" Of this supposititious 
 hack-author, who dies, and leaves to William Shakes- 
 peare the halo of his genius as well as the profit 
 of his toil, this anonymous writer draws a picture 
 16 
 
186 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 that lias something familiar in its coloring. "May 
 not William Shakespeare," he asks, " the cautious, 
 calculating man, careless of fame, and intent only 
 on money-making, have found, in some farthest garret 
 over-looking the ' silent highway of the Thames,' 
 some pale, wasted student . . . who, with eyes 
 of genius gleaming through despair, was about, like 
 Chatterton, to spend his last copper coin upon some 
 cheap and speedy means of death? What was to 
 hinder William Shakespeare from reading, appreciat- 
 ing, and purchasing these dramas, and thereafter 
 * keeping his poet,' like Mrs. Packwood? . . . 
 With this view the disputed passages — those in which 
 critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting — 
 the meretricious ornaments sometimes crowded in — 
 the occasional bad taste — in short, all the imperfec- 
 tions discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, 
 are reconcilable with their being the interpolations of 
 Shakespeare himself on his poet's works." 1 Miss Delia 
 Bacon, a remarkable lacly, followed in a paper printed 
 in "Putnam's Magazine," in its issue of January, 
 1856, (and therefore must have written it in 1855), and 
 was supposed therein to distinctly announce and main- 
 tain that Lord Bacon — her namesake by coincidence — 
 was the " Shakespeare " wanted — a supposition which, 
 as we shall see, was erroneous. 
 
 The audacity of the assertion, by a young woman, a 
 school-teacher, in no way distinguished or anywise emi- 
 nent, that the idol of these centuries, and of the English- 
 speaking race, was a mere effigy of straw — a mere dummy 
 for an unknown immortal, was too tremendous ! Men 
 
 Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852, p. 88. 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 187 
 
 stood aghast. Was it a chimera of a mind diseased ! 
 Sneered at in her own country, she went to England, 
 but found that — while at home she was treading only on 
 adverse sentiment — there she was openly tampering with 
 vested rights, almost with the unwritten constitution 
 of England. She made a few personal friends, and 
 found some sympathizers, but all England was arrayed 
 against her. She came back, heart-broken, and died 
 eight months later. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 
 London, in September, 1856, appeared with his " Was 
 Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays ? A 
 Letter to Lord Ellesmere," in which the Baconian 
 theory was very plainly and circumspectly laid down 
 and admirably maintained. 1 The presumption once 
 disturbed, inquiry began to be diverted from the well- 
 worn track of the commentators, and the result has 
 been, we think, a candid, rational, and patient attempt 
 to study the Shakespearean writings by the aid of con- 
 temporary history rather than by mere conjecture, and 
 by the record rather than by fancy, guess-work, and 
 gossip. It is too early in the day — the time has been 
 too short — for the reaction to have proved equal to the 
 action, and verified the physical rule ; but three well- 
 
 1 This " Letter," which was reprinted in " Littell's Living Age," 
 (No. 56), for November, 1856, was, the following year (1857) elab- 
 orated into the valuable work on which we have so unsparingly- 
 drawn in these pages, and to which we acknowledge our exceed- 
 ing obligation ("Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry touch- 
 ing Players, Playhouses, and Play writers in the days of Elizabeth. 
 By William Henry Smith. London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1857 "). 
 In this work Mr. Smith (in his preface) asserts that at the date 
 of his letter to Lord Ellesmere, he had never seen Miss Bacon's 
 article in " Putnam's," but, it is to be observed, no where claims 
 to have been the originator of the " Baconian Theory." 
 
188 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 defined anti-Stratfordian theories have offered them- 
 selves already, as substitutes for the mossy and vener- 
 able fossil remains of the commentators. These theo- 
 ries are : 
 
 1. The Delia Bacon Theory; 
 
 2. The Baconian Theory ; and 
 
 3. The New Theory (as we are compelled, for want 
 of a better name, to call it). 
 
 THE DELIA BACON THEORY. 
 
 It was across no dethroned and shattered intellect 
 that there first flashed the truth it has been the essay 
 of these papers to rehearse. That Delia Bacon — who, 
 earliest in point of time, announced to the world that 
 "Shakespeare" was the name of a book, and not the 
 name of its author; and who, contenting herself with 
 the bare announcement, soon passed on to the theory 
 we are now about to notice — was pelted with a storm 
 of derision, abuse, and merciless malice, until in pov- 
 erty, sickness, and distress, but still in a grand silence, 
 she passed out of sight for ever, is true enough. 
 That iu the midst of it all she still struggled on in 
 what she believed to be " the world's work " — bearing 
 more than it was ever intended a woman should bear 
 — is not to over weigh any merit her scheme of the 
 Shakespearean pla}^s may have possessed, however it 
 may have eventuated in the "madness" so insepar- 
 ably connected with her name. Whatever Delia Bacon 
 died, she lived and moved in the conviction that she 
 was a worker in the world's workshop. What to us 
 is a mere cold, historical formulary, seems, however, 
 we may smile at the absurdity, to have seized upon 
 her whole life and being; and, as in a great crusade 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 189 
 
 against a universal error, she seems to have struggled 
 in loneliness and wretchedness, with a crusader's faith 
 and a martyr's reward. 
 
 In all her tragic life, Delia Bacon appears never to 
 have paused to formulate the theory, for ever to be 
 associated with her name, as to the actual authorship 
 of the plays. The paper "William Shakespeare and 
 his Plays," which appeared in " Putnam's Magazine" 
 (and inaugurated the controversy, never thereafter to 
 " down " at anybody's bidding), seems to treat the mat- 
 ter as already settled. It is rather sarcasm at the 
 expense of those who rejected the theory of a non- 
 Shakespearean authorship than a formulation of the 
 theory itself. That the sarcasm, as a sustained effort, 
 has rarely if ever been equaled, there certainly can be 
 no question. Her indignation at the idea that the 
 magnificent plays sprang from the brain of " the Strat- 
 ford poacher — now that the deer-stealing fire has gone 
 out of him; now that this youthful impulse has been 
 taught its conventional mental limits, sobered into the 
 mild, sagacious, witty Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe," 
 is intense. " What is to hinder Mr. Shakespeare, the 
 man who keeps the theater on the bank-side, from 
 working himself into a frenzy when he likes, and 
 scribbling out, unconsciously, Lears, and Macbeths, 
 and Hamlets, merely as the necessary dialogues to the 
 spectacle he professionally exhibits!" Her allusion to 
 Bacon is equally impassioned: "We should have 
 found, ere this, one with learning broad enough and 
 deep enough and subtle enough and comprehensive 
 enough ; one with nobility of aim and philosophic 
 and poetic genius enough to be able to claim his 
 own, his own immortal progeny, unw T arped, un- 
 
190 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 blinded, undeprived of one ray or dimple of that all- 
 pervading reason that informs them — one who is able to 
 reclaim them, even now, ' cured and perfected in their 
 limbs, and absolute in full numbers as he conceived 
 them !' " Long before its appearance, as we shall pro- 
 ceed to narrate; and still longer before the world had 
 well opened its eyes to the fact that a formidable 
 anti-Shakespearean proposition had been asserted, its 
 author had left the proposition itself leagues behind, 
 and was well along on her route to the fountain-head 
 of its inspiration. The problem she proposed to her- 
 self was not, " Did Bacon and others write the plays ?" 
 but " Why did Bacon and others write the plays 
 under the name of William Shakespeare ?" 
 
 As the fruit of laborious study of the system and 
 structure of the plays, she reached the answer — 
 as she believed, and lived and died believing — hidden 
 and embalmed in the masterpiece of them all, the 
 tragedy of " Hamlet." " Hamlet," she maintained, 
 was the master-key that unlocked the whole magnifi- 
 cent system. They were not plays, but chapters in a 
 great Treatise — links in a great chain of philosophy — 
 a new philosophy of politics and of life; and, just as 
 the Lord Hamlet caused certain strolling players, with 
 the set speech he put into their mouths, to " catch the 
 conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of 
 all the golden age put into the mouths of the vaga- 
 bond Shakespeare and his crew the truth which should, 
 in the fullness of time, catch the conscience of the 
 whole world. But why should these great minds have 
 chosen to put their philosophy into enigmas and 
 ciphers? Miss Bacon's answer was convincing : " It 
 was the time when the cipher, in which one could 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 191 
 
 write ' omnia per omnia,' was in request ; when even 
 4 wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not un- 
 worthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when 
 the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other 
 uses than at preseut, and when a nomrne cle plume was 
 required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge 
 of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It was 
 a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and 
 anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles 
 were not mere sport and child's play; when they had 
 need to be close and solvable only to those who should 
 solve them. It was a time when all the latent capaci- 
 ties of the English language were put in requisition, 
 and it was flashing and crackling through all its length 
 and breadth, w T ith puns and quips and conceits and 
 jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic se- 
 crets that opened clown into the bottom of a tomb, 
 that opened into the Tower, that opened on the scaf- 
 fold and the block." 1 This was the " Delia Bacon 
 theory." This was the " madness " forever associated 
 with her plaintive story, and not the proposition that 
 the author of the plays (whoever he might be — or they, 
 if more than one) and William Shakespeare were per- 
 sons — as distinctly two as were the noble Hamlet and 
 the poor player who played " Gonzago " in the " Mouse- 
 trap " that day before the majesty of Denmark. But, 
 madness or not, Miss Bacon never wavered in her con- 
 viction that the appointed time to read the oracles had 
 come, and that she, Delia Bacon, a namesake, possibly, 
 of the real Hamlet of the plays, had been raised in 
 her appointed place to be the reader. Alas for her ! 
 
 1 a 
 
 Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded," p. x. 
 
192 THE SHAKSPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Like Cassandra, she announced her message only to 
 be scorned and flouted in return ! 
 
 By what whim of fortune or fancy the great plays 
 had grown to be known as " Shakespeare's works," 
 any more than Burbage's works, or Jonson's works, 
 she never troubled herself to inquire ; but with* the de- 
 tails of her mission she was careful to possess herself. 
 She held that "the material evidence of her dogma as 
 to the authorship, together with the key of the new 
 philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare's 
 grave." 1 She claims to have discovered, by careful 
 study of Lord Bacon's letters, not only the key and 
 clew to the whole mystery, but to an entire Baconian 
 cipher In these letters — there were over five hun- 
 dred of them extant, and others have been discovered, 
 we believe, since Miss Bacon's day — however, it still 
 remains, for the secret of Miss Bacon's clew died with 
 her. But she stoutly maintained that in these letters 
 were " definite and minute directions how to find a 
 will and other documents relating to the conclave of 
 Elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed in a 
 hollow space in the under surface of Shakespeare's 
 gravestone. . . . The directions, she intimated, 
 were completely and precisely to the point, obviating 
 all difficulties in the way of coming to the treasure, 
 and so contrived as to ward off any troublesome con- 
 sequences likely to arise from the interference of the 
 parish officers. . . . There was the precious secret 
 protected by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold 
 in the guardianship of a fiend." 2 The original manu- 
 
 1 Hawthorne. 
 
 2 Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and early 
 devoted herself to literature, writing two works " The Tales of 
 
PAKT IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 193 
 
 scripts of the plays she did not expect to find there. 
 These she believed the ignorant Shakespeare to have 
 scattered, after the blotless copies for the players had 
 been taken ; to have devoted to domestic purposes, or 
 to have never concerned himself about further. This 
 was the gravamen of the charge she brought against 
 "Lord Leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of 
 Stratford, and this the vandalism for which she never 
 could forgive him. " This fellow," she cried, " never 
 cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at 
 their hands. , . . What is to hinder his boiling his 
 kettle with the manuscripts . . . after he had done 
 with them ? He had those manuscripts — the original 
 Hamlet, with its last finish; . . . the original Lear, 
 with his own fine readings ... he had them all — 
 pointed, emphasized, corrected, as they came from the 
 gods ! And he has left us to wear out our youth and 
 squander our life in poring over and setting right the 
 old garbled copies of the play-house ! . . . For is he 
 not a private, economical, practical man, this Shakes- 
 peare of ours, with no stuff and nonsense about him ; 
 a plain, true-blooded Englishman, who minds his own 
 
 the Puritans " and " The Bride of Fort Edward." She soon, how- 
 ever, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted the profes- 
 sion of a student and teacher of history, and began her career 
 as a lecturer on history in the city of Boston. Her method was 
 original with herself. She had models, charts, maps, and pic- 
 tures to illustrate her subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar 
 (" Recollections of Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 
 1866) that, being of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, 
 she was successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar 
 says, " She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like an 
 angel." 
 
 17 
 
194 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 business, and leaves others to take care of theirs? . . . 
 What did he do with them? He gave them to his 
 cook, or Dr. Hall put up potions in them, or Judith — 
 poor Judith, who signified her relation to the author 
 of Lear and the Tempest, and her right to the glory 
 of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary 
 kind of ' mark' which she affixed to legal instruments 
 — poor Judith may have curled her hair with them to 
 the day of her death. . . . What did you do with 
 them ? You have skulked this question long enough ; 
 you will have to account for them ! The awakening 
 ages will put you on the stand, and you will not leave 
 it until you answer the question, what did you do with 
 them?" 1 This chain of dramas, so blindly perpetu- 
 ated by William Shakespeare, became, through Miss 
 Bacon's unlocking process, a great system of political 
 philosophy, dictated by the thoughtful Bacon and his 
 compeers, and locked up for the nineteenth century, 
 against the blindness of the centuries between. 
 
 But, of so startling a proposition, Miss Bacon 
 confesses that the world would require something 
 more than her own conviction. So she deliberately 
 set out to "prove, from the very crypt and silence of the 
 grave itself, its truth. To St. Albans, whence the 
 mysterious letters were dated, to the lonesome tomb 
 at old Verulam and the vault in Stratford chancel, she 
 proposed a pilgrimage — thence to probe the secret, 
 and lay it open to a doubting world. " Her friends 
 regarded her theory as a delusion, and Miss Bacon as 
 a monomaniac. . . . They put their Shakespeares 
 out of sight when she approached, declined to listen 
 
 l " Putnam's Magazine," January, 1856. 
 
PART IV.— EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 195 
 
 to her conversations on the subject, and peremptorily 
 refused contributions to assist in her expedition. But, 
 by her lectures, and thefriendsshe enlisted in her pro- 
 ject in ]STew York City, she gathered together enough 
 money to get to London." 1 
 
 It was while in London, in abject poverty and 
 friendlessness, that Thomas Carlyle, "upon whom she 
 had called and whom she had impressed with respect 
 for herself if not for her theory," says Hawthorne, 
 advised Miss Bacon to put her thoughts upon paper 
 first, before proceeding to the overt act of proof she 
 contemplated — namely, the opening of William 
 Shakespeare's grave. It was upon his advice that 
 this most remarkable woman — sitting in bed in a 
 garret to keep warm without a fire, without sufficient 
 or wholesome food, "looking back," to use her own 
 words, " on the joys and sorrows of a world in which 
 I have no longer any place, like a departed spirit," 
 and yet, doing " the world's work," and knowing 
 " that I had a right to demand aid for it" — undertook 
 to unfold out of the Shakespearean plays their hidden 
 system of philosophy." Meanwhile, under a contract 
 obtained for her by Mr. R. W. Emerson (though, it is 
 presumed, more for temporary supply of funds than 
 as rider to her great work), she furnished to " Put- 
 nam's Magazine" eighty pages of manuscript, which 
 became the famous paper " William Shakespeare and 
 his Plays," first announcing to the world the first anti- 
 Shakespearean theory of which it had ever heard. 2 
 
 1 Mrs. Farrar. 
 
 2 This was contracted to be the first of a series of papers, but 
 the arrangement for some reason, probably because Miss Bacon 
 found it necessary to devote herself to the work to which she 
 
196 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Under such circumstances, and with such surround- 
 ings, this heroic woman accomplished the first half of 
 the work she had marked out for herself — the reading 
 of the sealed book, the unfolding of the philosophy 
 of the Shakespearean plays. Her book was written, 
 printed, published, and — damned ! 2 It failed so utterly 
 
 was to give her life, fell through, and no successive papers ap- 
 peared in the magazine. 
 
 2 "The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded. By Delia 
 Bacon." London: Sampson, Low & Co.; and Boston: Ticknor 
 & Fields, 1857. The book lies before us, and certainly is the 
 most difficult reading we ever attempted. Even so competent 
 and partial a critic as Hawthorne says of it: " Without prejudice 
 to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was 
 wholly unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, 
 among other reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know 
 what to leave out. Every leaf and line was sacred, for all had 
 been written under so deep a conviction of truth, as to assume, 
 in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A practiced book-maker, 
 with entire control of her material, would have shaped out a 
 duodecimo volume, full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation — 
 criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of other 
 people's critical remarks on Shakespeare. . . . There was a 
 great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would 
 have shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the whole 
 bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, and 
 there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with 
 a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been 
 picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, 
 as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the 
 mud. ... I believe that it has been the faith of this re- 
 markable book never to have had more than a single reader. I 
 myself am acquainted with it only in isolated chapters and scat- 
 tered pages and paragraphs. But since my return to America, 
 a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he 
 has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is com- 
 pletely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 197 
 
 and miserably that nobody opened it, though that 
 fact deterred nobody, of course, from laughing at it 
 and its author to the utmost of their endeavor in ridi- 
 cule and abuse. " Our American journalists," says 
 Hawthorne, " at once republished some of the most 
 brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting 
 their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without 
 even waiting to know whether the ignominy was de- 
 served, and they never have known it to this day, and 
 never will." But none the less did Delia Bacon per- 
 severe to the end. The philosophy was unfolded. If 
 the world declined to receive the truth — " the truth," 
 as she claimed, " that is neither yours nor mine, but 
 yours and mine " — it was not on her head, at least, that 
 the consequences would fall. The second half of her 
 work remained. She proceeded to Stratford to crown 
 her labors, by opening the vault in the chancel of the 
 parish church, and exposing the secret she had already 
 guessed, to the doubting Thomasses who clamored for 
 the tactual evidence so long entombed there. 
 
 Although on a mission so likely to be regarded as 
 predatory — as even corning under police prohibition, 
 Miss Bacon seems to have lived in open avowal of her 
 purpose, under the very shadows of the church she 
 meant to despoil, and to have made nothing but 
 friends. The regard was mutual, and, says Hawthorne, 
 
 and not to me, whom, in almost the last letter that I received 
 from her, she declared unworthy to meddle with her work — it 
 belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her so much 
 justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due 
 position before the public." (" Our Old Home.") The volume 
 is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshops and at such 
 prices as the bookseller may choose to demand. 
 
198 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 " slie loved the slumberous town, and awarded the only 
 praise that I ever knew her to bestow on Shakespeare, 
 the individual man, by acknowledging that his taste 
 in selecting a residence was good, and that he knew 
 how to choose a suitable retirement for a person of shy 
 but genial temperament." She laid her plans before 
 the vicar, who, so far as Miss Bacon ever was per- 
 mitted to learn, never opposed them. 1 At least he did 
 not hand her over to the first Dogberry at hand — a 
 most un-English omission on his part. He did, how- 
 ever, ask Miss Bacon's leave to consult a friend, " who 
 proved to be legal counsel," and who, doubtless, ad- 
 vised inaction, for the matter was allowed, so far as 
 the lady was concerned, to retain the form of a pend- 
 ing negotiation with the parish, never, as a matter of 
 fact, broken off on its part. The rest is best told in 
 Mr. Hawthorne's dramatic narrative: "The affair 
 looked certainly very hopeful. However erroneously, 
 Miss Bacon had understood from the vicar that no 
 obstacle would be interposed to the investigation, and 
 that he himself would sanction it with his presence. 
 It was to take place after nightfall ; and, all prelimi- 
 nary arrangements being made, the vicar and the 
 clerk professed to wait only her word, in order to set 
 about lifting the awful stone from its sepulchre. . . 
 She examined the surface of the gravestone, and en- 
 
 1 1 cannot help fancying, however, that her familiarity with 
 the events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death and burial 
 (of which she would speak as if she had been present at the 
 the edge of the grave), and all the history, literature, and per- 
 sonalties of the Elizabethan age, together with the prevailing 
 power of her own belief, had really gone some little way toward 
 making a convert of the good clergyman. — Hawthorne. 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 199 
 
 deavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it 
 were of such thickness as to be capable of containing 
 the archives of the Elizabethan Club. She went over 
 anew r the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the pregnant 
 sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's letters 
 and elsewhere. . . . She continued to hover around 
 the church, and seems to have bad full freedom of 
 entrance in the day-time, and special license, on one 
 occasion at least, at a late hour at night. She w r ent 
 thither with a dark lantern, which could but twinkle 
 lik3 a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity 
 that filled the great, dusky edifice. Groping her way 
 up the aisle, and toward the chancel, she sat down on 
 the elevated part of the pavement above Shakespeare's 
 grave. She made no attempt to disturb the grave, 
 though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices 
 between Shakespeare's and the two adjacent stones, 
 and in some way satisfied herself that her single 
 strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of 
 need. She threw the feeble rays of her lantern up to- 
 ward the bast, but could not make it visible beneath the 
 darkness of the vaulted roof. . . . Several times she 
 heard a low movement in the aisle ; a stealthy, dubious 
 footfall prowling about in the darkness, now here, 
 now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if 
 some restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth 
 to peep at the intruder. By and by the clerk made 
 his appearance, and confessed that he had been watch- 
 ing her ever since she entered the church." This was 
 the nearest she came to the overt act, all thought of 
 which was finally abandoned ; for, meanwhile, worn 
 out with the absorbing mental activity of these last 
 years, and her physical privations (she had only ar- 
 
200 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 rived in Stratford in a condition so feeble and pros- 
 trated as to have believed herself beyond any necessity 
 of providing any further earthly sustenance; the 
 failure of her book and the miscarriage of her plans 
 did the rest), she finally consented to be borne back 
 to her home to die peacefully at the last, among friends. 
 Her life and her " theory" are only to be discussed 
 together, and both with tenderness. "Was there ever 
 a more wonderful phenomenon?" exclaims Haw- 
 thorne — u a system of philosophy, growing up in this 
 woman's mind, without her volition, contrary, in fact, to 
 the determined resistance of her volition, and substi- 
 tuting itself in the place of everything that originally 
 grew there ! To have based such a system on fancy, 
 and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost 
 as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays 
 . . . it certainly came from no inconsiderable depth 
 somewhere." 
 
 This was, so far as she herself put it on paper, Miss 
 Delia Bacon's theory. It is to be carefully noticed, 
 however, that it is a theory, not of a unitary but of a m 
 joint authorship. There is one passage in the " Put- 
 nam's Magazine" article (which at that time was an- 
 nounced by the publishers as the first of a series of 
 papers, and was so intended by Miss Bacon) which 
 points to Bacon as the supposed sole author of the 
 plays. But, in the book which followed it, these plays 
 are repeatedly assigned to a conclave or junta of Eliza- 
 bethan courtiers and scholars, and such was the faith, 
 we believe, in which Miss Bacon labored and died. 
 
 The unitary theory, we believe not unfairly, may 
 be assigned to Messrs. Smith and Holmes ; the latter 
 of whom, in the preface to his work, most distinctly 
 
PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 201 
 
 rejects Miss Bacon's " junta" authorship, and under- 
 takes to maintain the proposition that Bacon, and 
 Bacon alone, was the author of the whole canon of 
 "Shakespeare." According to Judge Holmes, Bacon 
 had reasons in plenty for concealing his author- 
 ship, and for "loving better to be a poet than to 
 be accounted one." Not only his personal safety : — 
 Dr. Heywood was already in the tower for having 
 incensed the Queen by an unlucky pamphlet dedi- 
 cated to Essex; and "not long after this," says 
 Holmes, " and while Essex is under arrest, and Bacon 
 in sundry interviews w 7 ith the Queen, is still interced- 
 ing in his behalf, her Majesty brings up against him 
 this affair of Dr. Heywood's book, and also, as it 
 would seem, distinctly flings at Bacon himself about 
 ' a matter which grew from him, but went after about 
 in other's names (in fact no other than the play Rich- 
 ard II. we have to-day)." — but the development of 
 his plans made concealment particularly desirable. 
 Political rivals were watching jealously his every ut- 
 terance. He is known to be a " concealed poet," so 
 he prepares a masque or two for the queen's own eye 
 and audience ; but he alone, according to Judge 
 Holmes, writes " Shakespeare." " Had the plays (says 
 Mr. Eurness) come down to us anonymously — had the 
 labor of discovering the author been imposed upon 
 future generations, we could have found no one of 
 that day but Francis Bacon to whom, to assign the 
 crown. In this case it would have been resting now 
 upon his head by almost common consent." It is well 
 that this essential difference between the "Delia Ba- 
 con" and the "Baconian " theories should be empha- 
 sized here. 
 
202 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 PAET V. 
 THE BACONIAN THEORY. 
 
 71HE English Eenaissance Drama seems nat- 
 urally to group itself into two grand divi- 
 sions : the Elizabethan drama and — Shakes- 
 peare. There is nothing in the first which 
 surprises : which impresses us as too abrupt a depart- 
 ure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the 
 middle age mummeries — "miracle plays" and " myste- 
 ries" — or as being too refined or elaborate for the 
 groundlings who swaggered and swilled beer, or the 
 lords and maids of honor who ogled and flirted in the 
 contemporary barns called " play-houses " in the days 
 of Elizabeth. But that the proprietor of one of these 
 barns should have found it to his profit to have over- 
 shot the intelligence of his audience by creating a 
 Hamlet, a Lear, Brutus, and Macbeth — the action of 
 whose roles are intellectual rather than scenic — for his 
 players, or an Ophelia, Isabella, or Catharine for the 
 small boys employed to render his female parts, is 
 an incongruity — to put it mildly — which arrests our 
 credulity at once. 
 
 The utmost that the Shakespeareans propose to do — 
 the utmost they attempt — is to make out William 
 Shakespeare to have been an Elizabethan Dramatist. 
 But the Elizabethan Dramatist was a man who catered 
 to the Elizabethan play-goer. Greene, Peele, Lodge, 
 Nash, and the rest, were Elizabethan Dramatists. But 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 203 
 
 their names are only a catalogue to-day. If we hap- 
 pen to bay a set of their works at a bargain, at some 
 old book sale, we may put them on our shelves ; but 
 we are not equal to the laborious task of reading 
 them. The Shakespearean Drama is a thing apart. 
 Its Dramatic form seems only an Incident; perfect as 
 that Incident is, there is so much more in it that we 
 find appealing to our hearts and intellects to-day, that 
 we hesitate to ascribe it even to an Elizabethan Dram- 
 atist. The Baconian theory, as elaborated by Holmes, 
 we understand to be that this element apart from the 
 Dramatic, in these days is the key-note and explana- 
 tion of the whole Shakespeare mystery, and leads to 
 the discovery that "Shakespeare" was only a con- 
 venient name under which the popular ear was sought 
 to be arrested by a Philosopher, who wrote in cipher, 
 as it were, for a great purpose of his own. 
 
 The philosophical system contemplated by Francis 
 Bacon — say the Baconians — was divided into two 
 grand Divisions, the Didactic and the Historical. The 
 first — its author (despairing of contemporary fame, or 
 possibly distrustful of the permanence of the vernac- 
 ular) locked up in the universal language of scholars, 
 and left it by his testament to "the next ages." The 
 other he chose to put into Dramatic form. The spirit, 
 motive, theme, and purport of two great phenomena 
 of English letters, synchronizing in date (the philosop- 
 lcal canon of Bacon and the dramatic canon of 
 'Shakespeare,") are identical, and form together es- 
 sentially one great body of philosophy and inductive 
 science, and, therefore, must have had the one author. 
 " It is a thing, indeed, if practiced professionally, of 
 low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline, it 
 
204 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 is of excellent use — I mean stage playing/' he says 
 himself. And again : " Dramatic poetry is as history 
 made visible." This Historical or preliminary division 
 of the Philosophy did not need a dead, but a living lan- 
 guage — the language of his race. This he left in En- 
 glish: and when, at the end, a broken, weak, despised 
 old man — knowing himself only too well to be the 
 meanest and weakest of his kind; but yet conscious 
 of having, in a large sense, worked for the good of 
 his fellow-men — he made no excuse or palliation, but 
 only bespoke for himself and his life " men's charitable 
 speeches." 
 
 But, if there was but one author for these two con- 
 temporary works, why not William Shakespeare as 
 well as Francis Bacon? Why not ask the question, 
 " Did William Shakespeare write Lord Bacon's 
 works ? " * as well as, "Did Lord Bacon write William 
 Shakespeare's work?" While not within our scope to 
 demonstrate the identical philosophy of the Novum 
 Organum and the Shakespearean Drama — (a work to 
 which Miss Bacon devoted her life — and whose dem- 
 onstration has been followed by Judge Holmes) — it is 
 properly within that scope to examine, from the out- 
 side, the question whether, as matter of fact, William 
 Shakespeare could have written either; or whether, 
 from circumstantial evidence merely, Lord Bacon was 
 thus, and in pursuance of a great purpose, actually 
 the author of the Dramatic canon of " Shakespeare." 
 
 Now, aside from any opinion as to their value, 
 beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of 
 
 1 See this question asked and answered affirmatively in " North 
 American Review." February, 1881. New York. D. Appleton 
 & Co. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 205 
 
 the Shakespearean works which, under the calmest 
 and most sternly judicial treatment to which they 
 could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be 
 beyond gainsay or neglect. These two characteristics 
 are — 1. The encyclopaedic universality of their infor- 
 mation as to matters of fact; and, 2. The scholarly 
 refinement of the style displayed in them. Their claim 
 to eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a 
 question of taste; and we may conceive of whole peo- 
 ples — as, for example, the Zulus or the Ash an tees — 
 impervious to any admiration for the Shakesperean 
 plays on that account. But this familiarity with what, 
 at their date, was the Past of history, and — up to that 
 date — the closed book of past human discovery and 
 research which we call Learning ; is an open and in- 
 disputable fact: and the New-Zealander who shall sit 
 on a broken arch of London Bridge and muse over the 
 ruins of British civilization, if he carry his researches 
 back to the Shakespearean literature, will be obliged 
 to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the 
 scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the ac- 
 cumulated learning of the world down to his own act- 
 ual day. Moreover, this scholar would not be com- 
 pelled to this decision only by a careful examination of 
 the entire Shakespearean opera. He will be forced to 
 so conclude on an examination of any one, or, at the 
 most, of any given group of single plays. Let him 
 open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the "Julius 
 Csesar." * Even the artificial Alexander Pope (who, 
 so far from being an over-estimator of the Shakes- 
 
 1 See in this connection "The English of Shakespeare illus- 
 trated in a Philological commentary on his ' Julius Csesar.' By 
 G. L. Craik." London. Chapman & Hall. 1857. 
 
206 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 pearean works, only, from the heights of his superior 
 plane, admits them very grudgingly to a rank beside 
 the works of Waller) was obliged to confess as much. 
 " This Shakespeare," says Mr. Pope, " must have been 
 very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of 
 antiquity. In 'Coriolanus' and 'Julius Csesar,' not 
 only the spirit, but the manner of the Romans is ex- 
 actly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shown be- 
 tween the manners of the Romans in the time of 
 the former and of the latter. No one is more a mas- 
 ter of the poetical story, or has more frequent allusions 
 to the various parts of it. Mr. Waller (who has been 
 celebrated for this last particular) has not shown more 
 learning in this way than Shakespeare," 1 But, if the 
 New-Zealander be a philologist, he will scarcely need 
 perusal of more than a Shakespearean page to arrive 
 at this judgment. Wherever else the verdict of schol- 
 arship may err, the microscope of the philologist can- 
 not err. Like the skill of the chirographical expert, 
 it is infallible, because, just as the hand of a w T riter, 
 however cramped, affected, or disguised, will uncon- 
 sciously make its native character of curve or inclina- 
 tion, so the speech of a man will be molded by his 
 familiarity, be it greater or less, with the studies, learn- 
 ing, tastes, and conceits of his own day, and by the 
 models before him. He cannot unconsciously follow 
 models that are unknown to him, or speak in a lan- 
 guage he has never learned. Young Chatterton de- 
 ceived the most profound scholars of his day, and his 
 manuscripts stood every test but this ; but under it 
 they revealed the fact, so soon to receive the mournful 
 
 1 Smith, p. 86. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY, 207 
 
 corroboration of history, that they were only the forg- 
 eries of a precocious boy. To just as moral a certainty 
 are the handiwork of the Elohist and the Jehovist dis- 
 cernible in the Hebrew Scriptures, and just as abso- 
 lutely incapable of an alternative explanation are the 
 ear-marks of the Shakespearean text. Hallam, whose 
 eyes were never opened to the truth, and who lived 
 and died innocent of any anti-Shakespearean theory 
 (though he sighed for a " Shakespeare of heaven," 
 turning in disgust from the " Shakespeare of earth," 
 of whom only he could read in history), noticing the 
 phases, unintelligible and improper except in the 
 sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously 
 in the plays, proceeds to say : " In the ' Midsummer- 
 Night's Dream' these are much less frequent than in 
 his later dramas; but here we find several instances. 
 Thus, ' Things base and vile, holding no quantity v (for 
 value)-, rivers that 'have overborne their continents 9 
 (the continenti viva of Horace); 'compact of imagina- 
 tion ; ' ' something of great constancy ' (for consistency) ; 
 * sweet Pyramus translated there ; ? 'the law of Athens, 
 which by no means we may extenuate,' etc, I have con- 
 siderable doubts," continues Mr.Hallam, " whether any 
 of these expressions would be found in the contempo- 
 rary prose of Elizabeth's reign, which was less over- 
 run with pedantry than that of her successor. Could 
 authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still 
 not very likely that one who did not understand the : r 
 proper meaning would have introduced them into 
 poetry." x When we remember the coarseness of 
 
 lu Literature of Europe," Part II, ch. vi, sec. 81. " To be told 
 that he played a trick to a brother player in a licentious amour, or 
 that he died in a drunken frolic . . does not exactly inform 
 
208 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 social speech in those days, even in the highest walks 
 of life — we happen to have very graphic accounts of 
 Queen Elizabeth's sayings and retorts courteous (as, 
 e. g., when she boxed Essex's ears and told him to go 
 and he hanged) — it requires considerable credulity to 
 assign this classic diction to a rustic apprentice from 
 Stratford, who, at " about eighteen," begins his dra- 
 matic labors, fresh from the shambles, and with no 
 hiatus for a college course between. 
 
 Add to this the patent fact that the antique allu- 
 sions in the plays " have not regard to what we may 
 call ' school classics,' but to authors seldom perused but 
 by profound scholars " * even to-day: and technical ex- 
 ploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the 
 Shakespearean text, can bring evidence only cumula- 
 tive as to the result already obtained. But, if we pass 
 from the technical structure to the material of the 
 plays, we are confronted with the still more amazing 
 discovery that, not only the lore of the past was at the 
 service of their author, but that' he had no less an ac- 
 cess to secrets supposed to be locked in the very womb 
 of Time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet dis- 
 tant future, were to immortalize their first sponsors' 
 For example, Dr. Harvey does not announce — what is 
 credited to him 2 — his discovery of the circulation of 
 
 us of the man who wrote " Lear." If there was a Shakespeare 
 of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of heaven, and it is of 
 him that we desire to know something." Id. Part II, ch. vi, sec. 
 35, note. 
 
 1 Smith, p. 85. 
 
 2 Though not, perhaps, universally now-a-days. The late John 
 Elliotson declared that the circulation through the lungs had 
 certainly been taught seventy years previously by Servetus, who 
 was burned at the stake in 1553. Dr. Robert Willis asserts, in 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 209 
 
 the blood in the human system — until 1619 (his book 
 was not published until 1628), three years after Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare's death. But why need Dr. Harvey 
 have resorted to vivisection to make his " discovery " ? 
 He need only have taken down his " Shakespeare." 
 Is there any thing in Dr. Harvey any more exactly 
 definite than the following? 
 
 " I send it through the rivers of your blood, 
 Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain, 
 And, through the cranks and offices of man: 
 The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins, 
 From me receive that natural competency 
 "Whereby they live." 
 
 — Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1. 
 
 41 . . . had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick 
 (Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins"). 
 — King John, Act III, Scene 3. 
 
 his "Life of Harvey," that the facts he used were familiarly 
 known to most of his predecessors for a century previous. Izaak 
 Walton states that Harvey got the idea of circulation from Wal- 
 ter Warner, the mathematician; and that eminent physician, 
 John Hunter, remarks that kServetus first, and Eealdus Columbus 
 afterward, clearly announced the circulation of the blood through 
 the lungs; and Cisalpinus, many years before Harvey, published, 
 in three different works, all that was wanting in Servetus to make 
 the circulation complete. Wotton says that Servetus was the first, 
 as far as he could learn, who had a distinct idea of this matter. 
 Even the Chinese were impressed with this truth some four 
 thousand years before Europeans dreamed of it. Plato affirmed 
 — "the heart being the knot of the veins, and the fountain from 
 whence the blood arises and briskly circulates through all the 
 members." This, however, rather adds to than lessens the 
 strength of the argument drawn from finding the " discovery " 
 in the plays. 
 
 18 
 
210 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 *'. . . As dear to me as are the ruddy drops 
 That visit my sad heart." 
 
 — Julius Cccsar, Act II, Scene 1. 
 
 Harvey's discovery, however, is said to have been 
 the theory of Galen, Paracelsus, and Hippocrates 
 (who substituted the liver for the heart), and to have 
 been held also by Eabelais. Neither Galen, Paracel- 
 sus, Hippocrates, nor Eabelais was a text-book at 
 Stratford grammar-school during the two terms Mr. 
 De Quincy placed William Shakespeare as a pupil 
 there — but William has them at his fingers' ends. 
 There are said to be no less than seventy-eight pas- 
 sages in the plays wherein this fact of the circulation 
 of the blood is distinctly alluded to; and, as to Galen 
 and Paracelsus, they intrude themselves unrestrictedly 
 all through the plays, without the slightest pretext or 
 excuse : 
 
 " Parolles. So I say ; both of Galen and Paracelsus. 
 Lqfeu Of all the learned and authentic fellows." 
 
 —All's Well that Ends Well, Act II, Scene 3. 
 
 "Host of the Garter Inn. What says my iEsculapius ? my Galen ? " 
 — Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II, Scene 3. 
 
 In King Henry VI. Part II., Act ii, Scene 2, the eru- 
 dite Bardolph and Falstaff 's classical page make a 
 learned blunder about Althea, whom the page con- 
 founds with Hecuba. And so on. Are we to believe 
 that this sometime butcher's boy and later stage man- 
 ager has his head so brimming full of his old Greeks 
 and philosophers that he can not for a moment miss 
 their company, and makes his very panders and public- 
 cans prate of them ? Even if it were the commonest 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEu.Y. 211 
 
 thing in the world, nowadays, in 1881, for our Mr. 
 Boucicault or Mr. Daly to write a play expressly to 
 catch the taste of the canaille of the Old Bowery (or, 
 for that matter, of the urbane and critical audiences 
 of Wallack's or the Union Square), and stuff all the 
 low-comedy parts with recondite and classical allusion 
 (for this is precisely what William Shakespeare is said 
 to have done for the unroofed play-house in the mud 
 of the Bankside in London, some three hundred years 
 ago or less, and to have coined a fortune at) — even, 
 we say, if it were the simplest thing in the world to 
 imagine this sort of play writing to-day, would it be a 
 wilder flight of fancy to suggest a pale student in 
 London in the days of Queen Elizabeth, somewhere 
 among the garrets of Gray's Inn, writing dialogues 
 into which Galen and Paracelsus would intrude un- 
 bidden — and a stage manager letting them stay there 
 as doing no harm (or, may be, taking them for names 
 of dogs or wenches — at any rate, as good, mouth- 
 filling words, to be paid for at the lowest market 
 price) i 1 than to conceive a twelfth manager and pro- 
 prietor of this home of the Muses, and whilom sticker 
 of calves, after the day's labor, shunning his cups and 
 the ribald mirth-making of those sad dogs, his fellow- 
 
 1 Shakespeare married a woman older than himself. Why 
 should he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or 
 record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity ? 
 
 See Midsummer-Night's Dream," Act I, Scene 1 — " 0, spite, too 
 old to be engaged to young ! " etc. Again — " Too old, by Heaven ! 
 Let still the woman take an elder than herself." Again — " Then 
 let thy love be younger than thyself," etc., etc. ("Twelfth 
 Night," Act II., Scene 4.) 
 
 It is very difficult to suppose that Shakespeare should have 
 wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might 
 
212 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 managers, to seek, in the solitude of his library and 
 Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this 
 same Galen and Paracelsus ? 
 
 Newton, who was only born in 1642 — twenty years 
 after Shakespeare was laid away in his tomb — surely 
 need not have lain under his appletree in the orchard 
 at Woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal 
 the immutable truth of gravitation. He had bat to 
 take down his copy of " Troilus and Cressida" 
 (printed in 1609) to open to the law itself, as literally 
 stated as he himself could have formulated it : 
 
 " Cressida. . . But the strong base and building of my love 
 Is as the very center of the earth, 
 Drawing all things to it." 
 
 — Troilus and Cressida, Act IV. , Scene 2. 
 
 Are we called upon to tax our common sense to 
 fancy our manager, on one of his evenings at home, 
 after the play at the Globe was over, snugly in his 
 library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows 
 over their cups, stumbling upon the laws of the cir- 
 culation of the blood and of gravitation, engrossing 
 them "without blotting out a line," and sending 
 the " copy " to the actors so that they could commit 
 it to memory for the stage on the following evening? 
 
 What a library it was — that library up among the 
 flies (if they had such things) of the old Globe Thea- 
 ter! What an Elihu Burritt its owner must have 
 been, to have snatched from his overworked life — from 
 the interval between the night's performance and the 
 
 snub her in private) ; though it is very easy to imagine his pass- 
 ing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried perusal in 
 the green-room." — Chambers s Journal, August 7, 1852, p. 89. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 213 
 
 morning's routine — the hours to labor over Gralen and 
 Paracelsus and Plato in the original Greek ! It was 
 miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his 
 forge, in the nineteenth century — surrounded with li- 
 braries, and when books could be had for the pur- 
 chasing — could have mastered all the known languages- 
 But that William Shakespeare, with only two terms 
 at Stratford school (or, let us say, twenty years at 
 Statford school, or at the University of Oxford — for 
 there is as much evidence that he was at Oxford as 
 that he was at Stratford school), without books, since 
 there were next to no books purchasable, should know 
 every thing that was written in books ! Surely there 
 never was such a miracle as this ! 
 
 " He was the prophet of geology," says Pullom, 1 
 before it found an exponent in Werner ; " 
 
 " O Heaven ! that one might read the book of fate, 
 And see the revolution of the times 
 Make mountains level, and the continent 
 (Weary of solid firmness) melt itself 
 Into the sea! and, other times, to see 
 The beechy girdle of the ocean 
 Too wide for Neptune's hips." 2 
 
 And yet William Shakespeare had but two terms 
 of Hunt, Jenkins and Stratford school! And, Mr. 
 Malone believed, had never even gone so far into the 
 classics as to have read Tacitus ! 3 
 
 What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous 
 
 " History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with 
 New Facts and Traditions." By W. S. Fullum, London: Saun- 
 ders, Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864. 
 
 2 " King Henry IV.." Part II., Act 3, Scene i. 
 
 3 See ante, p. 88. For the curriculum of Stratford school and 
 conjectural methods of instruction therein, see Venus and 
 Adonis, a Study in Warwickshire Dialect. New York. The 
 Shakespeare Society, 1885. 
 
214 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Stratford school, "two terms" of which — between his 
 poaching and his beer-bouting — were all the schooling 
 William Shakespeare ever had, according to all his 
 biographies. (We say, all be ever had, because his 
 father was so illiterate that he signed every thing witb 
 a mark, and so did his mother, and so did the rest of 
 William's family ; and the boy William was too busy 
 at skylarking — according to those who knew him — to 
 have had much opportunity of private instruction at 
 the parental knee, even had the parental acquirements 
 been adequate.) Were the theory and practice of the 
 common law taught there ? " Legal phrases flow from 
 his pen," says Mr. Grant White, " as a part of his vo- 
 cabulary and parcel of his thought. . . . This con- 
 veyancer's jargon ('fine and recovery,' 'tenure,' 'fee 
 simple,' ' fee farm,' etc., etc.) could not have been 
 picked up by hanging around the courts in London, 
 two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the 
 title of real property were comparatively rare. And, 
 besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his 
 early plays, written in his first London years, as in 
 those produced at a later period." x And not only in 
 the technique, but in the groundwork of " that mighty 
 and abstruse science, the law of England," is he per- 
 fect. A chief justice of England has declared that 
 " while novelists and dramatists are constantly making 
 mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of 
 inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he ex- 
 pounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of 
 exceptions, nor writ of error." 2 Were medicine and 
 
 l " Memoir," p. 47. And see " Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?" 
 
 By H. T . London : Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1871. 
 
 2 " Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements," Lord Campbell, p. 108. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 215 
 
 surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill 1 asserted in 1860 
 that it has been possible to compare Shakespeare's 
 knowledge with the most advanced knowledge of the 
 present day. And not only in the general knowledge 
 of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in 
 these days " medical jurisprudence," the man that 
 wrote the historical play of Henry VI. seems to have 
 been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown 2 says that 
 in " Frost's case " (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial 
 for murder, the defense set up that the deceased had 
 committed suicide. A celebrated physician being on 
 the stand as an expert on this question, was examined 
 as follows : 
 
 Q. What are the general indications of death from 
 violence ? 
 
 A. My knowledge will not enable me to answer so 
 broad a question. 
 
 And yet Mr. Brown points out that "William 
 Shakespeare's knowledge had enabled him" to an- 
 swer so " broad a question : " 
 
 " Warwick. See how the blood is settled in his face t 
 
 Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost 
 
 Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless. 
 ******* 
 
 But see, his face is black and full of blood; 
 
 His eyeballs further out than when he lived, 
 
 Staring full ghastly, like a strangled man ; 
 
 His hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling ; 
 
 And see " Shakespeare a Lawyer," by W. L. Kushton. Lon- 
 don, 1858. 
 
 1 " Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare." J. C. Bucknill, M. D. 
 London, 1860. And see Appendix I. 
 
 2 The Forum. By David Paul Brown. Philadelphia, 1856. 
 
216 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped 
 
 And tugged for life, and was by strength subdued. 
 * •* ■* -K- ■& * * 
 
 It can not be but he was murdered here; 
 
 The least of all these signs were probable." * 
 
 All the arts, sciences, and literatures must have been 
 mastered by our sleepless Shakespeare, either at Strat- 
 ford school, or in the midst of his London career, 
 when operating two theaters, reading plays for his 
 stage, editing them, engrossing the parts for his actors, 
 and acting himself. (And Mr. Colin will have it 
 that in these unaccounted-for times, he had visited 
 Germany with his troupe and performed in all its prin- 
 cipal cities, coining money as he went.) 2 Mr. Brown, 
 Dr. Bell, and others, announce that they believe that 
 these travels of his extended to Italy, and Mr. Thorns 
 and Mr. Cohn, to some extent, account for Shakespeare 
 on the continent, by believing that, instead of going at 
 once to London, when fleeing from Stratford before 
 Sir Thomas Lucy, he enlisted under Leicester for the 
 Netherlands in 1585, but left the ranks for the more 
 lucrative career of an actor. But these theories only 
 crowd still more thickly the brief years in which the 
 great works (which are, after all, what the world re- 
 gards in these investigations), appeared. Either at 
 Stratford school, or in the Blackfriars, or else by pure 
 
 1 2 Henry VI., Act 3, scene ii. 
 
 2 " Shakespeare in Germany. By Albert Cohn. London and 
 Berlin: Asher & Co., 1865. And see Shakespeare's Autographical 
 Poems, by Charles Armitage Brown. Essays on Shakespeare, by 
 Karl Elze. London, Macmillan & Co., 1874. The Supposed 
 Travels of Shakespeare. Three Notelets on Shakespeare. 
 Thorns: London, 1865. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 217 
 
 intuition, all this exact learning must have been ab- 
 sorbed. 
 
 The classical course conducted by Hunt and Jenkins 
 must have been far more advanced than is common in 
 our modern colleges, in Columbia or Harvard, for ex- 
 ample. For not only did Rowe and Knight find traces 
 in " Shakespeare " of theElectra of Sophocles, Colman 
 of Ovid, Farmer of Horace and Virgil, Steevens of 
 Plautus, and "White of Euripides, which are read to- 
 day in those universities ; but Pope found traces of 
 Dares Phrygius, and Malone of Lucretius, Statius 
 and Catullus, which are not ordinarily used as text- 
 books to-day in our colleges. 
 
 The name and character of "Imogen" is derived 
 from an Italian novel not then — and perhaps not now — 
 translated into English. Tschischwitz finds in " Ham- 
 let " the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, professor at 
 Wittemberg in 1583-86. All these are no stumbling- 
 blocks to those who adhere to the Baconian authorship. 
 
 But, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin aside, was 
 English taught at Stratford school ? If it were, it 
 would have been the most wonderful of all, for, as a 
 matter of fact in those days, and for many long years 
 thereafter, English was a much snubbed acquirement. 
 The idea of education was to read, talk, and quote 
 Latin, Greek, and the dead languages, the child was 
 put to his " accidence," instead of his horn-book, and 
 scholars scorned to spend much time on their own ver- 
 nacular. But even should we concede that it was 
 genius that made the village boy master of a diction 
 the grandest of which his mother tongue was capa- 
 ble, there is a greater difficulty beyond, over which 
 19 
 
218 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 the concession will not lift us. This difficulty has 
 been so succinctly stated by Mr. Grant White, in his 
 " Essay Toward the Expression of Shakespeare's Ge- 
 nius," that we can not do better than quote his words. 
 " It was only in London that those plays could have 
 been written. London had but just before Shakes- 
 peare's day made its metropolitan supremacy felt as 
 well as acknowledged throughout England. As long 
 as two hundred years after that time the county of each 
 member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue. 
 .... Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire 
 might have produced Shakespeare's mind ; but had 
 he lived in any one of those counties, or in another, 
 like them remote in speech as in locality from London, 
 and written for his rural neighbors instead of for the 
 audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music 
 of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth 
 and barbarous to the general ear, the edge of his fine 
 utterance would have been turned upon the stony 
 roughness of his rustic phraseology. His language 
 would have been a dialect which must needs have 
 been translated to be understood by modern English 
 ears." 1 As Mr. White wrote these words, did it not 
 occur to him that, by his own chronology, 2 this War- 
 wickshire rustic came to London with "Venus and 
 Adonis" in his pocket, and began, almost immediately, 
 the production of plays, not in the Warwickshire dia- 
 lect, which he had grown up in from his birth, but 
 in a diction that needs no translating " to be under- 
 stood by modern English ears ? " Robert Burns became 
 
 1 Shakespeare's Works, Vol. I., p. cxcvi. 
 2 Id., p. cxxi. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 219 
 
 great in the dialect of his home, which he made into 
 music through the alembic of his genius. When, later 
 in life, he essayed to write in metropolitan English, 
 says Principal Shairp, " he was seldom more than a 
 third-rate — a common clever versifier." 1 But this un- 
 couth Warwickshire rustic writes, as his first essay in 
 English composition, the most elegant verses the age 
 produced, and which for polish and care surpass his 
 very latest works ! Every step in the received Shakes- 
 peare's life appears to have been a miracle : for, accord- 
 ing to them, the boy Shakespeare needed to be taught 
 nothing, but was born versed in every art, tongue, 
 knowledge, and talent, and did every thing without 
 tuition or preparation. 
 
 And in the long vacation of this precious school 
 how much our worthy pupil — whose paternal parent 
 was in hiding from his creditors so that he dare not be 
 seen at church — supplemented its curriculum by 
 feasts of foreign travel! For it is only the careful 
 student of these plays who knows or conceives either 
 their wealth of exact reference to the minutest 
 features of the lands or the localities in which their 
 actions lie, or the conclusions to be drawn there- 
 from. There were no guide-books or itineraries of 
 Venice published until after William Shakespeare 
 had ceased writing for the stage : and yet, while school- 
 boy facts — such as that Venice is built in the sea, or 
 that gondolas take the place of wheeled vehicles, or 
 that there is a leaning tower at Pisa, or a coliseum at 
 Verona or Eome — are not referred to (the out-door 
 action in " Othello " or the " Merchant of Venice" is 
 
 i (i 
 
 English Men of Letters. Robert Burns. 
 
220 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 always in a street or open place in that city, canals 
 and gondolas being never mentioned), the most casual, 
 inadvertant, and trivial details of Italian .matters 
 (such as a mere tourist, however he might have ob- 
 served, would scarcely have found of enough interest 
 to mention to his neighbors on returning home), are 
 familiarly and incidentally alluded to, making the phe- 
 nomena of all this familiarity with Italy quite too 
 prominent to be overlooked. A poet like Samuel 
 Rogers writes a poem on Italy. All that is massive, 
 venerable, and sublime; all that touches his heart as 
 pitiful, or appeals to his nature as sensnous and ro- 
 mantic, goes down in his poem. The scenes Mr. Kog- 
 ers depicts are those which crowd most upon the cul- 
 tivated tourist to-day — the past of history that must stir 
 the soul to enthusiasm. But here are plays, written 
 before the days of guide-books (and if there had been 
 any such things, they would have enlarged upon the 
 same features that Mr. Rogers did), which are at home 
 in the unobserved details which the fullest Murray or 
 Baedeker find it unnecessary to mention. Portia 
 sends her servant Balthazar to fetch " notes and gar- 
 ments" of her learned cousin, Bellario, and to meet 
 her at the u common ferry which trades to Venice." 
 There are two characters named " Gobbo" in the play 
 — a frequent Venetian name in a certain obscure walk, 
 and one which a mere tourist would be most unlikely 
 to meet with. Othello brings Desdemona from her 
 father's house to his residence in the " Sagittary." 
 In " Two Gentlemen of Vorona," Valentine is made 
 to embark at Verona for Milan, and in "Taming 
 of the Shrew," Baptista is the name of a man. These 
 were sneered at as mistakes for some hundred years, 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 221 
 
 until one learned German discovers that Baptista is 
 not uncommonly used as a man's name in Italy, 1 
 and another learned German that, in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, Milan and Verona were actually connected by 
 canals, 2 with which the surface of Italy was inter- 
 sected ! 2 etc., etc. Dr. Elze has made a careful colla- 
 tion of these instances (which need not detain us here 
 except by way of reference), in an essay on the sup- 
 posed travels of Shakespeare, 2 wherein he, from the 
 same internal evidence, regards it certain that the 
 writer (William Shakespeare he calls him), not only 
 visited Italy, but Scotland, absorbing all he saw with 
 the same microscopical exactness. 
 
 And were the modern languages also taught by this 
 myriad-minded Jenkins? Mr. Grant White says em- 
 phatically, No ! " Italian and French, we may be sure, 
 were not taught at Stratford school." 3 And yet Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare borrowed copiously from Boccaccio, 
 Cinthio, and Belleforest. 
 
 Ulrici 4 says (quoting Klein) that the author of 
 "Borneo and Juliet" must have read " Haclriana," a 
 tragedy by an Italian named Groto, and Mr. Grant 
 White points out that Iago's speech, a Who steals my 
 purse, steals trash," etc., is a perfect paraphrase of a 
 stanza in Berni's "Orlando Innamorato," of which 
 poem, says Mr. White, to this day (1864) there is no 
 English version. Mr. White furnishes a translation of 
 
 1 A Von Beumont. Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 21, 1870. 
 
 2 Karl Elze on Shakespeare, p. 296. London. Macmillan & 
 Co. 1874. 
 
 3 Memoir. Works, p. xxi. 
 
 4 Vol. I, p. 253. 
 
222 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 the stanza of Berni, which is certainly startingly like. 1 
 And yet Mr. Yv r hite clings to his Stratford school, 
 where " Beeston " told Aubrey that William Shakes- 
 peare was once a school-master. Perhaps Mr. "White 
 refuses to be converted because he has discovered that 
 Dr. Farmer discovered that, when, in the " Taming of 
 the Shrew," Tranio quotes Terence, " he is inaccurate, 
 and gives the passage, not as it appears in the text of 
 the Latin dramatist, but as it is misquoted in the Latin 
 grammar of William Lily ; a school-book in com- 
 mon use among our forefathers when William Shakes- 
 peare was a boy." 2 But (though somebody has sug- 
 gested that William might have risen to be " head boy" 
 at Stratford grammar school ; and been, in that capacity,- 
 intrusted with hearing the lessons of the smaller boys, 
 whence the school-master story may have arisen), the 
 Beeston story has been rejected by all the commenta- 
 tors with a unanimity of which, we believe, it is the 
 only instance, in case of a Shakespearean detail. So 
 far as we know, there has been but one effort to prove 
 that William Shakespeare was a university man. 3 
 But if, instead of going to school, or operating a 
 theater, William had passed his days as a journeyman 
 printer, he could hardly have been more at home to 
 the mysteries of that craft. Mr. Blades, a practical 
 printer, has found in the Works so many terms, tech- 
 nical to and employed in the exact sense of the com- 
 posing and press-rooms, that they seriously add to 
 
 1 Ante, p. 64, note. 
 
 2 Id. p. xx. 
 
 3 "Some Shakespearean and Spenserian MSS.," "American 
 Whig Review," December, 1851. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 223 
 
 the enumeration of possible Shakesperean vocations. 
 
 For example : 
 
 " Behold, my Lords, 
 Although the print be little, the whole matter 
 And copy of the father, 
 The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger." 
 
 "Witness, also, the following : 
 
 " You are but as a form in wax, by him imprinted. 
 
 — Midsummer-Night's Dream, I, 1. 
 
 " His heart, with your print impressed. 
 
 — Love's Labours Lost, II, 1. 
 
 A small type, called nonpareil, was introduced into 
 English printing houses from Holland about the year 
 1650, and became admired and preferred beyond the 
 others in common use. It seems to have become 
 a favorite type with Shakespeare, who calls many 
 of his lady characters " Nonpareils." Prospero calls 
 his daughter "a Nonpareil." (Tempest, Act III, 
 Scene 2d) Olivia, in " Twelfth Night," is the " Non- 
 pareil of Beauty" (Act I, Scene 5), and in Cymbeline, 
 Posthumous is made to call Imogen the " Nonpareil 
 of her time" (Act II, Scene 5). 
 
 When a certain number of pages of type have been 
 composed they are placed in an iron frame called a 
 "chase," laid upon an "imposing" stone, a piece of 
 beveled wood, called a " sidestick," is placed beside 
 the pages, and small wedges of beveled hard wood, 
 called " coigns," or " quoins," are tightly driven in, 
 holding the pages firmly in their places, and making 
 a compact "form." Surely there is an allusion to 
 this in Pericles III, 1. 
 
 " By the four opposing coigns 
 Which the world together joins." 
 
224 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Before the " form " is taken from the stone to be 
 put on the press, the quoins are made very tight with 
 a " mallet" to insure its "lifting" safely. 
 
 " There is no more conceit in him than there is in a mallet." 
 
 —2 Henry IV, 2. 
 
 • which process is called " locking-up," and when com- 
 pleted, the form is said, technically, to be " locked-up," 
 
 or fast. 
 
 "fast locked-up in sleep." 
 
 — Measure for Measure, IV, 2. 
 
 And to what but the care taken by a printer to make 
 his forms " register " can we attribute the use of that 
 word in Anthony and Cleopatra, Act IV, Scene 9. 
 
 " But let the world rank me in register — 
 A master leaver and a fugitive." 
 
 Punctuation is a fruitful source of misunderstanding 
 between an author and his printer. Very few authors 
 punctuate their manuscript as they would wish to see 
 it in the print, and fewer yet are apt to be good 
 natured and satisfied when the printer punctuates for 
 them. William Shakespeare may have remembered 
 this when he wrote : 
 
 " Wherefore stand you on nice points ? " 
 
 — 3 Henry VI, iv, 7. 
 
 " Stand a comma 'tween their amities." 
 
 — Hamlet, V, 2. 
 
 * My point and period, . . . ill or well." 
 
 — Lear, IV. 7. 
 
 "points that seem impossible." 
 
 — Pericles, V, 1. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 225 
 
 " Puts the period often from his place." 
 
 — Lucrece, line 565. 
 
 " You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent." 
 
 " No levelled malice infests one comma." 
 
 — Timon, I, 1. 
 
 "Come we to full points here? And are et ceteras nothing?" 
 
 Possibly a book-worm, or even a bookseller might 
 draw as many similes as Shakespeare did, from 
 books — as for example : 
 
 " Show me your image in some antique book." 
 
 — Sonnet, 1. ix. 
 
 " Has a book in his pocket with red letters in it." 
 
 —2 Henry VI, iv, 2. 
 
 " My red dominical — my golden letter ! " 
 
 — Love's Labours Lost, V, 2. 
 
 referring to the rubricated editions of books so com- 
 mon in the seventh century, or the golden letters used 
 in the calendar ; or again, 
 
 " To place upon the volume of your deeds 
 As in a title-page, your worth of arms." 
 
 — Pericles, II, 3. 
 
 11 This man's brow, like to a title-leaf, 
 Foretells the nature of a tragic volume." 
 — 2 Henry IV, 1,1. 
 But in the following : 
 
 " The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear." 
 
 — Sonnet, 1. xxvii. 
 
 it is hard to be persuaded that direct allusion is not 
 
226 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 made to the English custom (which still obtains, as any 
 body may see for himself by opening a book printed — 
 wherever published — in England) of placing the typo- 
 grapher's imprint upon the vacant or extra leaf or 
 leaves — where the text runs short, at the end of 
 the volume; just as, if an American publisher, who 
 buys a hundred copies of an English work, may 
 stipulate to have his imprint put upon the title- 
 page (or, perhaps, print his own title-page in this 
 country), the last page of the book itself will invari- 
 ably reveal whether the actual manufacture was in 
 England or not ; an analogy which implies technical 
 information. An image employed by Othello, who 
 takes his wife's hand in his, and says, 
 
 " Here's a young and sweating devil." 
 
 —Othello, III, 4. 
 
 is, Mr. Blades thinks, misunderstood. If his wife's 
 palm was the messenger, as Othello suspected, of her 
 desires to Cassio, there would be some propriety — 
 from a printer's standpoint — in calling it " a devil," 
 for a printer's " devil " is his messenger or errand boy: 
 though another meaning is not so far fetched in sound 
 to a non professional. 
 
 We have mentioned that the Stationer's Company 
 was a fraternity composed only of monopolists, each 
 of whom had a monopoly, from the crown, of the 
 printing of certain books. It was a part of their duty 
 to give notice of this monopoly upon every impression 
 of the book, precisely as the notice of copyright entry 
 is obliged by law to be printed to-day upon copy- 
 righted books. The entry was to be expressed, after 
 the printer's name, or at least, conspicuously on the 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 227 
 
 title-page, in the formula, " cum privilegio ad impri- 
 mendum solum;" and as the formula was to be inces- 
 santly used it was undoubtedly "kept standing" in 
 the composing room. 
 
 It is curious to notice, in the "Taming of the Shrew," 
 Act iv., Scene 4, the recurrence of this formula in a 
 speech of Biondello : 
 
 Bion. I can not tell; except they are busied about a counter- 
 feit assurance; take you assurance of her cum privilegio ad im- 
 primendum solum to the church. 
 
 It is to be noticed that the word "counterfeit" in 
 the above speech, was a printer's term in those days; 
 and, used in the printer's technical sense, would be ap- 
 plicable; for Biondello is counseling Lncertio to marry 
 Bianca out of hand, and without waiting for her father 
 and his counselor who are discussing the marriage 
 treaty. A "counterfeit" was a reprint (as we would 
 say now, a " reprint in fac-simile"). 1 
 
 Again : it might be supposed that a country lad 
 should know the ways of dogs and birds and beasts 
 and creeping things. But it happens to be human 
 experience that the country lad is the least likelv 
 person to turn out a naturalist. It is much more 
 probable that some over- worked shoemaker, in some 
 rare escape from his city garret, should find his 
 thoughts awakened by watching an ant-hill, and suc- 
 ceed in years in making himself an entomologist; than 
 that the farmer's boy, who catches bugs every day 
 to bait his fish-hook, should turn out an entomolo- 
 
 1 Marahren's Parallel List of technical Typographical Terms — 
 art., "Counterfeit." We take the above from Mr. Blades' 
 /'Shakespeare and Typography." London, 1872. 
 
228 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 gist; just as it is not the farmer's daughter, but the 
 fashionable young lady from town who tramps the 
 fields and tears her hands for wild-flowers or wets her 
 feet for the pond lilies. But whoever wrote the plays 
 had found time to learn all the ways of these. Says 
 Bottom, to Cobweb, the fairy, in " Midsummer Night's 
 Dream," "Monsieur, get your weapons in your hand and 
 kill me a red-hipped humblebee on the top of a thistle." 
 In the United States as well as England, there is no 
 more likely place to find a bumblebee in midsummer 
 than on a thistle. In "Much Ado about Nothing," Ben- 
 edict says to Margaret " Thy wit is as quick as a grey- 
 hound's mouth. It catches." The peculiarity of a 
 greyhound is that, unlike other clogs, it is able to catch 
 game in its mouth as it runs; other hounds must stop 
 to do this. In "As You Like It," Celia tells Rosalind 
 that Monsieur Le Beau, who comes with his mouth 
 full of news, will feed it to them " as pigeons feed 
 their young," and Rosalind replies, " Then we shall be 
 news crammed." Pigeons bring food to their young 
 in their crops, and cram it down their young ones' 
 throats, as no other birds do. In "Twelfth Night" 
 the clown tells Yiola that "fools are as like husbands 
 as pilchards are to herrings — the husband's the bigger." 
 The pilchard closely resembles the herring, but is 
 thicker and heavier, with larger scales. In the same 
 play Maria says of Malvolio, "Here comes the trout 
 which must be caught with tickling." Expert 
 anglers know that by gently tickling a trout's sides 
 and belly, it can be so mesmerized as to be taken 
 out of the water with the hand. In "As you Like It," 
 we have the lines " For look where Beatrice, like the 
 lapwing, runs close by the ground to hear our confer- 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 229 
 
 ence." The lapwing is a kind of plover which is very 
 swift of foot and which, when trying to avoid being 
 seen, keeps its head close to the ground as it runs. Says 
 Lear's fool, " The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long 
 that it had its head bit off by its young." The hedge- 
 sparrow in England is a favorite bird for the cuckoo 
 to impose its young upon. In "All's Well that Ends 
 Well," Lafeu says of Parolles " I took this lark for a 
 bunting." The English bunting is a field bird of the 
 same form and color as the lark, but inferior as a 
 singer. And so the figures are always accurate, "the 
 ousel-cock so black of hue," " the throstle with his 
 note so true," " the wren with little quill," " the russet- 
 pated chough, rising and caw T ing at the guns report." 
 And so of flowers, as when Perdita speaks of 
 
 — daffodils, 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty — 
 
 the writer knew that in England the daffodil blooms 
 in February and March, while the swallow never ap- 
 pears until April. In none of the allusions to nature 
 or natural phenomena in the pla}^s, is there any such 
 thing as guess work. 1 Now, what was the necessity 
 for all this technical, geographical, botanical, and oc- 
 cult learning, in a simple drama thrown off by an 
 Elizabethan dramatist, earning his living by catering 
 to an Elizabethan audience? It was not only unnec- 
 essary, but almost fatal to his success. The Eliza- 
 bethan audience did not want scientific treatises. But 
 
 x And see further "The natural History of the Insects men- 
 tioned in Shakespeare," by K. Paterson. London: A. K. New- 
 man & Co., Leadenhall street, 1841. 
 
230 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 nothing — from governmental polity to the stuffing of 
 a fowl — from processes of the human mind to the 
 management of kitchen gardens — was too small or 
 rude for a philosopher's (let us say for Francis Bacon's) 
 vast purposes. How otherwise are they to be ac- 
 counted for ? 
 
 That Shakespeare borrowed Greene's famous " sea- 
 coast" is a point either way. If he took it sup- 
 posing that Bohemia had a sea-coast, the omnipo- 
 tent knowledge assigned him by his worshipers failed 
 him at least once. And if he knew (as is now claimed, 
 though on what authority we know not), that Bohe- 
 mia once possessed provinces on the Adriatic, he knew, 
 as usual, what the acute research of three hundred 
 years has only just developed. And was agriculture 
 taught at this Stratford school, and politics and the art 
 of war? 1 And was there any thing that William 
 Shakespeare did not know ? We are entitled to 
 ask these questions, for it must be remembered that, 
 before the appearance of the Shakespearean dramas, 
 there was practically no literature written in the 
 English tongue. To use the words of Macauley, 
 "A person who did not read Latin and Greek could 
 read nothing, or next to nothing. . . . The Italian 
 was the only modern language which possessed any 
 thing that could be called a literature." 2 One possess- 
 ing, then, merely " small Latin and less Greek," could 
 not have written " Shakespeare." Still less could he 
 have written it out of Gower and Chaucer, and the 
 
 1 See "Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?" Three Notelets on 
 Shakespeare, by Wm. J. Thorns, London. John Russell Smith, 
 1865. 
 
 2 Essays. Lord Bacon. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 231 
 
 shelf-full of English books that made up all there was 
 in English letters. 
 
 But if the Stratford grammar-school confined its 
 teachings to the pages of the English bible alone, it 
 worked wonders, for Bishop Wadsworth goes so far as 
 to declare, that " take the entire range of English liter- 
 ature — put together our best authors, who have written 
 on subjects not professedly religious, and we shall not 
 find, I believe, in them all, printed so much evidence of 
 the Bible being read and used, as in Shakespeare alone. 1 
 Yet William Shakespeare had little opportunity for 
 self-education, except these two terms at Stratford 
 school; he was a lad -of- all -work at the Bankside The- 
 ater, when a mere child. He was only fifty-two years 
 old when he died. He was one of several partners in 
 certain theatrical establishments in London, in the 
 years when he must have put all this multitudinous 
 learning, he had carried in his head so long, on paper. 
 He was so active, industrious, and shrewd in those 
 years, that he alone of the partners was able to retire 
 with a fortune — to purchase lands and a grant of arms 
 for his father (whence he himself might become an es- 
 quire by descent) ; and, in the years of leisure after 
 his retirement, he wrote only three or four epitaphs, 
 which no other graduate of Stratford school would 
 probably have cared to claim. 
 
 It has only been within the last few years that 
 hardy spirits— like Nathaniel Holmes — whose edu- 
 cation has led them to look judicially backward from 
 effects to causes — and whose experience had impressed 
 
 1 Shakespeare's use of the Bible. By Charles Wadsworth, p. 
 345. London. Smith Elder & Co., 1880. 
 
232 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 them with the idea that most effects come in natural 
 procession from causes somewhere — were courageous 
 enough to seek the solution of this mystery — not in 
 what is called the "internal evidence" of the plays 
 themselves, but in the circumstances and surround- 
 ings, that is to say, in the external evidence of their 
 date and production. 
 
 The Baconian theory is simply that, so far as the 
 records of the Elizabethan period are accessible, there 
 was but one man in England, at the date at which 
 this Shakespearean literature appeared, who could 
 have produced it. 1 The history of Bacon's life, his 
 massive acquirements, his profound scholarship even 
 as a child: his advantages of foreign travel, his ambi- 
 tious acquaintance with the court : and, joined to all, 
 his dire necessities and his successive retirements (the 
 dates of which, when collated, coincide with the 
 dates of the plays tallying in matter with the cir- 
 cumstantial surroundings of Bacon's life (as, for exam- 
 ple, Shylock appeared at about the time when Bacon 
 was most helplessly in the toils of what he calls "the 
 Lombardo") : — all this need not be recapitulated here. 
 He was born and bred in the atmosphere of libraries. 
 While William Shakespeare was poaching on Avon 
 banks, the little Francis was impressed with the utter 
 inadequacy of Aristotle's method to grapple with 
 
 1 Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor 
 of discovering the author been imposed upon after-generations, 
 I think we could have found no one of that day but Bacon to 
 whom to assign this crown. In this case it would have been 
 resting now on his head by almost common consent." — (W. H. 
 Furness to Judge Holmes, third edition of "Authorship of 
 Shakespeare," p. 628). 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 233 
 
 modern needs, and meditating its supersedure with 
 labors of Lis own. The gray-haired Queen, who in 
 youth had called him her little Lord Keeper, will 
 not lift a band to aid him in his poverty, or to advance 
 him in the State, regarding him as a man of study 
 rather than of practice and experience; and so Bacon 
 is known to have remained, bemoaning (as he himself 
 says in a letter to Burleigh, written in 1592) "the 
 meanness of my [his] estate ; for though I can not ac- 
 cuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my 
 health is not to spend, nor my course to get. 1 '' This 
 is the very year, 1592, in which Robert Greene " dis- 
 covers that a new poet bas arisen who is becoming the 
 only shake-scene in a county ; " and so far forgets 
 himself as to become " jealous" of William Shakes- 
 peare, who, up to this time, has only been a " Johannes 
 Factotum," of not much account until he borrows 
 " our feathers." 2 And so, until 1613, Bacon is driven 
 to the Jews. Why should he not, in his pressing 
 necessity for "lease of quick revenue," bethink him 
 of the resources within himself, and seek a cover 
 whereunder — without embarrassing his hope of future 
 preferment — he may turn into gold his years of study 
 and travel, by means of a quick pen ? 
 
 In 1613, when he is suddenly created attorney-gen- 
 eral, the Shakespearean plays cease abruptly, to appear 
 no more for ever. William Shakespeare closes out his 
 theatrical interest in London, and retires, to money- 
 lending (as some say), in Stratford. He dies in 1616. 
 Lord Bacon reaches his highest pinnacle of greatness, 
 
 1 Spedding, "Letters and Life of Bacon," vol. i, p. 108. 
 2 Ante, p. 125 
 20 
 
234 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 and falls, in 1621. In 1623, while Bacon is again 
 spending his time in the strictest privacy and retire- 
 ment, there suddenly appears a folio, " The Complete 
 Works of William Shakespeare," amended, revised, 
 enlarged, and improved, including at least seventeen 
 (Mr. Smith says twenty-three) plays which had never 
 appeared or been heard of in Shakespeare's lifetime. 
 
 Few of us — outside the ranks of commentators, like 
 Mr. Grant White, and others, who give their valuable 
 lives to this study — dream how vast were the emenda- 
 tions and revisions, enlargements and corrections of 
 the old Shakespearean plays given to the world in this 
 folio of 1623. Mr. White says that in the one play of 
 " Love's Labours Lost " there are inserted new lines 
 in almost every speech. 1 Another, " The Merry Wives 
 of Windsor," according to Knight, 2 has double the 
 number of lines it originally possessed in 1600. The 
 "Henry V." has nineteen hundred new lines. The 
 " Titus Andronicus " has an entire scene added, and 
 the "Much Ado about Nothing" and "The Lear" 
 are so altered and elaborated, with curtailment here 
 and enlargement there, as to lead Mr. Knight to de- 
 clare that " none but the hand of the master could 
 have superadded them." 3 But, if William Shakes- 
 peare was the "master," how did his hand reach up 
 out of the grave under Stratford chancel, where it had 
 rested seven years, to make these improvements? 
 And if William Shakespeare in his lifetime made those 
 revisions for Heminges and Condell (who appear on 
 the title-page of this folio of 1623 as editors, and an- 
 
 1 Cited by Holmes, " Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, 
 p. 71. 
 
 2 " Studies of Shakespeare," p. 337. 8 Id. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 235 
 
 nounce in the preface that this edition is printed from 
 the "true original copies") at Stratford (where, ac- 
 cording to his own inventory, he had neither library 
 nor books — nor bookcase, nor writing table, for that 
 matter), why did he not print them himself, for his 
 own benefit, instead of performing all this labor of 
 emendation for somebody else? He could not have 
 been fearful lest he would lose money by them, for 
 they had been the foundation and source of all his 
 fortune. Nor had he grown, in his old age, indiffer- 
 ent to gain (let the ghost of the poor " delinquent for 
 malt delivered" assure us of that!). He could not 
 have revised them for pure glory : for, in his previous 
 career, while in London, he had shown no interest in 
 them, permitting them to be surreptitiously printed 
 by whoever, in the same town with himself, listed so 
 to do. He had even allowed them to be mixed up 
 with other people's trash, his name signed to all in- 
 differently, and the whole made footballs of by the 
 London printers, under his very nose, without so much 
 as lifting a voice in protest, or to declare which were 
 his and which were not. 1 Besides, if he had revised 
 them for the glory of his own name, why did he not 
 cause them to be printed? Nor can we suppose that 
 he was employed to revise them, for pay, by Heminges 
 and Condell, because, if they did so employ him, why 
 did they carry the expense of the revision for seven 
 ]ong years, until he and his wife were both in their 
 graves, before reimbursing themselves by printing the 
 first folio for the market ! Last, and most wonderful 
 
 x See post, "The New Theory," where it appears that, at the 
 time Shakespeare was producing certain plays on his stage, cer- 
 tain others were being printed and circulated, as his, outside. 
 
236 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 of all, in this first folio are included all these en- 
 tirely new plays which had never been heard of be- 
 fore! Who wrote those, and why? The answer to 
 these riddles, the Baconians say, is that, when again 
 at leisure, Bacon bethought himself of his scattered 
 progeny, and — whether proposing to publicly own 
 them or not — whether to secure them for posterity or 
 merely for his own pastime — he devoted that leisure to 
 a revision of the works by means of which he had 
 bridged the first long interval in his career. At any 
 rate, when the revision appeared, it is matter of fact 
 that William Shakespeare was dead and in his grave, 
 and speculation has nothing to do with that. 
 
 Besides the coincidence of the plays appearing dur- 
 ing Bacon's first retirement : ceasing altogether at his 
 first elevation, and appearing in revised and improved 
 form again after his final downfall, and during his 
 second privacy, the Baconians cite : I. Contemporary 
 statements, which include (A), Sir Tobie Matthew's 
 famous postscript : l " The most prodigious wit of these 
 times is of your name, though he be known by an- 
 other" (which Mr. Weiss 2 explains, very lamely in our 
 opinion, by arguing that the other name by which 
 Bacon was known, and to which Matthew alludes, was 
 " Viscount St. Albans) ; (B), a letter from Bacon him- 
 
 1 Bacon was in the habit of sending certain of his lighter man- 
 uscripts to Sir Tobie, and this postscript was appended to a letter 
 acknowledging the receipt of Bacon's " great and esteemed favor 
 of the 9th of April." 
 
 2 "Wit, Humor and — Shakespeare." By John Weiss. Boston. 
 Roberts Brothers, 1876. Matthew writes this in a letter ac- 
 knowledging receipt of a volume sent him by Bacon. If that 
 volume was a copy of the "First Folio," the postscript would be 
 intelligible. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 237 
 
 self, to Sir John Davies, who is going to meet the new 
 king James (with whom Bacon is striving for favor, 
 looking to his own preferment), in which he commits 
 to Sir John's "faithful care and discretion " his inter- 
 ests at court, and adds, " So, asking you to he good to 
 concealed poets, I continue," etc., etc.; 1 II. Evidence by 
 way of Innuendo, including another of Matthew's 
 postscripts (the one in which he writes to Bacon, "I 
 will not return you weight for weight, but measure for 
 measure," etc.); also, perhaps, the injunctions of 
 secrecy in Bacon's own letters to Matthew, to "be 
 careful of the writings submitted to you, that no one 
 see them." There is, besides, in many of Bacon's pre- 
 served letters something suggestive of a "curious under- 
 meaning, impressing the reader with an idea of more 
 than appears on the surface." The idea of the stage, as 
 a figure of speech, occurs in a letter to the Queen : 
 " Far be it from me to stage myself," etc.; and in one 
 to lady Buckingham, " I do not desire to stage myself 
 but for the comfort of a private life," etc. " Dramatic 
 poesy," he declares, " is as history made visible." 
 Writing to Matthew, he refers to a " little work of 
 my recreation;" and Matthew, in return, banters him 
 on writing many things " under another name." This 
 is in 1609, and no more " Shakespeare " plays appear 
 until Othello, in 1621. The Jonson obituary verse — 
 in which occur the encomiums so rung in our ears by 
 the Shakespeareans (and which we have — earlier in 
 these pages — seen was all they really had behind them), 
 which we have thought could be most easily explained 
 on the " nil mortuis nisi bonum" theory — are also re- 
 
 1 Holmes, " Authorship of Shakespeare," 
 
238 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 garded, we believe, by the Baconians, as Innuendo. 1 
 III. The Parallelisms. That is to say, an almost 
 identity of phraseology, found in both the Baconian 
 and Shakespearean writings. The best list of these is 
 to be found in Judge Holmes' book, covering some 
 twenty-five closely-printed pages. 2 Of the value of 
 this latter class of evidence, it is for every reader to 
 judge for himself; but that a writer of exact science 
 and moral philosophy should plagiarize from the 
 theater, or the theater from the writer of exact science 
 and moral philosophy ; or (still more improbable) that 
 two contemporary authors, in the full glare of the 
 public eye, should select each other's works to habitu- 
 ally and regularly plagiarize upon, are altogether, it 
 seems to the Baconians, out of the question. But 
 even the conceiving of so unusual a state of affairs as 
 a political philosopher and playwright contracting 
 together to mutually plagiarize from each other's writ- 
 
 *It is curious to find the Baconians appealing to this "best evi- 
 dence " for the other side. But they read it as an Innuendo. 
 For example, the verses — 
 
 "Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage 
 Or influence, cheer the drooping stage! 
 
 Which — since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night 
 And despaired day— hut for thy volume's light — " 
 
 they say, do not and can not, refer to William Shakespeare at 
 all. For this was published in 1623, and William Shakespeare 
 had been dead seven years. He could not " shine forth " again, 
 except figuratively, in his volume, and this he already does by 
 the publication of his works, and is admitted to do in the next 
 line, where it is said that but for " thy volume's light" the stage 
 would " mourn in night." The Baconians, who believe that Ben 
 Jonson himself was the " Heminges and Condell " who edited the 
 first folio, regarded this whole poem as a sop to Bacon, on Ben 
 Jonson's part. 
 2 Pp. 306-326. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 
 
 239 
 
 ings would hardly account for the coiucidence between 
 the cottage scene (Act IV, Scene 3) in "A Winter's 
 Tale," and Bacon's "Essay on Gardens," in which he 
 maintained that " there ought to be gardens for all the 
 mouths of the year; in which severally things of 
 beauty may be in their season," which he proceeds to 
 
 suggest : 
 
 BACON. 
 
 For December and January, 
 and the latter part of Novem- 
 ber, you must take such things 
 as are green all winter . . . 
 rosemary . . . lavender . . . 
 marjoram. 
 
 BACON. 
 
 Primroses for March, there 
 come violets, especially the sin- 
 gle blue — the yellow daffodil: 
 in April follow the double 
 white violet, the cowslip, flower- 
 de-luce, and lilies of all natures, 
 the pale daffodil. 
 
 In May and June come pinks 
 of all sorts: the French mari- 
 gold, lavender in flowers; in 
 July come gilliflowers of all va- 
 rieties. 
 
 PERDITA. 
 
 . . , Eeverend sirs, 
 For you there's rosemary, and 
 
 rue ; these keep 
 Seeming and savor all the win- 
 ter long. 
 
 PERDITA. 
 
 . . . daffodils, 
 
 That come before the swallow 
 dares, and take 
 
 The winds of March with beau- 
 ty ; violets dim 
 
 . . . pale primroses . . . 
 bold oxlips, and 
 
 The crown-imperial ; lilies of all 
 kinds, 
 
 The flower-de luce being one! 
 
 Sir, the year growing ancient — 
 
 Not yet on summer's death, nor 
 on the birth 
 
 Of trembling winter, — the fair- 
 est flowers o' the season 
 
 Are our carnations, and streak- 
 ed gillyvors, . . . 
 
 Hot lavender, mints, savory, 
 marjoram ; 
 
 The marigold, that goes to bed 
 with the sun ; 
 
 And with him rises, weeping; 
 
 These are flowers of middle 
 summer. 
 
240 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 "Were we assured that the prose in the left-hand col- 
 umn was the poet's first rough notes for the exquisite 
 poetry in the second, would there be any internal evi- 
 dence for doubting it? And when it appears that 
 " The Essay on Gardens" was not printed until 1625, 
 nine years after William Shakespeare's death and bur- 
 ial, and two years after an edition of his alleged plays, 
 rewritten and revised, had appeared (when so delib- 
 erate a " steal " would hardly be profitable), the ex- 
 oteric evidence seems at least to command attention. 
 
 A coincidence between a passage in " The Advance- 
 ment of Learning " and in the play of " Troilus and 
 Cressida," Act II., Scene 2 (which, we shall see later 
 on, first appeared in print, advertised as the work of 
 a novice, in 1609, thereafter, within a few months, to 
 be reissued as by William Shakespeare 1 — who was not, 
 at the date of that edition, either a novice or a first 
 appearance), is worth pausing to tabulate : 
 
 BACON. HECTOR. 
 
 Is not the opinion of Aristotle . . . Not much 
 
 worthy to be regarded, where he Unlike young men, whom Aris- 
 saith that young men are not fit totle thought 
 auditors of moral philosophy, Unfit to hear moral philosophy, 
 because they are not settled 
 from the boiling heat of their 
 affections nor attuned by time 
 and experience? 
 
 That the manager of a theater, in dressing up a play 
 for the evening's audience (and such an audience) 
 should tuck in an allusion to Aristotle, to " catch the 
 
 1 Post, " The New Theory." 
 
 2 It is to be noticed that no similarity of style in these opposed 
 extracts is alleged or relied upon. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 241 
 
 ear of the groundlings" — or, finding it already in, 
 should not have a sufficient acquaintance with Aris- 
 totle to scent an impropriety and take it out — is no less 
 or no more absurd than that a philosopher, in compos- 
 ing so profound and weighty an essay as the "Advance- 
 ment of Learning," should go to a cheap play-house 
 for his reference to the Greek sage. If Bacon did at- 
 tend the theater that night to learn the opinion of 
 Aristotle (whom he had criticised at college at the age 
 of fifteen) on young blood and philosophy, he was 
 misled, for Aristotle said not that young men ought 
 not to hear moral, but ought not to study "political phil- 
 osophy. And the error itself is proof positive — it 
 seems to the Baconians — of an identical source for the 
 two passages. It must not be forgotten, however, that 
 the evidence from these coincidences is cited not to an 
 Anti-Shakespearean case — which is purely historical 
 — but as cumulative to the Baconian case alone. And 
 yet, though the evidence from the " parallelisms " is 
 the least forcible of any presented by the Baconians, 
 so systematically do they occur that the ablest Bacon- 
 ian writer (Judge Holmes) claims that he has been able 
 to reduce them to an ordo, and to know precisely 
 where to expect them, by reference merely to a history 
 of the life of Lord Bacon, and the date of the produc- 
 tion. " When I got your ' Letters and Life of Bacon,' " 
 he writes to Mr. Spedding, " and read that fragment 
 of a masque; having the dates of all the plays in my 
 mind, I felt quite sure at once in which I should find 
 that same matter, if it appeared anywhere (as I expected 
 it would) and went first straight to the ' Midsummer- 
 Night's Dream/ and there came upon it, in the second 
 21 
 
242 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 act, so palpably and unmistakably that I think noth- 
 ing else than a miracle could shake my belief in it." 1 
 
 The facts that Lord Bacon expressed himself to the 
 effect that the best way of teaching history was by 
 means of the drama; that there is a connected and 
 continuous series of historical plays (covering by 
 reigns the entire period of the War of the Roses), in 
 the Shakespearean drama " from ' King John/ by way 
 of prelude — in which the legitimate heir to the throne 
 is set aside, and the nation plunged into civil war — to 
 ' Richard III.,' where the two roses are finally united 
 in one line in Henry VII., and winding up with the 
 reign of Henry VIII. — wherein, as a grand finale to 
 the whole, the splendor of the new line is shown 
 in its reunited vigor" — which (with but one hia- 
 tus, the missing reign of Henry VII.) is one 
 complete cycle of English history ; and that, 
 among the remains of Francis Bacon, is a manu- 
 script " History of Henry VII." found, which might 
 well be the minutes for a future drama (the opening 
 paragraph of which seems to be a recapitulation 
 of the last scene of the Richard III. of the dramas), 
 is certainly startling. Not necessarily connected with 
 this discovery is the further fact that Mr. Spedding 
 has found, in the library of Northumberland house, 
 among certain of Bacon's manuscripts, a slip of paper, 
 upon which is scrawled eight times, in a clerky hand 
 (not Bacon's), the name " William Shakespeare," to- 
 gether with the names of certain of the known 
 Shakespearian Historical plays, and of certain (as 
 Judge Holmes conjectures) other plays not now 
 
 1 "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, p. 621. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 243 
 
 known. 1 But there is nothing in this discovery more 
 startling 1 than the numberless other coincidences — if 
 they be nothing more — which Judge Holmes has 
 massed in his scholarly work. 
 
 Henry Chettle, in 1603, in his "England's Mourning 
 Garment (a rhyme)," wonders that "Melicert does not 
 drop a single sable tear" over the death of " Our Eliza- 
 beth.''* It might, indeed, seem strange had William 
 Shakespeare (supposing these lines to apply to him) 
 been the favorite he is said to have been with Elizabeth. 
 But, while neither Shakespeare nor Bacon sing mor- 
 tuary strains, of the two (if these stories about Eliza- 
 beth's love for Shakespeare are true) it is certainly not 
 strange that Bacon did not; for Bacon, at least, had 
 no cause to idolize his queen. 
 
 Ben Jonson's eulogies of Shakespeare, in verse, no- 
 where surpass, as we have seen, his eulogies of Bacon, 
 in prose. He calls Lord Bacon " the dx/ur/j of our lan- 
 guage," and, as Mr. Thompson suggests, " no pinnacle 
 has two acmes." " On every variety of court enfold- 
 ing," continues that writer, " was Bacon daily em- 
 ployed, writing in others' names ; and, if we do not 
 think worse of Plato for personating Socrates, or of 
 Cicero for personating Cato," neither should ill bo 
 thought of Bacon for borrowing a name "to cover his 
 aim," etc. 2 Meanwhile, "this dx/wj of our language 
 was poor and a borrower." In 1605, is published an 
 anonymous pamphlet, called " Ratsei's Ghost." In it, 
 one Ratsei, a highwayman, is about to be hung, and 
 gives some parting advice to a strolling player ; tells 
 
 1 Holmes' "Authorship of Shakespeare," 3d edition, pp. 657— 
 682. 
 
 2 The Kenascence Drama, p. 59. 
 
244 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 him to go to London, where he would learn to be 
 frugal and thrifty ; to feed upon all men, but let none 
 feed on him; make his hand stranger to his pocket, 
 his heart slow to perform his tongue's promise ; and 
 when he felt his purse well lined, to buy some place 
 of lordship in the country; that, growing weary of 
 playing, his money may then bring him to dignity and 
 reputation ; that he need care for no man — no, not for 
 them that before made him proud with speaking their 
 words on the stage." " If this satirical passage," says 
 Mr. Thompson, "plainly alludes to him who went to 
 London very meanly, and came, in time, to be exceed- 
 ingly wealthy, it confirms Greene's saying, that 
 Shakespeare made his money by acting, not by writ- 
 ing, plays, and by usury." l 
 
 As to Miss Bacon's question, " What did William 
 Shakespeare do with Bacon's manuscripts?" Mr. 
 Thompson 2 seems to think that they may yet be 
 brought to light. They " appear to have beeu so many 
 times hypothetically burned, at Stratford, in the Globe 
 theater, the London fire, by their owners (by purchase) 
 at the play-house, to hinder rivals from using them," 
 that Mr. Thompson argues that " it is probable they 
 are still to the fore." Bacon's Will directs certain pa- 
 pers laid away in boxes, cabinets, and presses, to be 
 collected, sealed up, and put away, " so as not to have 
 them ready for present publication." He was " not 
 ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less 
 pains and embracement (perhaps), yield more luster 
 and reputation to my name, than those other which I 
 
 1 Id., p. 209. 
 
 2 Kenascence Drama, or History made Visible. By William 
 Thompson. Melbourne, 1880. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 245 
 
 have in hand." They could bide their time, an , since 
 William Shakespeare and his fellows do not dispose 
 of them, the inference is that they were not allowed 
 to retain them. 
 
 The Baconian theory, it is to be noticed, is quite in- 
 different as to whether William Shakespeare, on first 
 turning up at London, found employment (as Mr. 
 Grant White asserts) in his "cousin's law-office" or 
 not : or whether, at any stage in his career, either in 
 Stratford or London, he was an attorney's clerk, hard 
 'prentice at the trade of " noverint." (By which slur 
 Mr. Fullom believes that Nash meant, not that Shakes- 
 peare was a u noverint," but that the young " nove- 
 rints" of the time w^ere " Shakespeares;" that is to 
 say, that they scribbled, out of hand, for the stage.) 
 The Shakespearean problem is neither increased nor 
 diminished by the proposition ; even an attorney's 
 clerk could not have written all the Shakespearean 
 pages. Should it be necessary, however, to find a law- 
 student in London who could have managed some of 
 them, w T hy not allow Francis Bacon his claim among 
 the rest ? He has, at least, this advantage of his rival ; 
 that, while it is the general impression now-a-days 
 that William Shakespeare was not a law-student, as a 
 matter of fact Francis Bacon was. 1 
 
 1 And too good a law student, we think, to have written the 
 law in the " Merchant of Venice." For, although Lord Bacon 
 was apt to discover the public feeling, and quick to array him- 
 self on the right side (and spitting at Jews has always been ac- 
 counted of Gentiles for righteousness), he must have seen that 
 Shylock had a standing in court on the merits of his case. 
 
 But Portia begins her extraordinary (according to common 
 law at least) judgment by deciding for the Jew in that, not hav- 
 ing paid the principal sum, Antonio must suffer in the foreclosure 
 
246 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 As to the bibliography of the Baconian theory, 
 there are two volumes which will probably always 
 remain its text-books, viz., Judge Holmes's book, of 
 which the first edition appeared in 1866 : and Mr. 
 Smith's, printed in 1857, which made a convert of 
 
 of the mortgage, as it were, upon his person. This is against the 
 letter of any known law, which gives an equity of redemption to 
 the debtor in all such cases. Her next decision is, that the Jew 
 has his election between the principal sum and the penalty, and 
 that, with his election, not the law itself can interfere. This, 
 again, is not law ; for the law abhors a penalty, and even in a 
 foreclosure will not allow the debtor to be mulcted in more than 
 the face of his debt, interest, and costs. But now, having de- 
 cided, against all law, for the Jew, Portia begins deciding for the 
 Christian, and the first point she makes is that, when Shylock 
 takes his pound, he must not take a hair's weight more or less, 
 nor yet one ounce of blood. This, again, is clearly not law, since it is 
 an eternal principle of jurisprudence that, when the law grants any 
 thing it also grants everything that is necessary to the conversion 
 of that thing to possession (as, when it grants a farm, it likewise 
 tacitly grants a right of way to that farm). So, if Shylock had had 
 any title to his pound of flesh, he would certainly have had a title 
 to draw as much blood as it was absolutely necessary to draw in 
 cutting out that pound, and such portions of flesh over and above 
 a pound as it would be absolutely necessary to cut out, providing 
 the cutting out was done by a skillful operator and not a bungler. 
 Astounded at this turn of the tide, Shylock deliberates, and 
 finally cries, " Well, give me my principal and let me go !" Por- 
 tia thereupon renders her fourth decision, which is the most as- 
 tounding of all — namely, that, having once refused a tender of 
 the money in open court, the Jew is not entitled to change his 
 mind and take it! Since the days of Moses — certainly since the 
 days of Littleton — a tender has never quite destroyed a debt, 
 but only the interest and costs accruing upon it, after the ten- 
 der! Such a glaring and high-handed sacrifice of common law 
 and common sense to stage effect might have been conceived 
 of by a manager anxious for the plaudits and pence of a crowded 
 house, scarcely by a future lord chancellor of England. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 247 
 
 Lord Palmerston. Mr. Wilkes's exceedingly fresh 
 and readable work, " Shakespeare from an American 
 Point of View/' and Mr. King's " Bacon versus 
 Shakespeare ; a Plea for the Defendant," as text- 
 books on the other side, could hardly be expected to 
 produce much disorder in Messrs. Holmes and Smith's 
 stern and compact columns of facts and argument. 
 
 Mr. Wilkes 1 decides off-hand against this Bacon- 
 ian theory at the start, and then goes on, like his 
 predecessors, to construct a Shakespeare to suit him- 
 self. It is to his praise that he has endeavored to con- 
 struct this Shakespeare out of the Shakespearean 
 pages, rather than to have unreined his fancy. B-ut he 
 makes his own particular Shakespeare, nevertheless. 
 The Wilkes Shakespeare is a Romanist. We con- 
 sider this to William Shakespeare's praise, for to be a 
 good Romanist is to be a good Christian, and to be 
 one in a Protestant reign is to be a consistent Chris- 
 tian as well. But this is all the good Mr. Wilkes's 
 Shakespeare is. Beyond that he is base-born, a man 
 despised of his equals, and a flunkey and tidewaiter 
 at the knees of an aristocracy to which he can not at- 
 tain — an obscene jester, etc., etc. — and this author he 
 calls Shakespeare. Such a one, whoever he is, is 
 neither Bacon nor Raleigh, at all events. In 1880, 
 Mr. Thompson, of Melbourne, Australia, published a 
 volume, "Renascence Drama; or, History made Vis- 
 ible," 2 devoted to an accumulation of fact and argu- 
 ment — rather than to a presentation of the case al- 
 ready made — in favor of the Baconian theory. Mr. 
 
 1 Shakespeare from an American Point of View. New York: 
 D. Appleton & Co., 1877. 
 
 2 Melbourne : Sands & McDougall, Collins street, west, 1880. 
 
248 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Thompson aims to answer the more refined objections 
 to that theory, by showing that Bacon's mind and art 
 rather overgrasped than undergrasped the matter and 
 form of these Shakespearean drama, and his work is 
 an extremely valuable and charming contribution to 
 the pro-Baconian view. 
 
 In his abounding zeal for " our Shakespeare," Mr. 
 King 1 gives us much eulogy, very little argument, and 
 remakes but one or two points, namely, that a large 
 proportion of the Shakespearean characters are made 
 to bear Warwickshire names, such as Ford, Page, 
 Evans, Hugh, Oliver, Sly, Marion Hacket, the fat ale- 
 wife of Wincot, Curtis, Burton Heath, Fluellen, Bar- 
 dolph, and so on ; and that certain expressions which 
 have puzzled commentators, such as "make straight" 
 (meaning " make haste "), " quoth " (meaning " went "), 
 the use of the word " nie " in place of " for me," u old " 
 for " frequent," etc., are Warwickshire expressions, and 
 current in no other parts of England. But, by consult- 
 ing any " Dictionary of Provincialisms used in Shakes- 
 peare," Mr. King will discover that besides Warwick- 
 shire, 1 the plays contain traces of about every other 
 known British dialect. And if, as has been suggested, 
 Mr. Manager Shakespeare dressed up his friends' dia- 
 logues for his own stage, and tucked in the clowns and 
 jades, this usage of Warwick names might well be ac- 
 counted for. Four of these names are taken out of 
 "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and three of them 
 from the induction to the " Taming of the Shrew " — 
 matter in the composition of which Shakespeare or 
 
 1 Bacon and Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant. By- 
 Thomas King. Montreal : Lovell Printing and Publishing Com- 
 pany, 1875. 
 
PART V.— THE BACONIAN THEORY. 249 
 
 any other playwright might have had the largest hand, 
 without entitling himself to any Olympus. And if, 
 in the dressing up, Shakespeare inserted a clown or a 
 sot here and there, to make sport, what would be 
 more natural than that he should put into their mouths 
 the argot he had grown up amid in his boyhood, and 
 make the drunken turnkey in " Macbeth " to say, with 
 hiccoughs, " If a man were porter of hell-gate, he 
 should have old turning the key?" For, as Mr. King 
 can see for himself, the cardinals and kings do not use 
 these phrases; nor, we may add, are the surnames he 
 particularizes ever bestowed on them, but only on the 
 low-comedy characters of the plays. 
 
 Surely, if William Shakespeare ever were forced 
 "upon the country," as the lawyers say, as against my 
 Lord Bacon, he would wish his case to the jury rather 
 without Mr. King's " plea " than with it. As a " plea " 
 on any side of an historical question, it is, to be sure, 
 nothing, if not candid ; but, as a personal appeal to 
 posterity to, willy-nilly, believe that certain players 
 and others in the age of Elizabeth knew not guile, it 
 is touching and beautiful in the extreme. " Who shall 
 say Heminges and Condell lied?" 1 " Could rare Ben 
 Jonson, who is worthy of our love and respect, have 
 lied ?" 2 Did Shakespeare practice a deceit upon his 
 
 1 " Bacon versus Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant." By- 
 Thomas King. Montreal, and Rouse's Point, New York : Lovell 
 Printing, etc., Company, 1875, p. 9. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 10. Heminges and Condell " profess that ' they have 
 done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of so 
 worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.' Yet 
 their utter negligence, shown in their fellow's volume, is no ev- 
 idence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of their care or 
 their intelligence. The publication was not, I fear, so much an 
 
250 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 noble and generous patron ? Could he be guilty of a 
 lie?" 1 And so on. To much the same effect (the 
 reverence clue the name " Shakespeare," the improba- 
 bility of Jonson and others telling an untruth, etc.) is 
 an anonymous volume, " Shakespeare not an Impostor, 
 by an English Critic," 2 published in 1857 ; and finally ? 
 in 1877, was published a paper, read before the Royal 
 Society of Literature, by C. M. Ingleby, M. A., LL.D., 
 a vice-president 3 of the same. Dr. Ingleby is severe 
 upon all anti- Shakespearean s, whose minds he likens 
 to " Macadam's sieves," which " retain only those in- 
 gredients which are unsuited to the end in view " 
 (whatever that may mean), and thinks that "the pro- 
 fession of the law has the inevitable effect of fostering 
 the native tendency of such minds." Unlike the oth- 
 ers, however, Dr. Ingleby does not confine himself to 
 expressions of his interest in the anti-Shakespeareans 
 "as examples of wrong-headedness," but attempts an 
 examination of the historical testimony. In favor of 
 the Shakespearean authorship, he names seven wit- 
 nesses, viz., John Harrison, Francis Meres, Robert 
 Greene, Henry Chettle, Heminges, Condell, and Ben 
 Jonson. John Harrison was the printer (publisher) 
 who published the "Venus and Adonis" in 1593, and 
 the "Lucrece" in 1594. Each of these was without 
 
 offering of friendship as a pretext to obtain the copyright.'' 
 (Disraeli, "Amenities of Authors — Shakespeare.") 
 ilbid., p. 13. 
 
 2 George Townsend (according to Allibone), London : Gr. Eout- 
 ledge & Co., Farringdon street, 1857. 
 
 3 " Shakespeare : The Man and the Book." London: Josiah 
 Adams, Triibner & Co., 1877, Part I., p. 38. " The Authorship of 
 the Works attributed to Shakespeare." 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 251 
 
 an author's name on the title-page, though each was 
 dedicated to Southampton, in an address dedicatory, 
 signed "William Shakespeare." This is all that the 
 Harrison evidence amounts to, except that Dr. Ingleby 
 says, "It is to me quite incredible that Harrison would 
 have done this unless Shakespeare had written the 
 dedications, or at least had been a party to them." x 
 As to Meres, anybody can see by reading him that he 
 wrote as a critic, and not as an historian. 2 To subpoena 
 Greene as a witness to Shakespeare's genius, is at least 
 a bold stroke ; for, as has been seen, Greene is very 
 emphatic to the effect that "William Shakespeare was 
 a mere "Johannes Factotum," or Jack-of-all-trades, 
 who trained in stolen plumage, and the Shakespeareans 
 (Dr. Ingleby alone excepted) have universally exerted 
 themselves to break the force of this testimony by 
 proving Greene a drunkard, jealous, etc. 3 Greene 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 42. 
 
 2 " Palladis Tamia, Wit's Commonwealth," 1598. 
 
 3 That Robert Greene was much more than a drunkard and a 
 pretender, but that, to the contrary, he had many admirers who 
 were not unaware of the effrontery of his debtor, Shakespeare, 
 a search among the old literature of the day would reveal. In 
 a quarto tract, dated 1594, "Greene's Funeralls, by R. B., Gent.," 
 is a copy of verses, the last stanza of which runs : 
 
 " Greene is the pleasing object of an eye 
 
 Greene pleased the eye of all that looked upon him; 
 Greene is the ground of every painter's dye, 
 
 Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him: 
 Nay, more; the men that so eclipsed his fame, 
 Purloined his plumes, can they deny that same?" 
 
 Hallam believes that the last two lines are directed principally 
 at William Shakespeare. (" Literature of Europe," Part II., 
 ch. vi., p. 32, note.) 
 
 A selection of his poems, edited by Lamb, is printed 
 in Bonn's Standard Library. But by far the most careful ac- 
 
252 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 was a graduate of Cambridge — a learned man — " one 
 of the fathers," says Lamb, " of the English stage." 
 He does not seem to have approved of William Shakes- 
 peare's borrowing his plumes ; but the impression that 
 he was a monster of debauchery and drunkenness is de- 
 rived wholly from his own posthumous work, " The Con- 
 fessions of Robert Greene," etc., London, 1592, which 
 lays the black paint on so thickly that it should have 
 put the critics on their guard. Greene was probably 
 no worse than his kind. Henry Chettle edited Greene, 
 and personally deprecated some of its hard sayings as 
 to Shakespeare, on account of his (Shakespeare's) be- 
 ing a clever,.civil sort of fellow, and of "his facetious 
 grace in writing;" but more particularly, no doubt, 
 because " divers of worship" had taken him up, and he 
 (Chettle) did not wish to appear as approving slander 
 of a reigning favorite. Heminges and Condell were 
 men of straw, whose names are signed to the preface 
 to the "first folio," who otherwise bear no testimony 
 one way or the other, but whose book, as will be 
 demonstrated farther on, is an unwilling witness 
 against its purported author. And Ben Jonson, who 
 brings up the rear of this precious seven, has been al- 
 ready disposed of. That theory must be pretty soundly 
 grounded in truth, against which there is nothing but 
 rhetoric to hurl, and, in our opinion, it would be en- 
 tirely safe — if not for the Baconians, for the anti- 
 Shakespeareans, at least — to rest their case on the ar- 
 guments for the other side. And we believe the more 
 
 count of Greene's career, as connected with William Shakes- 
 peare, is to be found in " The School of Shakespeare," by Rich- 
 ard Simpson, London : Chatto & Windus, 1878, Vol. II., p. 339. 
 
PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 253 
 
 thoughtful among Shakespeareans are beginning to 
 recognize it, and coming to comprehend that, if they 
 are to keep their Shakespeare they must re- write their 
 " Biographies ; " spend less time in proving him to 
 have been an epitome of the moral virtues — beyond 
 the temptation of deer stealing, beer drinking, and 
 skylarking, etc. — and devote more attention to his op- 
 portunities for acquiring the lore and technical knowl- 
 edge his alleged pages so accurately handle. Espe- 
 cially has Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his little book (in 
 which he binds himself to cite no dates or authorities 
 subsequent to 1616), 1 impressed us as endeavoring to 
 meet this emergency. But we find that he has not 
 met it. He has, indeed, developed many details of 
 curious interest — as that John Shakespeare was, in 
 April, 1552, fined twelve pence for throwing muck 
 into the street in front of his house; and that he was 
 several times a candidate for high bailiff' of Stratford 
 (or mayor, as the office was afterward called) before 
 finally arriving at that dignity in 1568 ; that July 15, 
 1613, there was heard at Worcester Assizes a curious 
 lawsuit, brought by Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's son- 
 in-law, against a neighbor for slandering his wife (Su- 
 sannah Shakespeare), which suit appears to have been 
 "fixed" in some way before coming to trial. Mr. 
 Phillips brings much learning to prove that William 
 may have been " pre-contracted " to Anne Hathaway — 
 that his death may have been from malarial fever 
 
 Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. Brighton. Printed for 
 the Author's friends, 1881. We should add to our list of books 
 Mr. 0. Follett's two able pamphlets on the Baconian theory. 
 Sandusky, Ohio, 1880. 
 
254 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 rather than inebriation — which have nothing at all to 
 do with the question or the practical difficulties cited 
 by the anti-Shakespeareans, one way or the other. 
 But as to those practical difficulties, he brings no light 
 and has no word to say. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 255 
 
 PART VI. 
 
 THE NEW THEORY— THE SONNETS— CONCLUSION. 
 
 F a matter so indifferent as the number of peb- 
 bles in Demosthenes' mouth when he prac- 
 ticed oratory on the beach, no effort of 
 credulity can be predicated. But when a 
 proposition is historical and capable of proving itself, 
 it is, indeed, the skeptic who believes the most. It 
 would be interesting, for example, to compile a cat- 
 alogue of the reasons why A, B, and C, and their 
 friends, doubt the real Shakespeare story, and cling to 
 the manufactured tradition. A will tell us he believes 
 it because somebody else (Bacon will do as well as 
 anybody) wrote enough as it was, and was not the 
 sort of man who would surrender any of the glory 
 to which he w r as himself entitled, to another. B, be- 
 cause, when somebody else wrote poetry (for example, 
 Bacon's "Paraphrase of the Psalms"), his style was 
 quite another than the style of the dramas. C, be- 
 cause he is satisfied that William Shakespeare spent 
 some terms at Stratford school, and was any thing but 
 unkind to his wife. D, because the presumption is too 
 old to be disturbed ; as if we should always go on be- 
 lieving in William Tell and the man in the moon, 
 because our ancestors believed in them ! And so on, 
 through the alphabet. It is so much easier, for in- 
 stance, to believe that miracles should appear by the 
 page, or that universal w 7 isdom should spring fully 
 
256 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 armed from the brain of a Warwickshire clown, than 
 that Francis Bacon, or somebody else, should write 
 anonymously, or in two hands, or use as a nomme de 
 plume the name of a living man, instead of inventing 
 one de novo. And, had such a nomme de plume been 
 wanted, whose name was more cheaply purchasable, 
 and more available for incognito, than this of a theat- 
 rical "Johannes Factotum," who, by doing any thing 
 and every thing that was wanted, and saving every 
 honest penny he turned, actually became able to buy 
 himself a coat-of-arms (the first luxury he ever ap- 
 pears to have allowed himself out. of his increasing 
 prosperity) 1 and a county seat, and so to be, par excel- 
 lence — among a then despised and low caste craft — 
 " the gentle " Shakespeare ? 
 
 In the days when this historical William Shakes- 
 peare arrived in London, there were two playhouses 
 in operation, to either of which he might have strolled 
 on foot, without crossing the river to the Surrey shore, 
 and to which gentlemen very probably rode on horse- 
 back— " The Theatre" and "The Curtain" at. Shore- 
 ditch. Before the door of one of these we may, perhaps, 
 
 1 We happen on traces of the fact that William Shakespeare's 
 particular weakness was his "noble descent" very often, in ex- 
 ploring the annals of these times, and that his fellow actors by 
 no means spared his weakness. " It was then a current joke to 
 identify Shakespeare with 'the Conqueror,' or r Rufus,' as if his 
 pretensions to descent from the Norman dukes were known" 
 ("Ben Jonson's Quarrel with Shakespeare," "North British Re- 
 view," July, 1870). And certain lines in the "Poetaster" are 
 supposed to be a fling at this weakness of Shakespeare, as the 
 whole play is believed to be a hit at Marlow (id.). We shall see 
 how this weakness was fostered by the new set into which cir- 
 cumstances forced Shakespeare, later on. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 257 
 
 imagine a rustic lad — fresh from Stratford, and foot- 
 sore from his long tramp, attracted by the crowd and 
 the lights, standing idle and agape. Possibly, then, 
 riding up, some gallant threw young William his 
 horse's bridle, and William Shakespeare had found 
 employment in London. By attention to business, 
 William, in time, may have, as Eowe thinks, come 
 to control the horse -holding business, and take his 
 predecessors into his pay ; until they became known 
 as " Shakespeare's boys," and the young specula- 
 tor's name penetrated to the inside of the theater. 
 In course of time he becomes a "servitour" (what 
 we now call a " super," i. e., supernumerary) inside, 
 and ultimately (according to Rowe, an actor him- 
 self, and the nearest in point of time to William 
 Shakespeare to write his biography) " the reader" * of 
 the establishment ; and naturally, therefore, stage ed- 
 itor of whatever is offered. He has no royal road to 
 learning at his command, nor does he want one. The 
 " knack at speech-making," which had delighted the 
 rustic youth of Stratford, mellowed by the new expe- 
 riences which surround him, is all he needs. Not 
 only the plays of Greene and others, which he now 
 remodeled (and improved, no doubt), but essays of his 
 own, became popular. The audience (we shall see 
 more of them further on) called for " Shakespeare's 
 plays," and his name came to possess a market value. 
 The dramas we now call " Shakespearean " surely 
 did appear in his lifetime, aud under his name. Were 
 
 *In this capacity he read and accepted Ben Jonson's "Every 
 Man in his Humour," which was the beginning of the intimacy 
 which ended with their lives. 
 
 22 
 
258 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 they ever performed at his theater? Let us glance at 
 the probabilities. 
 
 The " theaters " of this day are barely more 
 than inclosures, with a raised platform for the per- 
 formers, and straw for the audience to stand or go 
 to sleep in, as they prefer. Wotton, in a letter to 
 Bacon, 1 says that the fire that destroyed the Globe 
 theater burned up nothing but "a little wood and 
 straw and a few forsaken cloaks." Sir Philip Sidney, 
 writing in 1583, ridicules the poverty of the scenic ef- 
 fects and properties of the day in an often-quoted 
 passage: "You shall have Asia of the one side and 
 Africke of the other, and so many other under king- 
 domes that the plaier, when hee comes in, must ever 
 begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will 
 not be conceived. Now, you shall have three ladies 
 walk to gather flowers, and then you must believe the 
 stage to be a garden: by-and-by we have news of a 
 shipwreck in the same place; and we are to blame if 
 we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that 
 comes a hideous monster, with lire and smoke, and the 
 miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave, 
 while, in the mean time, two armies fly in, represented 
 with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard 
 heart will not receive it for a pitched field !" 2 
 
 And M. Taine has drawn a life-like picture of the 
 audience which applauded this performance : " The 
 poor could enter as well as the rich ; there were six- 
 penny, twopenny, even penny seats. . . . If it 
 rained, and it often rained in London, the people in 
 
 1 Smith's " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 74. 
 
 2 "The Defence of Poesie," edition 1626, p. 592. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 259 
 
 the pit, butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices, 
 receive the streaming rain on their heads . . . 
 they did not trouble themselves about it. While wait- 
 ing for the pieces they . . „ drink beer, crack 
 nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then resort to their 
 fists : they have been known to fall upon the actors, 
 and turn the theater upside down. At other times 
 they were dissatisfied and went to the tavern to give 
 the poet a hiding or toss him in a blanket. . . . 
 When the beer took effect there was a great upturned 
 barrel in the pit, a receptacle for general use. The 
 smell arises, and then comes the cry, ' Burn the juni- 
 per !' They burn some in a plate in the stage, and the 
 heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there 
 assembled could scarcely get disgusted at any thing, 
 and can not have had sensitive noses. In the time of 
 Rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of. 
 Remember that they were hardly out of the middle 
 age, and that, in the middle age, man lived on a dung- 
 hill." Mr. White assures us further, that pickpockets 
 were apt to be plentiful among this audience, and when 
 discovered, were borne upon the stage, pilloried in full 
 view, 1 and there left, the play going on meanwhile 
 around them; and, moreover, that the best seats sold 
 were on the stage itself; where any of the audience, who 
 could pay the price, could sit, recline, walk, or con- 
 verse w T ith the actors engaged in the performance," 
 while pages brought them rushes to stretch upon, and 
 
 1 " Kempe, the actor, in his 'Nine Days' Wonder,' a. d. 1600, 
 compares a man to ' such an one as we tye to a poast on our stage 
 for all the people to wonder at when they are taken pilfering.' " 
 (" Shakespeare," by Richard Grant White, Vol. I., p. 183.) 
 
260 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 pipes of tobacco with which to regale themselves. 1 
 "Practicable" scenery of any sort, even the rudest, 
 was utterly unknown, 2 and it is thought that the act- 
 ors relied on barely more than the written action of 
 the piece for their guidance. In the plays of this pe- 
 riod we come continually on such stage directions as 
 " Here they two talke and rayle what they list;" "All 
 speak ;" " Here they all talke," etc., 3 which proves that 
 much of the dialogue was trusted to the inspiration of 
 the moment — to which inspiration the gallants and 
 pickpockets may not unnaturally have contributed. 
 The principal burden of entertaining the audience 
 rested with the clown, who, unembarrassed by any 
 
 1 Ibid. 
 
 2 Whenever we come on a stage direction, therefore, which sup- 
 poses "practicable" scenery in a play, we may assert with con- 
 fidence, that the same was written in or after 1662, up to which 
 date there was no such thing as practicable machinery. In the 
 original edition of " The Tempest," for instance, there is no in- 
 timation, by way of stage direction, that the first scene occurs on 
 shipboard. In the first edition of "As You Like It" there is 
 no mention of a forest in the stage direction. Nor in the early 
 quartos of "Romeo and Juliet" is there any intimation that Ju- 
 liet makes love in a balcony. " What child is there, that, com- 
 ing to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an 
 old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?" says Sidney, in his 
 "Defence of Poesie."— (R. Gk White's "Shakespeare's Scholar," 
 p. 489, note.) Trap-doors, however, were probably in very 
 early use; at least, we find in a comedy by Middleton and Dekkar 
 a character called " Trap-door." There seems, also, to have been 
 pillars that turned about, and a writer in the times of James I. 
 mentions that " the stage varied three times in one tragedy." 
 
 3 These stage directions are taken from Greene's " Tu Quoque," 
 a. d. 1614, two years before Shakespeare died, and long after, ac- 
 cording to the commentators, he had ceased writing for the 
 stage. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 261 
 
 reierence to the subject-matter of the play, popped in 
 and out at will, cracked his jokes, danced and sung 
 and made himself familiar with the outsiders upon 
 the stage. Before an audience satisfied with this 
 rudimentary setting, upon a stage crowded with 
 smirking gallants and flirting maids of honor, we 
 are assured that Hamlet and Wolsey delivered their 
 soliloquies, Anthony his impassioned oratory, and 
 Isabella her pious strains; while the clowns and pot- 
 wrestlers discoursed among themselves of Athens and 
 Troy, and Hecuba and Althea, of Galen and Paracelus, 
 of "writs of detainer," and "fine and recovery," and 
 " praemunire," and of the secrets of the pharmacopoeia ! 
 "At this public theater," says Mr. Smith, " to which 
 every one could obtain access, and the lowest of the 
 people ordinarily resorted ... we are called upon 
 to believe that the wonderful works which we so 
 greatly admire and feel we can only appreciate by 
 careful private study — that not only Englishmen like 
 Coleridge confess, in forty years of admiring study of 
 Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, and German 
 philosophers, literature, and manners, to have found 
 bursting upon him with increased power, wisdom, and 
 beauty in every step," l but foreigners like Schlegel, 
 Jean Paul, and Gervinus, " have fallen down before 
 in all but heathen adoration" — were performed. In 
 1880, when we force a common-school education at 
 state expense upon the people, the Shakespearean 
 plays are disastrous to managers. They "lose money 
 on Shakespeare," and unless " carpentry and French " — 
 unless ballet and spectacle are liberally resorted to, are 
 
 1 Bacon and Shakespeare, p. 91. 
 
262 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 dragged down to desolate houses and financial ruin. 
 " Shakespeare " is " over the heads " of be nbXXoe in 
 these days of compulsory education. And yet we are 
 calmly asked to credit the astounding statement that 
 in and about the year 1600, in London, these grave, 
 intellectual, and stately dialogues are taking by storm 
 the rabble of the Bankside, and entrancing the trades- 
 men and burghers of the days when to read was quite 
 as rare an accomplishment as serpent-charming is to- 
 day — when, if sovereigns wrote their own names, it 
 was all they could do — and when the government 
 could not afford to hang a man who could actually 
 write his name. 1 "And yet," to quote Mr. Smith 
 again, " it was from the profit arising from this 
 wretched place of amusement that Shakespeare rea- 
 lized the far from inconsiderable fortune with which 
 in a few years he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon." If 
 not actual intellectual giants, the rabble of that day 
 must have been the superiors in literary perception of 
 some very eminent gentlemen who were to come 
 after them, like, for example, Fuller, Evelyn, Pepys, 
 Dryden, Dennis, liymer, Hume, Pope, Addison, Steele, 
 and Johnson, whose comments on our immortal drama 
 we have set forth in the First Part of this work. 2 Only 
 we happen to know they were not. 
 
 As an alternative to believing that these pearls, over 
 which this nineteenth century gloats, were cast before 
 the swine of the sixteenth ; the theory we are now con- 
 
 1 Benefit of clergy was only abolished in England by acts 7 and 
 8, George IV., c. 28, sec. 3, in 1827, fifty-three years ago; in the 
 United States it had been disposed of (though it had never been 
 availed of ) by act of Congress, April 30, 1790. 
 
 2 Ante, pp. 20-29. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 263 
 
 sidering offers, as less violent an attack upon common 
 sense, the supposition that what we now possess un- 
 der the name of " Shakespeare's plays" were not pro- 
 duced upon the stage of any play-house in those 
 days, but were printed instead, the name of William 
 Shakespeare having been attached to them as surety 
 for a certain circulation. The well-attested fact 
 that William Shakespeare was a play-writer is not 
 ignored by this supposition ; for the new theorists 
 believe that, although no fragment of the Shakespeare 
 work now survives, its character can be readily de- 
 termined. From what knowledge we possess of the 
 tone and quality of the audiences of those days, it is 
 not difficult to imagine the rudeness and crudity of the 
 plays. 
 
 These were the formative days of audiences, and, 
 therefore, the formative days of plays. Sir Henry 
 Wotton, in a letter from which we have just quoted, 
 written to Lord Bacon in 1613, refers to one of 
 these plays called " The Hog hath lost its Pearl." 
 Says this letter: "Now it is strange to hear how 
 sharp-witted the city is ; for they will needs have 
 Sir Thomas Swinnerton, the Lord Mayor, be meant by 
 the hog, and the late Lord Treasurer by the pearl." 
 There is no disputing the fact, at least, that the plays 
 we call " Shakespeare's " are cast in a mold by them- 
 selves, and have no contemporary exemplar. The 
 student of these days knows the fact that Dekker, 
 Webster, Massinger, Jonson, or any other who wrote 
 in periods that are counted " literature," made no for- 
 tunes at their work. That such as this one alluded to by 
 Wotton — and one example will suffice — were what the 
 town ran to see in those days, mere local sketches — 
 
264 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 lampoons on yesterday's events; coarse parables, the 
 allusions in which could be met and enjoyed by the 
 actors themselves (were to the popular taste, that is to 
 say), is much easier to conceive than that the " Ham- 
 let" and the "Lear" were to the popular taste. One 
 Dr. Hey wood (who, it is to be noted, is sometimes 
 called the u prose Shakespeare") is understood to have 
 produced some two hundred and twenty of this sort 
 of sketches alone; aud, possibly, this was the sort of 
 " early essays at dramatic poetry " which Aubrey 
 speaks of: this " the facetious grace in writing that ap- 
 proves his wit " which Chettle assigns to William 
 Shakespeare — mere sketches in silhouette of the 
 town's doings, such as would appeal, as this sort still 
 do in cities, to a popular and local audience. There 
 is some curious testimony on the subject, which looks 
 to that effect. 
 
 Cart wright, 1 in his lines on Fletcher, says : 
 
 " Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies 
 1' th' ladies' questions, and the fools' replies, 
 Old-fashioned wit, which walked from town to town 
 In turned hose, which our fathers called the clown ; 
 Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call, 
 And which made bawdry pass for comical. 
 
 • Nature was all his art : thy vein was free 
 As his, but without his scurrility." 
 
 One Leonard Digges — who, Farmer says (in his essay on 
 " The Learning of Shakespeare "), was " a wit of the 
 town " in the days of Shakespeare — wrote some verses 
 laudatory of William Shakespeare, which (Farmer 
 says again) " were printed along with a spurious edi- 
 
 1 Poems, 1651, p. 273. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 265 
 
 tion of Shakespeare " in 1640. In this copy of verses 
 occur such lines as — 
 
 " Nature only led him, for look thorough 
 This whole book, thou shalt find he doth not borrow 
 One phrase from Greeks, nor Latins imitate, 
 Nor once from vulgar languages translate." 
 
 A startling declaration to find made, even in poetry, 
 concerning compositions which Judge Holmes has 
 demonstrated are crowded with classical borrowings, 
 imitations drawn from works untranslated from their 
 originals at the date when quoted ; so that it would be 
 impossible to say that the quoter found them in English 
 works and took them with no knowledge of their orig- 
 inal source ! l " Nature itself was all his art," says Ful- 
 ler, and Denham, again, asserts that "all he [Shakes- 
 peare] has was from old mother witt." 2 And Dominie 
 Ward says, to the same effect, in his diary, " I have 
 heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural witt, with- 
 out any art at all;" 3 though, of course, this was, and 
 could have been, nothing more than matter of report. 
 It is probable that, in the production of these plays, 
 William Shakespeare was not always scrupulous to 
 compose " without blotting out a line" himself. That 
 he was a reckless borrower, and scissored unconscion- 
 ably from Robert Greene and others (so much so that 
 
 1 See Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, 
 p. 5. 
 
 2 Farmer, p. 13. 
 
 V Diary of Kev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, extending 
 from 1648 to 1679," p. 183; London, 1839, p. 30. 
 
 Shakespeare took his "Taming of the Shrew" from Greene's 
 " Taming of A Shrew," there being no copyright to prevent. 
 23 
 
266 TIIE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Greene wrote a whole book in protest), we have 
 Greene's book itself to testify. From its almost 
 unintelligible pages Ave can glean some idea of the 
 turgid English of the day. It was, of course, in 
 the composition of this popular English that Shakes- 
 peare, by surpassing Greene, awakened the latter's 
 jealousy. Otherwise, there would have been no su- 
 periority in Shakespeare over Greene which Greene 
 could have perceived: or, at least, no cutting into 
 Greene's profits wherein Greene could have found 
 cause for jealousy. For, if Greene had continued to 
 earn money indifferently to whether Shakespeare car- 
 ried on his trade or not, he would not have been 
 " jealous." But so fluent and clever a fellow as this 
 William Shakespeare of Stratford, who could hold, 
 when a mere boy, his rustic audience with a speech 
 over a calf-sticking, was a dangerous rival among the 
 hackney stock-playwrights of London, and would 
 easily have made himself invaluable to his manage- 
 ment by dashing off scores of such local sketches as 
 " The Hog hath lost his Pearl/' suggested by the cur- 
 rent events of the day. 
 
 But, even if " Hamlet," " Othello," " King Lear," 
 •'Macbeth," and "Julius Csesar" could have been 
 produced by machinery, and engrossed currente calamo, 
 (so that the author's first draft should be the acting 
 copy for the players), they could have hardly been 
 composed, nowadays, without a library. And even 
 had William Shakespeare possessed an encyclopaedia 
 (such as were first invented two hundred years or so 
 after his funeral) he would not have found it inclusive 
 of all the reference he needed for those five plays alone. 
 They can not be studied as they are capable of being 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 267 
 
 studied — as they were found capable of being studied 
 by Coleridge and Gervinus — without a library. And 
 yet are we to be asked to believe they were composed 
 without one ? — in the days when such a thing as a dic- 
 tionary even was unknown ! Who ever heard of 
 William Shakespeare in his library, pulling down vol- 
 umes, dipping into folios, peering into manuscripts, his 
 brain in throe and his pen in labor, weaving the warp 
 and woof of his poetry and his philosophy, at the ex- 
 pense of Greece and Rome and Egypt; pillaging alike 
 from tomes of Norseman lore and Southern romance — 
 for the pastime of the rabble that sang bawdy songs 
 and swallowed beer amid the straw of his pit, 
 and burned juniper and tossed his journey-actors in 
 blankets ? 
 
 It is always interesting to read of the habitudes 
 of authors — of paper-saving Pope scribbling his 
 " Iliad " on the backs of old correspondence, of Spen- 
 ser by his fireside in his library at Kilcolman Castle, 
 of Scott among his dogs, of Gibbon biting at the 
 peaches that hung on the trees in his garden at Lau- 
 sanne, of Schiller declaiming by mountain brook- 
 sides and in forest paths, of Goldsmith in his garrets 
 and his jails. Even of Chaucer, dead and buried be- 
 fore Shakespeare saw the light, we read of his studies 
 at Cambridge, his call to the bar, and his chambers in 
 the Middle Temple. But of William Shakespeare — 
 after ransacking tradition, gossip, and the record — 
 save and except the statement of Ben Jonson how he 
 had heard the actor's anecdote about his never blotting 
 his lines — not a word, not a breath, can be found to 
 connect him w T ith, or surprise him in any agency or 
 employment as to the composition of the plays we 
 
268 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 insist upon calling his — much less to the possession of 
 a single hook! Did "William Shakespeare own a li- 
 brary ? Had we found this massive draught upon an- 
 tiquity in the remains of an immortal Milton or a 
 mortal Tupper, or in all the range of letters between, 
 we should not have failed to presume a library. Why 
 should we believe that William Shakespeare needed 
 none? — that, as his pen ran, he never paused to lift 
 volume from the shelf to refresh or verify his marvel- 
 ously retentive recollection ? There was no Astor or 
 Mercantile Library around the corner from the Globe 
 or the Blackfriars, in those days. And, as for his own 
 possessions, he leaves in his Will no hint of book or 
 library, much less of the literature the booksellers had 
 taken the liberty of christening with his name ! Where 
 is the scholar who glories not in his scholarship ? By 
 universal testimony, the highest pleasure which an au- 
 thor draws from his own completed work, the pride 
 of the poet in his own poem, is their chiefest payment. 
 The simple fact — which stands out so prominently in 
 the life of this man that nobody can gainsay it — that 
 William Shakespeare took neither pride nor pleasure 
 in any of the works which passed current with the 
 rest of the world as his, might well make the most 
 casual student of those days suspicious of a claim that, 
 among his other accomplishments, William Shakes- 
 peare was an author at all. 
 
 Just here we are referred to a passage in Fuller's 
 " Worthies :" " Many were the wit combats," says 
 Fuller, u between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson ; . . . 
 I beheld them," etc. But Fuller was only eight years 
 old when Shakespeare died, and possibly spoke from 
 hearsay, as it is hardly probable that an infant of such 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 269 
 
 tender years was permitted to spend his nights in 
 "The Mermaid." Besides, these "wit combats" at 
 "The Mermaid" are now said to be "wet combats," 
 i. e. drinking-bouts, by a long-adopted misprint. 
 
 As a matter of fact, unless we are misled by a typo- 
 graphical error in the edition before us, 1 what Fuller 
 
 1 The History of the Worthies of England. Endeavored by 
 Thomas Fuller, D.D. Two volumes. (First printed in 1662.) A 
 new edition, with a few Explanatory Notes by John Nichols, 
 F. A. S. London, Edinburgh, and Perth. Printed for F. C. & J. 
 Rivington and others. The reference to William Shakespeare 
 is at page 414 of volume II., and is as follows: 
 
 " WARWICKSHIRE 
 
 " WRITERS SINCE THE REFORMATION. 
 
 "William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in this 
 county, in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort to 
 be compounded. 1. Martial in the warlike sound of his surname 
 (whence some may conjecture him of a military extraction), Hasti- 
 vibrans or Shake-speare. 2. Ovid, the most naturall and witty of 
 Poets; and hence it was that Queen Elizabeth, coming into a 
 grammar school, made this extemporary verse — 
 
 " Persius a Crab-Staffe, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine Wag. 
 
 " 3. Plautus who was an exact Commedian, yet never any 
 Scholar, as one Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself. 
 Adde to all these that, though his genius generally was jocular, 
 and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be 
 solemn and serious, as appears by his Tragedies ; so that Heraclitus 
 himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might afford to smile at 
 his Comedies, they were so merry ; and Democritus scarce forbear 
 to sigh at his tragedies, they were so mournfull. 
 
 " He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, Poeta 
 non fit sed nascitur, ; One is not made but born a poet.' In- 
 deed, his learning was very little, so that as Cornish diamonds 
 are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed 
 even as they are taken out of the earth, so nature itself was all 
 the Art which was used upon him. Many were the ivet-combates 
 
270 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 did actually say was, not " wit combats/' but " wet 
 combats." But even if they were " wit combats," and 
 not friendly contests at ale-guzzling, like the early 
 tournament at "Piping Pebworth" and "Drunken 
 Bidford," the " wit " could not have been colossal, if 
 we may judge from one example preserved in the Ash- 
 molean manuscripts at Oxford, as stated by Capell. 
 " Ben " (Jonson) and " Bill " (Shakespeare) propose a 
 joint epitaph. 
 
 Ben begins : 
 
 " Here lies Ben Jonson, 
 Who was once one — " 
 
 Shakespeare concludes : 
 
 " That while he lived, was a slow thing, 
 And now, being dead, is no-thing." 
 
 This being the sort of literature which William 
 Shakespeare's pen turned out during his residence in 
 London, he could manage very well without a library. 
 And it was the most natural thing in the world that, 
 after retiring to the shade of Stratford, it should have 
 produced, on occasion, the famous epitaphs on his 
 friends Elias James aud " Thinbeard." At all events, 
 this is a simpler explanation than the " deterioration of 
 power, for which no .one has assigned a sufficient rea- 
 son," which Halliwell x was driven to assume in order 
 
 betwixt him and Ben Jonson ; which two I beheld like a Spanish 
 great gallion and an English man of war, lesser in bulk but lighter 
 in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advan- 
 tage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. He 
 died Anno Domini . . . and was buried at Stratford-upon- 
 Avon, the town of his nativity." 
 
 1 " Life of Shakespeare," p. 270. London, 1848. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 271 
 
 to account for this drivel from the pen which had 
 written " Hamlet.' And, moreover, it is a satisfactory 
 explanation of what can not be explained in any other 
 way (and which no Shakespearean has ever yet at- 
 tempted to explain at all), of the fact that William 
 Shakespeare, making his last Will and Testament at 
 Stratford, in 1515, utterly ignored the existence of any 
 literary property among his assets, or of his having 
 used his pen, at any period, in accumulating the com- 
 petency of which he died possessed. Had William 
 Shakespeare been the courtly favorite of two sover- 
 eigns (which Mr. Hallam doubts 1 ), it is curious that he 
 never was selected to write a Masqne. Masques were 
 the standard holiday diversions of the nobles of the 
 day, to which royalty was so devoted that it is said 
 the famous Inigo Jones was maintained for some years 
 in the employment of devising the trappings for them 
 alone (though, of course, it is no evidence, either way, 
 as to the matter we have in hand). But if William 
 Shakespeare was the shrewd and prosperous trades- 
 man that we have record of (and, that he came to Lon- 
 don poor and left it rich, everybody knows), was he 
 not shrewd enough, as well, to see that his audiences 
 did not require philosophical essays and historical 
 treatises; that he need not waste his midnight oil to 
 verify the customs of the early Cyprians, or pause to 
 explore for them the secrets of nature? We may as- 
 sert him to be a " great moral teacher " to-day ; but, 
 had he been a "great moral teacher" then, he would 
 have set his stage to empty houses. He could have 
 earned the same money with much less trouble to 
 
 1 Literature of Europe," vol. iii., p. 77 (note). 
 
272 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 himself. The gallants would have resorted to his stage 
 daily (as they would have gone to the baths if they 
 had been in old Rome) ; and the ha'penny seats have 
 enjoyed themselves quite as much had he given them 
 the school of " The Hog hath lost his Pearl," or 
 "The Devil is an Ass," or the tumbles of a clown. 
 Why should this thrifty manager have ransacked 
 Greek and Latin and Italian letters, the romance of 
 Italy and the Sagas of the North (or, according to Dr. 
 Farmer, rummaged the cloisters of all England, to get 
 these at second hand) ? Had these all been collected 
 in a public library, would he have had leisure to sit 
 down and pull them over for this precious, audience of 
 his, these gallants and groundlings — when his money 
 was quite as safe if he merely reached out and took 
 the nearest spectacle at hand (as he took his " Taming 
 of the Shrew," "Winter's Tale," "sea-coast of Bo- 
 hemia," and all — from Robert Greene) ? But, if we may 
 be allowed tc conceive that it was the action (that is to 
 say, the "business") of the Shakespearean plays that 
 delighted this Shakespearean audience (that filled the 
 cockpit, galleries, and boxes, while poor Ben Jonson's, 
 according to Digges, would hardly bring money enough 
 to pay for a sea-coal fire), and that certain greater than 
 the manager used this action thereafter as a dress for 
 the mighty transcripts caused to be printed under 
 voucher of the popular manager's name — if we may 
 be allowed to conceive this — however exceptional, it is 
 at least an accounting for the Shakespearean plays as 
 we possess them to-day, without doing violence to 
 human experience and the laws of nature. 
 
 Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Mont- 
 gomery are young noblemen of wealth and leisure, 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 273 
 
 who "pass away the time merely in going to plays 
 every clay/' 1 We have seen that the best seats were 
 on the stage, and these, of course, the young noble- 
 men occupied. There were no actresses in those days — 
 the female parts were taken by boys — but titled ladies 
 and maids of honor were admitted to seats on the 
 stage as well as the gallants, and a thrifty stage man- 
 ager might easily make himself useful to both. If my 
 Lord Southampton was bosom friend to William 
 Shakespeare (as rumor has it), their intimacy arose 
 probably through some such service. A noble youth 
 of nineteen, of proverbial gallantry and sufficient 
 wealth (though, it must be remembered, as among the 
 fortunes of his day, a comparatively poor man ; not 
 able to give away $25,000 at a time, for instance), was 
 not at so great a loss for a friend and alter ego in Lon- 
 don in 1593 (the date at which the " Venus and Adonis " 
 is dedicated to him) as to be forced to forget the social 
 gulf that separated him from an economical commoner 
 (lately a butcher in the provinces), however popular a 
 stage manager, except for cause; and it takes consid- 
 erable credulity to believe that he did forget it (if he 
 did), through being dazzled by the transcendent liter- 
 ary abilities of the economical commoner aforesaid. 
 For Southampton lived and died without ever being 
 suspected of a devotion to literature or literary pur- 
 
 1 " My Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland come not to the 
 court, the one but very seldom ; they pass away the time merely 
 in going to plays every day." — (Letter from Rowland White to 
 Sir Robert Sidney, dated October 11, 1599, quoted by Kenny, 
 "Life and Genius of Shakespeare." London: Longmans, 1864, 
 p. 34, note.) But it may be noted that Southampton and Ra- 
 leigh were opposed to each other in politics. 
 
274 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 suits ; and, besides, the economical commoner had not 
 then written (if he ever did write) the " Hamlet" and 
 "Lear," and those other evidences of the transcendent 
 literary ability which could sednce a peer outside his 
 caste. That the gallants and stage managers of the 
 day understood each other, just as they perhaps do to- 
 day, there is reason to believe. Dekker, in his " Gull's 
 Horn-Book," says that, " after the play was over, po- 
 ets adjourned to supper with knights, where they in 
 private unfolded the secret parts of their dramas to 
 them." By "poets" in this extract is meant, as ap- 
 pears from the context, the writers of dramas for the 
 stage; such as, perhaps, William Shakespeare was. 
 But whether these suppers after the play were devoted 
 to intellectual and philosophical criticism is a question 
 for each one's experience to aid him in answering. 
 Whether William Shakespeare was admitted to this 
 noble companionship, or was only emulous of the 
 honor, we have no means of conjecture, as either might 
 account for the fact that with his first savings he pur- 
 chased a grant of arms for his father, thus obtaining 
 not only an escutcheon, but one whole generation of 
 ancestry; a transaction which involved, says Dr. 
 Farmer, the falsehood and venality of the father, the 
 son and two kings at arms, and did not escape pro- 
 test; 1 for if ever a coat was "cut from whole cloth," 
 we may be sure that this coat-of-arms was the one. 
 
 1 A complaint must have been made from some quarter that 
 this application had no sufficient foundation, for we have, in the 
 Herald's college, a manuscript which purports to be " the answer 
 of Garter and Clarencieux, kings of arms, to a libellous scrowl 
 against certain arms supposed to be wrongfully given;" in which 
 the writers state, under the head " Shakespeare," that " the per- 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 275 
 
 Whoever wrote Hamlet's soliloquy and Antony's 
 oration might well have wri'ten the "Venus and 
 Adonis" and the " Lucrece," and was quite equal to 
 the bold stroke of describi ng the former (the most splen- 
 didly sensuous poem in an} 7 language— a poem that 
 
 son to whom it was granted had borne magistracy, and was jus- 
 tice of peace, at Stratford-upon-Avon ; he married the daughter 
 and heir of Arden, and was able to maintain that estate." The 
 whole of this transaction is involved in considerable, and, per- 
 haps, to a great extent, intentional obscurity; and it still seems 
 doubtful whether any grant was actually made in the year 1596. 
 In the year 1599, the application must have been renewed in a 
 somewhat altered form. Under that date, there exists a draft of 
 another grant, by which John Shakespeare was further to be al- 
 lowed to impale the ancient arms of Arden. In this document 
 a statement was originally inserted to the effect that "John 
 Shakespeare showed and produced his ancient coat-of-arms, here- 
 tofore assigned to him whilst he was her Majesty's officer and 
 bailiff of that town." But the words "showed and produced" 
 were afterward erased, and in this unsatisfactory manner the 
 matter appears to have terminated. 
 
 It is manifest that the entries we have quoted contain a num- 
 ber of exaggerations, one even of positive misstatements. The 
 "parents and antecessors" of John Shakespeare were not ad- 
 vanced and rewarded by Henry VII. ; but the maternal ances- 
 tors, or, more probably, some more distant relatives of William 
 Shakespeare, appear to have received some favors and distinc- 
 tions from that sovereign. The pattern of arms given, as it is 
 stated, under the hand of Clarencieux (Cooke, who was then 
 dead), is not found in his records, and we can place no faith in 
 his allegation. John Shakespeare had been a justice of the 
 peace, merely ex officio, and not by commission, as is here insin- 
 uated; in all probability he did not possess "lands and tene- 
 ments of the value of five hundred pounds ;" and Robert Arden, 
 of Wilmecote, was not a "gentleman of worship." — (Kenny, 
 " Life and Genius of Shakespeare," p. 38. London: Longmans, 
 1854.) 
 
276 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 breathes in every line the blase and salacious exquisite), 
 as the first heir of the invention of a busy London 
 manager and whilom rustic Lothario among War- 
 wickshire milkmaids. The question as to the author- 
 ship of the one hundred and fifty-four " Sonnets," 
 which appeared (with the exception of two, printed 
 in 1598, in a collection of verses called for some un- 
 suggested reason "The Passionate Pilgrim") in 1609, 
 need not enter into any anti-Shakespearean theory at 
 all. Except that one Francis Meres, writing in 1598 
 — eleven years before — had reported William Shakes- 
 peare to have circulated certain "sugared sonnets 
 among his private friends;" 1 and that the one hundred 
 and thirty -six f, h oft' e series says the author's name is 
 " Will " (the common nickname of a poet of those days), 2 
 there is nothing to connect them with William Shakes- 
 peare except his name on the title-page — in the days 
 when w r e have seen that printers put whatever name they 
 pleased or thought most vendable, upon a title-page. 
 (When the aforesaid " Passionate Pilgrim " was printed 
 in 1598 — also as by William Shakespeare — Dr. Hey- 
 wood recognized two of his own compositions incor- 
 porated in it, and promptly claimed them. " No evi- 
 dence," says Mr. Grant White, 3 in commenting on this 
 performance, " of any public denial on Shakespeare's 
 part is known to exist. It was not until the publica- 
 tion of the third edition of the poem, in 1612, that 
 William Shakespeare's name was removed.") But 
 what involves the authorship of the sonnets in still 
 
 1 Hallam does not think these are the sonnets mentioned by 
 Meres. — (" Literature of Europe," vol. hi., p. 40, note.) 
 
 2 See ante, p. 147, note. 
 
 3 " Shakespeare's Works," vol. hi., p. 77. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 277 
 
 deeper obscurity is the fact that their publisher, 
 Thomas Thorpe, himself dedicates them to a friend 
 of his own. He addresses his friend as " Mr. W. II. ," 
 and signs the dedication with his own inititials " T. T." 
 Perhaps it was just as the name "Shakespeare" was 
 fastened to the title-page of " The Passionate Pilgrim," 
 and the plays to which, as we shall notice the 
 Shakespeareans declare it never belonged, that Mr. 
 Thomas Thorpe calls, his book "Shakespeare's Son- 
 nets, never before imprinted," and makes in the pages 
 of the Stationers' Company the entry : " 20 May, 1609. 
 Tho. Thorpe. A book called Shake- speare's Sonnets." 
 They appear conjointly with a long poem entitled "A 
 Lover's Complaint," and two of them (as we have 
 said) had already been printed in " The Passionate 
 Pilgrim," published by Jaggard in 1598. This un- 
 happy dedication has been so twisted by the commen- 
 tators to serve their turns, that the only safety is to 
 print it as it stood in this first edition : 
 
 " 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 . T . T ." 
 
278 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 For a dedication composed in the turgid fashion of 
 nearly three hundred years ago, the above would seem 
 to be peculiarly intelligible. All publications were 
 ventures in those days. The printer might get his 
 money back and he might not. But, until he did, he 
 was an adventurer. So Mr. Thorpe, ya. setting forth 
 on his adventure, wishes well to his publication and 
 to some unknown patron whom he desires — as was 
 the custom — to compliment with wishes of long life 
 and happiness. At least this would seem to be the 
 reading on the face of it. To be sure, there is a slight 
 uncertainty as to whether " Mr. W. H." is dedicator 
 or dedicatee. But the moment the name of Shakes- 
 peare appears this little trouble becomes insignificant 
 — and, as usual, difficulties begin to crowd and multiply. 
 
 The title reads : " Shake-speares Sonnets never be- 
 fore imprinted : at London, by G. Eld, for T. T. And 
 are to be sold by William Apsley. 1609." 
 
 At that name the commentators appear, and swarm 
 like eagles around a carcass. 
 
 Mr. Armitage Brown, who flourished in or about 
 the year 1838, and appears to have been the first gen- 
 tleman who ever took the trouble to read them, has 
 demonstrated 1 that these sonnets are actually six 
 poems of different lengths 2 — each poem having a con- 
 sistent theme and argument (and he made this discov- 
 ery by the simple process of reading them). Can any 
 body believe that, if these six poems had been the 
 work of the mighty Shakespeare of the Shakespear- 
 
 1 " Shakespeare's Autographical Poems, being his Sonnets 
 clearly developed," etc. By Charles Armitage Brown. London: 
 James Bohn, 1838. 
 
 2 We find, however, that Coleridge had earlier advanced the 
 same theory. — Table Talk (Routledge's edition), p. 2071. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 279 
 
 eans, they would have waited until 1838 without a 
 reader ? And, most wonderful of all, that this mighty 
 poet in his own lifetime would allow six of his poems 
 to be torn up into isolated stanzas by a printer, stirred 
 together and run into type hap-hazard, and sold as his 
 " Sonnets ?" The Sbakespeareans tell us sometimes of 
 their William's utter indifference to fame, but they 
 have never claimed for him an imperturbability quite 
 so stolid as this. And while we could not well im- 
 agine Mr. Tennyson regarding with complaisance a 
 publisher who would print his " Maud," " Locksley 
 Hall," " Lady Clara," etc., each verse standing by itself, 
 and calling the whole " Mr. Tennyson's Sonnets," so 
 we fancy even Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, had he 
 been their author, would have thought the printers 
 were going a little too far. 
 
 But, all the same, the Shakespeareans, Mr.Armitage 
 Brown among the rest, are determined that these son- 
 nets shall be Shakespeare's and nobody else's, and 
 proceed to tell us who " Mr. W. H." (to whom Mr. 
 Thorpe, at William Shakespeare's request — as if the 
 the man who wrote the sonnets could not write a 
 dedication of them — dedicated them) is. Certain of 
 them believe the letters " W. H." to be a transposition 
 of " H. W.," in which case they might stand for 
 "Henry Wriothesley," Earl of Southampton. Mr. 
 Boaden and two Mr. Browns 1 read them, as they stand, 
 to mean William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (in either 
 case accounting for William Shakespeare addressing 
 an earl as " Mr." — which may mean " Mister' or " Mas- 
 
 1 Shakespeare's Autographical Poems." By Charles Armitage 
 Brown. London, 1838. " The Sonnets of Shakespeare solved," 
 etc. By Henry Brown. London, 1870. 
 
280 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 ter " — on the score of earl and commoner having 
 been the closest of " chums "). A learned French- 
 man, M. Chasles, has conjectured that Thomas Thorpe 
 wrote the first half of the dedication, including the 
 " Mr. W. H.," and William Shakespeare the second 
 half (including, perhaps, though M. Chasles does not 
 say so, the " T. T.") One equally learned German 
 (Herr Bernsclorff) suggests that "W. H." means 
 " William Himself," and that the great Shakespeare 
 meant to dedicate these poems to his own personality 
 (as George Wither, in 1611, dedicated his satirical 
 poems, " G. W. wisheth himself all happiness;") and 
 another supposes Shakespeare to have been in love 
 with a negress, " black but comely," like the lady of 
 the Canticles. Yet another, that this dark lady typi- 
 fied " Dramatic art," the Roman Catholic church, etc., 
 etc. Mr. Dowden will have it that Shakespeare and 
 Spenser, and Minto that Shakespeare and Chapman 
 were rivals for the lady's favor. And there have been 
 other and even more puerile speculations put gravely 
 forth by these same learned and venerable commenta- 
 tors : such as, since the word " Hewes " (in the line, "A 
 man in Hewes all Hewes in his controlling"), is spelled 
 with a capital letter, that, therefore, " W. H." is Wil- 
 liam Hewes (whoever he might have been). Wads- 
 worth believes that these sonnets were the repository 
 of the real emotions of William Shakespeare, as a 
 relief to long simulation of other people's emotions 
 in his dramas ; while Mr. William Thompson 1 believes 
 them to be The Sonnett, which Bacon mentions writ- 
 
 1 The Eenascence Drama, or History made Visible. By "Wil- 
 liam Thompson, F. K. C. S., F. L. S. Melbourne: Sands & Mc- 
 Dougal, Collins street, West, 1880, p. 113, et seq. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 281 
 
 ing in or about 1598, saying: "It happened a little 
 before that time that her Majesty had a purpose to 
 dine at Twickenham Park, at which time I had 
 (though I profess not to be a poet) prepared a sonnet, 
 directly tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's 
 reconcilement to my lord, which I remember I also 
 showed to a great person," etc. Now, Mr. Thompson 
 believes that this " great person " was William Her- 
 bert, who read them among the friends of the putative 
 author — was, in short, the " W. H." Mr. Thompson 
 points out that, if these sonnets are not Bacon's Son- 
 net, the latter has never been found, among Bacon's 
 papers or elsewhere. 
 
 If these are the sonnets distributed by William 
 Shakespeare among his private friends — of which 
 Meres seems to have known in 1598 — there would be 
 this historical difficulty in connecting them with Lord 
 Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, viz : In the 
 Sydney Papers 1 is preserved a letter from Rowland 
 White to Sir Robert Sydney, in which the writer 
 says : " My Lord Herbert hath, with much ado, brought 
 his father to consent that he may live at London, but 
 not before the next spring." This letter is dated April 
 19, 1597. " The next spring " would be 1598, the very 
 year in which Meres speaks of these sonnets as in ex- 
 istence among William Shakespeare's friends. Of 
 course, they might have been afterwards collected and 
 dedicated by their author. But at the time they were 
 so collected, Lord Herbert was Earl Pembroke, and 
 was surely not then, if he had ever been (which he had 
 
 1 Vol. II., p. 43. 
 24 
 
282 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 not), plain " Mr. W. H." In other words, if the son- 
 nets were William Shakespeare's, he must either have 
 dedicated them to a stranger — a boy at Oxford — or 
 have waited until that boy had become of age and an 
 earl, and then dedicated them to him: in either case 
 by a title not his own. In the absence of explanation, 
 nowadays, we would be obliged to regard such a ded- 
 ication an insult rather than a compliment. And men 
 were at least no less punctilious about titles in the age 
 of Elizabeth than they are to-day. 
 
 It is interesting, in this connection, to note that in 
 1595, and while young Lord Herbert was at Oxford, a 
 play, " Edward III.," was entered in the register of 
 the Stationers' Company. In both this play and in 
 Sonnett XCIY. occur the line, 
 
 " Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." 
 
 Were there any means of ascertaining in which the 
 line is original and in which quotation, it might be of 
 aid in solving this question of authorship. But, un- 
 happily, none are at hand. 
 
 Mr. Niel believes that " W. H." means " William 
 Hathaway," Shakespeare's brother-in-law, and that 
 " onlie begetter" of these sonnets means " only collec- 
 tor;" (going into considerable philology to make good 
 his assertion), and that Hathaway collected his broth- 
 er-in-law's manuscripts and carried them to Thorpe. 
 Mr. Massey has, for his part, constructed a tremendous 
 romance out of the sonnets, 1 in which " W. H." means 
 
 1 Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before interpreted. London, 
 1866. Vide, a volume " Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare, 
 showing that they belong to the Hermetic class of writings, and 
 explaining their general meaning and purpose." New York: 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 283 
 
 William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. But all these 
 commentators alike agree to ignore the fact that Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare did not dedicate the sonnets to any 
 body, or, so far as we know, procure Thomas Thorpe 
 to do so for him. A poem, " The Phoenix and the 
 Turtle," is sometimes bound up with these, described 
 as " Verses among the Additional Poems to Love's 
 Martyr ; or, Rosalin's Complaint," printed in 1601, but 
 nobody knows by what authority, except that pub- 
 lishers have got into the habit of doing so. 
 
 Then, again, anonymous authorship was a fashion- 
 able pastime among the gallants and the gentle of 
 this Elizabethan day, and joint authorship a familiar 
 feature in Elizabethan letters. It is said that the great 
 dramas we call Shakespeare's so persistently nowadays, 
 and which began to appear unheralded at about this 
 time, bear internal traces of courtly and aristocratic 
 authorship. The diction is stately and sedate. 'No 
 peasant-born author could have assumed and sus- 
 tained so haughty a contempt for every thing below 
 a baronet (for only at least that grade of humanity — 
 it is said by those who have carefully examined the 
 drama in this view 1 — does any virtuous or praiseworthy 
 attribute appear in a Shakespearean character: while 
 every thing below is exceedingly comic and irre- 
 sistible, but still " base, common, and popular"). If 
 certain noblemen of the court proposed amusing them- 
 selves at joint anonymous authorship, they were cer- 
 tainly right in concluding that the name of a living 
 
 James Miller, 1866. Printed "Anonymous," but written by 
 Judge E. A. Hitchcock. 
 
 1 Mr. Wilkes' Shakespeare from an American Point of View. 
 New York: Appletons, 1876. 
 
284 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 man, in their own pay, was a safer disguise than a 
 pseudonym which would challenge curiosity and spec- 
 ulation. At least — so say the New Theorists — such 
 has turned out to he the actual fact. It is the New 
 Theory that, while in employment in the theater, 
 William Shakespeare was approached by certain gen- 
 tlemen of the court. Perhaps their names were South- 
 ampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery, 
 and possibly among them was a needy and ambitious 
 scholar named Bacon, who, with an eye to preferment, 
 maintained their society by secret recourse to the Jews 
 or to any thing that would put gold for the day in 
 his purse. Possibly they desired to be unknown, for 
 the reasons given by Miss Bacon. In what they asked 
 of him, and what he did for them, he found, at any 
 rate, his profit. The story goes that the amount 
 of profit he realized from one of these gentlemen alone 
 was no less a sum than a thousand pounds. If so — 
 considering the buying power of pounds in those 
 days — it is not so wonderful that, at this rate, 
 William Shakespeare retired with a fortune. Even 
 at its most and its best, it is an infinitely small 
 percentum of the world's wealth that finds its 
 way into the poet's pocket; poetasters are some- 
 times luckier than poets. That William Shakes- 
 peare's fortune came faster than the fortune of his 
 fellows we do know. This was at once the most se- 
 cure and the most lucrative use he could have made 
 of his name. For, as we have seen, owing to the condi- 
 tion of the common law, while he could hardly have 
 protected himself against any piracy of his name by 
 injunction, he might have loaned it for value to the 
 printers, or to any one desirous of employing it, the 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 285 
 
 risk of piracy to be the borrower's. If these noble gen- 
 tlemen desired to write political philosophy — as Miss 
 Bacon believed, or belles lettres for their own pleas- 
 ure — they had their opportunity now; and the new 
 theory is not inconsistent, either with the Delia Bacon 
 theory or with the Baconian theory proper, as elabo- 
 rated by Judge Holmes, who recognizes Bacon's pen 
 so constantly throughout the dramas. The same dif- 
 ficulties which those theories meet would still confront 
 us if, as Mr. Boucicault and others have suggested, the 
 plays were offered from lesser sources, and rewritten 
 entirely by William Shakespeare ; for we should still 
 be obliged to ask, How did he dare to retain in the 
 plays the material which, unintelligible to him, he 
 must have believed to be unintelligible to his audi- 
 ences, as calculated to drive them away, rather than 
 to attract them ? 
 
 Any one of these schemes of assimilated author- 
 ship seems at least to tally with the evidence from 
 what we know as the "doubtful plays." In 1609, 
 there appeared in London an anonymous publica- 
 tion — a play entitled " Troilus and Cressida." It 
 was accompanied by a preface addressed, "A never 
 writer to an ever reader/' which, in the turgid fashion 
 of the day, set forth the merit and attractions of the 
 play itself. Among its other claims to public favor, 
 this preface asserted the play to be one "never stal'd 
 with the stage, never claperclawed with the palms of 
 the vulgar" — which seems (in English) to mean that 
 it had never been performed in a theater. But, how- 
 ever virgin on its appearance in print, it seems to 
 have very shortly become "staled with the stage," or, 
 at any rate, with a stage name, for, a few months later, 
 
286 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 a second edition of the play (printed from the same 
 type) appears, minus the preface, but with the an- 
 nouncement on the title-page that this is the play of 
 " Troilus aud Cressida, as it was enacted by the King's 
 Majesty his servants at the Globe. Written by William 
 Shakespeare" 1 Now, unless we can imagine William 
 Shakespeare — while operating his theater — writing a 
 play to be 'published in print — and announcing it as en- 
 titled to public favor on the ground that it had never 
 been polluted by contact with so unclean and unhoty 
 a place as a theater, it is hard to escape the conviction 
 that he was not the "never writer" — in other words, 
 that he was not its author at all — but on its appear- 
 ance in print, levied on it for his stage, underlined it, 
 produced it, and — it proving a success — either himself 
 announced it, or winked at its announcement by others, 
 as a work of his own. 
 
 Again, in 1600, a play was printed in London enti- 
 tled " Sir John Oldcastle ;" in 1605, one entitled " The 
 London Prodigal ;" in 1608, one entitled " The York- 
 shire Tragedy ;" in 1609, one entitled " Pericles, Prince 
 of Tyre;" and, at about the same time, certain others, 
 viz: " The Arraignment of Paris;" "Arden of Fever- 
 sham" (a very able work, by the way); "Edward 
 III. ;" " The Birth of Merlin ;" " Fair Em, the Miller's 
 Daughter;" "Mucedorus;" " The Merry Devil of Ed- 
 monton ;*' "The Comedy of George a Green;" and 
 "The Two Noble Kinsmen." All the above pur- 
 ported, and were understood to be, and were sold as 
 being, works of William Shakespeare, except " The 
 Merry Devil of Edmonton," which was announced as 
 
 1 Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, pp. 
 144-147. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 287 
 
 by Shakespeare and Kowley, and "The Two Noble 
 Kinsmen," as by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Now, it 
 is certainly a fact that William Shakespeare, from his 
 box-office at the Globe, or from his country-seat at Strat- 
 ford, never corroborated the printers by admitting,or 
 contradicted them by denying his authorship of any of 
 the above enumerated plays. The " Hamlet" had been 
 previously published in or about 1603, and the "Lu- 
 crece" had made its appearance in 1594. It is cer- 
 tainly a fact that none of these — from "Hamlet" to 
 "Fair Em," from "Lucrece" to "The Merry Devil of 
 Edmonton " — did William Shakespeare ever either 
 deny or claim as progeny of his. He fathered them 
 all as they came, " and no questions asked." And, had 
 Mr. Ireland been on hand with his " Vortigern," it 
 might have gone in with the rest, with no risk of the 
 scrutiny and the scholarship which exploded it so 
 disastrously in 1796. No plays, bearing the name 
 of William Shakespeare on their title-page, now ap- 
 peared from 1609 to 1622. But in the year 1623, seven 
 years after William Shakespeare's death, a folio of 
 thirty-six plays is brought out by Heminges and 
 Condell, entitled " The Works of Mr. William Shakes- 
 peare." Of the many plays which had appeared dur- 
 ing his life, and been circulated and considered as his, 
 or of which mention can (according to the Shakes- 
 peareans) be anywhere found, only twenty-six ap- 
 peared in this folio, while ten plays are included which 
 never appear to have been seen or heard of until their 
 presence in this Heminges and Condell collection. 
 The Shakespeareans allow that this is " mysterious," 
 but precisely the same "mystery" would have been 
 discovered in the days of Heminges and Condell them- 
 
288 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 selves, if it had been worth the while of anybody then 
 living to look into the question. Nothing has hap- 
 pened, since the death of William Shakespeare, to 
 make the Shakespeare question any more " mysteri- 
 ous " than he left it himself. 
 
 To make this apparent at a glance, let us present 
 the whole in a tabulated statement, only asking the 
 reader to observe that we have in every case given the 
 Shakespeareans the benefit of the doubt, and accepted 
 the mention of a similar name of any play as proof 
 positive of its being the play nowadays attributed to 
 William Shakespeare ; and their own chronology 
 everywhere. 
 
 The following table shows the plays passing as Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare's, in London, in the years when he 
 resided in London, as part proprietor and concerned 
 in the management of the Globe and Blackfriars 
 Theaters; the dates of their earliest mention or ap- 
 pearance, and which of them were included in the 
 first folio, edited by Heminges and Condell, in 1623: 
 on the supposition that the plays mentioned by Meres 
 (of which, however, no other traces can be found, 
 during William Shakespeare's life), besides those named 
 in Manningham's and For man's diaries, and the "Ac- 
 count of the Eevels at Court," are the identical plays 
 now included in the Shakespearean drama. The dates 
 are Mr. Grant White's. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 
 
 289 
 
 fR 
 
 R.2 
 
 o 
 
 
 A « •'d 
 
 £.23 d 
 
 >>> 
 
 CD -^ cS 
 
 £-d d^ 3 
 - d** =3 
 
 60 60 60 £.2 d? §- ra toa 
 
 .5.2 ~Z^~~£ Z~& 
 
 
 d q_t 
 
 pj o 
 
 "£d 
 
 >>.d, 
 OH 
 
 .Q d £ u 
 
 .3 BO g W 
 
 O - BO 
 
 3 ^ f-lr-H 
 
 "S 2 "5 8 
 M-M-rH ad 
 
 'd. -^ 
 
 * a> eS O 
 
 >* -j - 
 
 '/• 
 
 »j 
 
 
 ._« 
 
 
 S- 
 
 
 0) 
 
 S3 
 
 
 o 
 
 - 
 - 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 d 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 v. 
 
 33 
 
 O 60 
 
 
 p- 
 
 
 m 
 
 a 
 
 
 U 
 
 ca 
 
 _ 
 
 a 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 ir d 
 
 15 
 
 
 03 
 
 
 33 
 
 +3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 • 
 
 7" 
 
 ■s. 
 
 r. 
 
 f- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i— i 
 
 D 
 
 4-j 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 > 
 
 N 
 
 
 
 +j m G d c 
 
 !_ ^ -- »H 
 
 oo tc oc to 
 
 7". y. /. s; tc K SI til Ol 
 
 fCCO.-d 
 
 (1) 0) CD 
 
 +3 +J +J 
 
 ^- — -■ 
 
 CD O CD 
 GQ CO CO 
 
 o o 
 co a! 
 
 d d 
 
 fn u u 
 
 o o o 
 
 co to 02 
 
 c d c 
 
 *■ 
 
 'C'd 'C T3 
 
 CD CD 0> CD 
 +i *— -u -u 
 U 5h t-i S-< 
 O CD O O 
 
 CO CO CO 03 
 
 d d d d 
 
 P 
 
 l'irXXX'WCONCOMMNCCOOMOOOHOl.OOMffiNXMCl'fN'XONClOOHHOOOOO 
 
 aioiaioiaaoiaaiaQaaiaciooooooooooooooooHOOOHriooooo 
 
 W W u~ l~ i_t lO L.O i-C uO O i-O lO l" LO iO CO CO «o co co to to to to to CO CO' CO — — — CO CO CO CO CO CO CO CO CO CO CO 
 THr^rHrHrHi^r-Hi— li—lr-lrHi— li— ii-Hi— It— li— (i— Ii—(t— li— It— lr-(i—li-Hi-H!—<-^»-'r- ,, -(r-li— It— It— li— irHiHrHi— 1 r— 1 i— * 
 
 t-i'd 
 7i 13 
 
 d d 
 
 >- CO G 
 
 >~d 
 
 C.2- 
 cc d 
 
 rtT ^H 
 
 O-h o 
 
 S3 23 si^ 
 
 2 2 d- 
 > .2Gi , 
 •^"tf +■» 
 co d to 
 
 p fl) ^" 
 
 s3 
 
 g.g»g 
 
 03 
 
 +3 
 
 05 
 
 CD 
 
 :Ph o 
 
 J-i s3^ 
 
 ■ o d" 
 
 CD St) 
 
 r- CD 
 7j 
 
 O 
 
 .2 • ^ 
 ctf|« 
 
 Ph fcSfeti*^ Oh 
 
 fe< 
 
 -^coO 
 
 50 
 
 d ob S .d BQ , 
 -^ 1 Sao £j • 
 
 
 S3 
 CD CD 
 
 CO CD, 
 
 C O -- C CD CD 
 
 4: - '-d •- ^ O ^ 
 ^ si d c ci^ 
 
 d ^ to d c tc ,- H 
 ttH S 03 d S © Xi 
 
 . d '- -5 
 
 d ce 
 
 S3 S3 
 
 u '-i 
 
 d d 
 
 CD 'J 
 
 fe+3 
 
 2Ss1og 
 
 63 
 60 
 
 - o 
 
 M 
 
 O^^^^hC-iI 
 
 — rj+a — 
 
 
 > CD 2 >» = 
 ti CO 
 
 >^d 
 
 Seh 
 
 25 
 
 >. >>,3 ^ <^ 6t5n d 2 
 
 _ ^ I_ ^ O _ "- 1 „ O ^ 
 
 o5»2 2 "^dS dt:^ 
 
 6t bo tW= 2 -r ^ '-'^ 2 "d ^ .d -5 "g ■* 2 cf : « ^ 
 
 ■S-"-BtJjd^^©^oQ*SdoS^©-i=iSo3 
 
 WW^SHSrHaH^WDHCU^<<HS«<<^ 
 
 CO 
 
 CD 
 
 SdS 
 
 L| co so 
 
 13 sS 
 
 m« d (> 03 
 
 > bo e 
 
 -^ 
 
 CD 
 
 60 . 
 
 Sj CtJ 
 
 C ' 
 03 
 
 t£ 
 
 QO oo +» kj 
 
 2 r-i ai S <d 
 
 d°" 
 
 03^ 
 
 - o -- - — 
 c 03 t-t-% °53 
 
 fcr-< d"~ 
 
 MM 
 
 
 ^r 
 
 2> 
 
 Q O tl 
 
 dO^^tD.rt^ctJxj^c^^^f^^dCD 
 
 C3h>h<<hSW<<SchE-(<<HchHSHSS 
 
 r- C- 1 ' 
 
 .d o ^ >' 
 
 CD Q+J CD C3 2 ^ 
 S* rH _^ ^. > ft-i 
 
290 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 A play called "Duke Humphrey/' attributed to 
 Shakespeare, was amongst the dramatic manuscripts 
 destroyed by the carelessness of Warburton's servant, 
 in the early part of the last century, as appears by the 
 list preserved in the British Museum — MS. Lans- 
 downe, 849. 
 
 Leaving out these plays mentioned by Meres, we 
 then have twenty-one entirely new plays, which never 
 appeared in William Shakespeare's life, first appear- 
 ing in Heminges and Condell's edition. 
 
 It appearing, then, that, of some forty-two plays 
 credited to William Shakespeare during his lifetime, 
 Heminges and Condell selected only twenty-five, and 
 printed and bound up with those twenty-five nine 
 plays which nobody had ever heard of in print or on 
 the stage or any where else, until William Shakespeare 
 had been dead and in his grave seven years, besides 
 the " Othello," which was first heard of five years 
 after his death : it follows either that Heminges and 
 Condell knew that William Shakespeare was in the 
 habit of allowing plays to be called by his name which 
 he never wrote, or that Heminges and Condell's collec- 
 tion of " Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, His- 
 tories, and Tragedies, published according to the true 
 original copies," is nothing more or less than a col- 
 lection of plays written prior to the year 1623, and 
 not earlier than the reign of Elizabeth. The Shakes- 
 pearean® may take either horn of the dilemma they 
 please. " Pericles," one of the plays rejected by Hem- 
 inges and Condell has since been restored to favor, 
 and no editor now omits it. Surely, under the cir- 
 cumstances, we are justified in asking the question: 
 " If William Shakespeare ever wrote any plays or 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 291 
 
 poems, which of the above did he write, and which 
 are 'doubtful?'" 
 
 Whether the hand that wrote the "Hamlet" also 
 composed the " Fair Em;" or the classicist who pro- 
 duced the " Julius Csesar " and the " Coriolanus " at 
 about the same time achieved " The Merry Devil " 
 and " The London Prodigal," is a question lying 
 within that sacred, peculiar realm of "criticism" 
 which has "established" and forever "proved" so 
 many wonderful things about " our Shakespeare " — a 
 realm beyond our purview in these pages, and 
 wherein we should be a trespasser. Fortunately, 
 however, the question has been settled for us by those 
 to whom criticism is not ultra vires, and may safely be 
 said to be at rest now and forever. The burden of the 
 judgment of the whole critical world is of record 
 that the only true canon of "William Shakespeare" 
 consists of the plays first brought together in one book 
 by Heminges and Condell, plus the "Pericles;" and 
 that certain of the above-mentioned plays, known to 
 have been published under the name of William 
 Shakespeare are " spurious ;" that, during the lifetime 
 of William Shakespeare, and in the city where he 
 dwelt — under his very nose, that is to say — divers and 
 sundry plays did appear from time to time which he 
 did not write, but which he fathered. Whether, in 
 pure philanthrophy and charity, he regarded these as 
 little Japhets in search of a father, and so, pitying 
 their abandoned and derelict condition, assumed their 
 paternity, or, whether he took advantage of their bas- 
 tardy for mere selfish and ill-gotten gain, the criti- 
 cal world - find it unprofitable to speculate. But 
 there can be no reasonable doubt that, in London in 
 
292 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 the days of Elizabeth, in the name of " William 
 Shakespeare " there was much the same sort of com- 
 mon trade-mark as exists, in Cologne, in the days of 
 Victoria, in the name " Jean Maria Farina" — that it 
 was at everybody's service. And if William Shakes- 
 peare farmed out his name to playwrights, just as the 
 only original Farina farms out his to makers of. 
 the delectable water of Cologne, wherein shall we 
 find fault? If, two hundred years after, a lesser Sir 
 Walter of Abbotsford, be acquitted of moral obliquity 
 in denying his fatherhood of " Waverly," for the sake 
 of the offspring, surely the elastic ethics of authorship, 
 for the sake of the great book, will stretch out far 
 enough to cover the case of a Shakespeare, who neither 
 affirmed nor denied, but only held his peace ! William 
 Shakespeare, at least in the days when Lord Coke says 
 that a play-actor was, in contemplation of law, a vag- 
 abond and a tramp, 1 never had to shift for his living. 
 He always had money to spend, and money to lend, 
 in the clays when we know many of his contemporaries 
 in the theatrical and dramatic line were " in continued 
 and utter extremity, willing to barter exertion, name, 
 and fame for the daily dole that gets the daily dinner." 2 
 Of all the co-managers — and, among them, one Bur- 
 bage was the Booth or Forrest of his clay — William 
 Shakespeare is the only one whose pecuniary success 
 enables him to retire to become a landed gentleman 
 with a purchased " Esquire " to his name. 
 
 1 " The fatal end," he says, " of these five is beggary — the al- 
 oherayst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer, and the 
 poetaster." A " play-actor," he elsewhere affirms, was a fit sub- 
 ject for the grand jury, as a " vagrant." 
 
 2 "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852, p. 88. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 293 
 
 No wonder Robert Greene, a well-known* con- 
 temporary actor, but " who led the skeltering life pe- 
 culiar to his trade," and who had either divined or 
 shared the secret of the " Shakespearean " dramas, 
 raised his voice in warning of the masquerade in bor- 
 rowed plumes! "Was "William Shakespeare a shrewd 
 masquerader, who covered his tracks so well that the 
 search for a fragment of Shakespearean manuscript or 
 holograph, which has been as thorough and ardent as 
 ever was search for the philosopher's stone, has been 
 unable to unearth them? Certainly no scrap or mor- 
 sel has been found. The explanation of all this mys- 
 tery, according to the New Theory, is of very little 
 value, except in so far as it throws light upon what 
 otherwise seems inexplicable, namely, that these mag- 
 nificent philosophical dramas (which are more pre- 
 cious in our libraries as text-book and poems than as 
 stage shows wherewith to pass an idle evening in our 
 enlightened day) should have been popular with the 
 coarse audiences of the times from which they date. 
 But, if, to conceal their real authors, these magnificent 
 productions were simply sent out under a name that 
 was at every body's disposal, the discovery is of ex- 
 ceeding interest. From the lofty masterpiece of the 
 " Hamlet" to what M. Taine calls "a debauch of im- 
 agination . . . which no fair and frail dame in 
 London would be without " * — the " Yen us and 
 Adonis " — it was immaterial what they printed as 
 his, so this William Shakespeare earned his fee for 
 his silence. As for young Southampton — then just 
 turned of nineteen — his part in the covert work of the 
 
 1 Crawley, quoted by Taine, " English Literature," book ii., 
 chapter iv. 
 
294 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 junta»might, and, indeed, seems to have been, the ac- 
 cepting of the famous dedication. That a rustic 
 butcher-lad should, while holding horses at the door 
 of a city theater, produce as "the first heir of his in- 
 vention " — the very first thing he turned his pen to — 
 so maturely voluptuous a poem as the u Venus and 
 Adonis," would be a miracle, among all the other 
 miracles, not to be lost sight of. 
 
 We believe that historical and circumstantial evi- 
 dence alone is adequate to settle or even to disturb 
 this Shakespearean question ; for it appears to be the 
 unanimous verdict of criticism that the style of Bacon 
 and the style of " Shakespeare " are as far apart as 
 the poles. Experts have even gone so far as to reduce 
 both to a " euphonic test," 2 and pronounce it impossi- 
 ble that the two could have been written by the same 
 hand. But this is not very valuable as evidence; for 
 never, we think, can mere expert evidence be of itself 
 sufficient as to questions of forgery of authorship any 
 more than of autograph. If mere literary style had 
 been all the evidence accessible, our Shakespeareans 
 would have been making oath to the Ireland forgeries 
 to-day as stoutly as when, in the simplicity of their 
 hearts, they swore the impromptus of a boy of eighteen 
 surpassed any thing in " Hamlet " or Holy Writ. 
 Even Mr. Spedding, who ignores any " Baconian 
 Theory," in writing the life of Bacon, admits that 
 whenever a literary doubt has to be decided by the 
 test of style, " the reader must be allowed to judge for 
 himself." It was only by just such circumstantial evi- 
 dence as has been grouped in these papers (such as the 
 
 2 Wilkes's "Shakespeare from an American point of view," 
 Part III. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 295 
 
 Elizabethan orthography and philology — the use of 
 Roman instead of Arabic numerals, etc.) that the Ire- 
 land imposture was exploded. Forgery is the imita- 
 tion of an original, and, if the original be inimitable, 
 there can surely be no forgery. In the case of forgery 
 of a signature, lawyers and experts know that the 
 nearer the imitation, the more easy is it detectable; 
 for no man writes his own name twice precisely alike, 
 and, if two signatures attributed to the same hand are 
 found to be foe similes, and, on being superimposed 
 against the light, match each other in every detail, it 
 is irrefutable evidence that one is intentionally simu- 
 lated. 1 In the case of literary style, however, we are 
 deprived of this safeguard, because, the more nearly 
 exact the counterfeit, the more easilv the critic is de- 
 ceivecl. Pope was not afraid to entrust whole sections 
 of the paraphrase he called the " Odyssy of Homer," 
 just as Michael Aug el o did his frescoes, to journey- 
 workmen — and not a critic has ever been able to pro- 
 nounce, or even guess, which was Pope and which 
 was Pope's apprentice; and not only the Chatterton, 
 Ireland, and Macpherson forgeries, but the history of 
 merely sportive imitation and parody prove that lit- 
 erary style is any thing but inimitable ; that, in fact, 
 it requires no genius, and very little cleverness to 
 counterfeit it. 2 'Nov is — what is incessantly appealed 
 
 1 Hunt versus Lawless, New York Superior Court, November, 
 1879. And see, also, Moore versus United States, 2 Otto, United 
 States, 270. Criminal Law Journal, Jersey City, N. J., March, 
 1881. Art, " Calligraphy and the Whittaker Case." 
 
 2 The curious reader is referred to " Supercheries Literaries, 
 Pastiches, etc.," one of the unique labors of the late M. Delapierre. 
 London, Triibner & Co., 1872. 
 
296 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 to — "the internal evidence of the plays themselves " 
 of any particular value to the end in view. Were the 
 question before us, " Was the author of these works 
 a poet, statesman, philosopher, lawyer?" etc., etc., this 
 internal evidence would be, indeed, invaluable. But 
 it is not. The question is not lohat, but who, was the 
 author. Was his family name " Shakespeare," and 
 was he christened " William " ? The Shakespearean 
 has been allowed to confound these questions, and to 
 answer them together, until they have become as in- 
 separable as Demosthenes and his pebble-stones. But, 
 once separated, it is manifest that tbe internal evidence 
 drawn from the works themselves, however satisfac- 
 tory as to the one question, is utterly incompetent as 
 to the other, and that it is by purely external — that is 
 to say, by circumstantial evidence, by history, and by 
 the record — that the question before us must be an- 
 swered, if, indeed, it ever is to be answered at all. 
 And, therefore, it is by circumstantial evidence alone, 
 we think, that literary imposture can be satisfactorily 
 exposed. Neither can we trust to internal evidence 
 alone; for an attempt to write the biography of Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare by means of the internal evidence 
 of the Shakespearean plays, has inevitably resulted 
 in the questions we have already encountered: was 
 Shakespeare a lawyer, was Shakespeare a physician — 
 a natural philosopher — a chemist — a botanist — a classi- 
 cal scholar — a student of contemporary life and man- 
 ners — an historian — a courtier — an aristocrat — a bib- 
 licist — a journeyman printer, and the rest! — and in 
 giving us the fairy stories of Mr. Knight and Mr. De 
 Quincy in place of the truth we crave. For we can 
 not close our eyes to the fact that history very decid- 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 297 
 
 edly negatives the idea that William Shakespeare, of 
 Stratford, was either a lawyer, a physician, a courtier, 
 a philosopher, an aristocrat, or a soldier. Moreover, 
 while the internal evidence is fatal to the Shakespear- 
 ean theory, it preponderates in favor of the Baconians,' 
 for, when we should ask these questions concerning 
 Francis Bacon, surely the answer of history would be, 
 Yes — yes, indeed; all this was Francis Bacon. The 
 minute induction of his new and vast philosophy did 
 not neglect the analysis of the meanest herb or the 
 humblest fragment of experimental truth that could 
 minister to the comfort or the health of man. And 
 where else, in the range of letters — except in the 
 Shakespearean works, where kings and clowns alike 
 take their figures of speech from the analogies of na- 
 ture — is the parallel of all this faithful accumulation 
 of detail and counterfeit handwriting of Mature ? The 
 great ex-chancellor had stooped to watch even the 
 " red-hipped humble-bee" and the " small gray-coated 
 gnat." Had the busy manager been studying them as 
 well ? His last act on earth was to alight from his car- 
 riage to gather handfuls. of snow r , to ascertain if snow 
 could be utilized to prevent decomposition of dead 
 flesh ; and it is related that, in his dying moments — 
 for the very act precipitated the fever of which he died 
 — he did not forget to record that the experiment 
 had succeeded " excellently well." From these to 
 lordly music, 1 and in all the range between, no 
 science had escaped Francis Bacon. Had the busy 
 
 1 Ulrici, p. 248, book ii, Chapter vi., refers to "Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona," Act 1, 8c. 2. as proving that the author of that play 
 " possessed in an unusual degree the power of judging and un- 
 derstanding the theory of music." 
 
298 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 manager followed or preceded the philosopher's 
 footsteps, step by step, up through them all? And 
 did he pause in his conception or adaptation of a play, 
 pen in hand, to take a trip to Italy, or a run-up into 
 Scotland to get the name of a hostelry or the topog- 
 raphy of a highway, to make it an encyclopaedia as well 
 as a play as he went along? If the manager alone 
 was the author of these works, there is, we have seen, 
 no refuge from this conviction. But, if, as is the New 
 Theory, those plays were amplified for the press by a 
 learned hand, perhaps, after all, he was the stage man- 
 ager, actor, and human being that history asserts him 
 to have been. If, as has been conjectured, William 
 Shakespeare sketched the clowns and wenches with 
 which these statelv dramas are relieved, it would ac- 
 count for the supposed Warwickshire source of many 
 of them. And if William Shakespeare was pretty 
 familiar with the constabulary along his route between 
 home and theater, so often traveled by himself and 
 jolly coetaneans with heads full of Marian Hackett's 
 ale, and thought some of them good enough to put 
 into a play, his judgment has received the approval 
 of many audiences beside those of the Bankside and 
 Blackfriars. The Shakespearean plays, as now per- 
 formed in our theaters, are the editions of Cibber, Gar- 
 rick, Kemble, Kean, Macready, Booth, Irving, and 
 others, and, while preserving still the dialogues which 
 passed, perhaps, through Shakespeare's hands, retain 
 no traces of his industry, once so valuable to the Globe 
 and Blackfriars, but now rejected asunsuited to the exi- 
 gencies of the modern stage. The " business " inserted 
 in them by William Shakespeare's editorship has long 
 since been rejected. Little as there is of the man of 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 299 
 
 Stratford in our libraries, there is still less of him in 
 our theaters in 1881. But the world still retains the 
 honest Dogberry, who lived at Grendon, in Bucks, on 
 the road from London to Stratfordtown, and doubtless 
 many more of the witty manager's master strokes. 
 At least, the "New Theory" and the "Delia Bacon 
 Theory " coincide in this, that William Shakespeare 
 was fortunate in the manuscripts brought to him, and 
 grew rich in making plays out of them and matching 
 them to his spectacles. 
 
 Such, briefly sketched, are the theories concern- 
 ing these glorious transcripts of the age of Elizabeth, 
 which, while two centuries of literature between is ob- 
 solete and moribund, are yet unwithered and unstaled, 
 and the most priceless of all the treasuries of the age 
 of Victoria. And yet, there seems to be a feeling that 
 any exploration after their authorship is a sacrilege, 
 and that this particular historical question must be 
 left untouched — as Pythagoras would not eat beans, as 
 parricidal — that William Shakespeare is William 
 Shakespeare — and the doggerel curse of Stratford 
 hangs over and forefends the meddling with his bones. 
 But no witch's palindrome for long can block the 
 march of reason and of research. Modern scholarship 
 is every day dissolving chimera, and, if this Shakes- 
 peare story has no basis of truth, it must inevitably be 
 abolished along with the rest. If this transcendent 
 literature had come down to us without the name, 
 would it have been sacrilege to search for its paternity? 
 And does the mere name of William Shakespeare 
 make that, which is otherwise expedient, infamous? 
 
300 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 Or, is this the meaning of the incantation on the tomb 
 — that cursed shall he be that seeks to penetrate the 
 secret of the plays ? Such, indeed, was the belief that 
 drove poor Delia Bacon mad. But we decline to see 
 any thing but the calm historical question. It seems to 
 us that, if we are at liberty to dispute as much as we 
 like as to whether two a's or only one, or three e's or 
 only two belong of right in the name " Shakespeare," 
 surely it can not be debarred us to ask of the Past the 
 origin of the thousand-souled pages we call by that 
 name. We believe that, if the existence of these three 
 theories — as to each of which it is possible to say so 
 much — proves any thing, it proves that history and cir- 
 cumstantial evidence oppose the possibility of "Wil 
 liam Shakespeare's authorship of the works called h s, 
 and that there is a reasonable doubt as to whether 
 any one man did write, or could have written, either 
 with or without a Bodleian or an Astor Library at his 
 elbow, the whole complete canon of the Shakespearean 
 works. 
 
 But is there not a refuge from all these more or less 
 conflicting theories in the simple canon that human 
 experience is a safer guide than conjecture or miracle? 
 In our own day, the astute manager draws from bushels 
 of manuscript plays, submitted to him by ambitious 
 amateurs or plodding playwrights, the few morsels 
 he deems worthy of his stage, and, restringing them 
 on a thread of his own, or another's, presents the re- 
 sult to his audiences. Can we imagine a reason why 
 the same process should have been improbable in the 
 days of Elizabeth and James? And if among theso 
 amateurs and playwrights there happened to be the 
 same proportion of lawyers, courtiers, politicians, 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 301 
 
 soldiers, musicians, physicians, naturalists, botanists, 
 and the rest (as well as contributions from the hun- 
 dreds of learned clerks whom the disestablishment of 
 the monasteries had driven to their wits for support), 
 that we would be likely to find among the correspond- 
 ing class to-day, it would surely be a less violent ex- 
 planation of "the myriad-minded Shakespeare," than 
 to conjecture the " Shakespeare" springing, without an 
 interval for preparation, at once into the finished 
 crown and acme of each and all of these. In fact, 
 is it not William Shakespeare the editor, and not 
 the author, to whom our veneration and gratitude are 
 due ? 
 
 It almost seems as if not only the skepticism of 
 the doubter but the criticism of scholarship have 
 all along tended irresistibly to accept this com- 
 promise, as all criticism must eventually coincide 
 with history, if it be criticism at all. The closest 
 examination of the Shakespearean plays has re- 
 vealed to scholars traces of more than one hand. It 
 is past a hundred years since Theobald declared that, 
 " though there are several master strokes in these 
 three plays (viz.: the three parts of 'King Henry 
 VI.'), yet I am almost doubtful whether they we're en- 
 tirely of his (Shakespeare's) writing. And unless they 
 were wrote by him very early, I should rather imagine 
 them to have been brought to him as a director of the 
 stage, and so have received some finishing beauties at 
 his hands. An accurate observer will easily see the 
 diction of them is more obsolete, and the numbers 
 more mean and prosaical than in the generality of his 
 genuine composition." 1 We have elsewhere shown 
 
 1 Theobald's Shakespeare (1733). Vol. IV., p. 110. 
 
302 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 that Farmer stumbled upon the same difficulty. 
 Malone "wrote a long dissertation," says Mr. Grant 
 White, "to show that the three parts of 'King Henry 
 VI.' were not Shakespeare's, but had only been altered 
 and enriched by him; and that the first ' part ' was 
 written by another person than the author of the sec- 
 ond and third." 1 Drake proposed that the " First 
 Part of 'King Henry VI.' be excluded from future edi- 
 tions of Shakespeare's Works, because it offers no 
 trace of any finishing strokes from the master bard." 2 
 "It remains to inquire," says Hallam (after a discus- 
 sion of these plays, which he says Shakespeare re- 
 modeled from two old plays " in great part by Marlowe, 
 though Greene seems to have put in for some share in 
 their composition"), "who are to claim the credit of 
 these other plays, so great a portion of which has 
 passed with the world for the genuine work of Shakes- 
 peare." 3 And again, what share he (Shakespeare) 
 may have had in similar repairs of the many plays he 
 represented, can not be determined. 4 And Dyce, Hal- 
 liwell, and all the others follow Mr. Hallam (whose 
 authority is Greene's well-known complaint about the 
 "Johannes Factotum, who struts about with his t3 f ger's 
 heart wrapped in a player's hide;" 5 which al- 
 lusion to a line in the third part of Henry the Sixth, 
 locates the particular " steal " which Greene had most 
 at heart when he complained). Last of all comes Mr. 
 
 1 An essay on the authorship of the three parts of King Henry 
 the Sixth. By Richard Grant White. Riverside Press. H. O. 
 Houghton & Co., Cambridge, Mass., 1859. 
 
 2 Shakespeare and His Times. Vol. II., p. 297. 
 
 3 Note to Hallam' s Literature of Europe. Part II., chap, vi., § 30. 
 4 Id.,§35. 
 
 6 " 0, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide." — III. Hen. VI. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 303 
 
 Grant White, a most profound believer in " Shakes- 
 peare, and all that Dame implies," with " An Essay on 
 the authorship of the Three Parts of King Henry the 
 Sixth," 1 to prove that William Shakespeare, in pla- 
 giarizing from the earlier tragedies, only plagiarized 
 from himself, he himself having really written all that 
 was worth saving in them ! Mr. White labors consider- 
 ably to fix the exact date at which Marlowe, Peele and 
 Greene — the most eminent play writers of the day — 
 employed a raw Stratford youth, just truanting in 
 London, to kindly run over, prune, and perfect their 
 manuscripts for them, and to clear Mr. White's 
 Shakespeare from the stigma of what, if true, Mr. 
 White admits to have been a " want of probity on 
 Shakespeare's part, accompanied by a hardly less 
 culpable indifference on the part of his fellows." 2 This 
 "indifference" can not be charged to one sufferer, at 
 least, Robert Greene, who was not silent when he saw 
 his work unblushingly appropriated: thus giving us 
 assurance of one occasion, at least, upon which 
 William Shakespeare posed as editor instead of 
 author. 
 
 At any rate, we have seen the circumstantial evi- 
 dence has been corroborated by the experts (for so, to 
 borrow a figure, let us call them) Aubrey, Cartwright, 
 Digges, Denham, Fuller, 3 and Ben Jonson. All these 
 assure us (Ben Jonson twice, once in writing and once 
 in conversation) that William Shakespeare was a nat- 
 
 1 Cambridge, Mass. : H. 0. Houghton & Co. Riverside Press, 
 1859. 
 
 2 Id., p. 100. 
 
 'See the quotation from his "Worthies of England," in the 
 foot-note, ante, this chapter. 
 
304 THE SHAKESPEAKEAN MYTH. 
 
 ural wit — a wag in the crude — but that he wanted art. 
 Old Dominie Ward made a note "to read Shakes- 
 peare's plays to post him," but even he had heard 
 that he was a wit, but that he wanted art. 1 This tes- 
 timony may not compel conviction, but it is all we 
 have; we must take it, or go without any testimony 
 at all. At any rate, it sustains and is sustained by the 
 circumstances, and these seven different witnesses, 
 at least, testify without procurement collusion, or 
 knowledge of the use to be made of their testimony, 
 and opposed to them all is only the little elegiac 
 rhyme by one of themselves: 
 
 " Yet must I not give nature all — thy art, 
 My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part." 
 
 Only one single scrap of mortuary effusion on which to 
 hang the fame of centuries ! And if we exclude the 
 circumstantial evidence and the expert testimony as 
 false, and admit the one little rhyme as true, then our 
 reason, judgment, and inner consciousness must ac- 
 cept as the author of the learned, laborious, accurate, 
 eloquent, and majestic Sheakespearean pages, a wag — 
 a funny fellow T whose "wit (to quote Jonson again) 
 was in his own power," but not "the rule of it," so 
 much so, "that sometimes it was necessary he should 
 be stopped." Surely it is a much less violent supposi- 
 tion that this funny Mr. Shakespeare — who happened 
 to be employed in the theater where certain master- 
 pieces were taken to be cut up into plays to copy out 
 of them each actor's parts — that this waggish penman, 
 as he wrote out the parts in big, round hand, improved 
 on or interpolated a palpable hit, a merry speech, the 
 
 1 Ante, page 68. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 305 
 
 last popular song, or sketched entire a role with a 
 name familiar to his boyish ear — the village butt, or 
 sot, or justice of the peace, 1 may be ; or, why not some 
 fellow scapegrace of olden times by Avon banks? 
 He did it with a swift touch and a mellow humor that 
 relieved and refreshed the stately speeches, making 
 the play all the more available and the copyist all the 
 more valuable to the management. But, all the same, 
 how this witty Mr. Shakespeare would have roared at 
 a suggestion that the centuries after him should chris- 
 ten by his — the copyist's — name all the might and 
 majesty and splendor, all the philosophy and pathos 
 and poetry, every word that he wrote out, unblotting 
 a line, for the players ! 
 
 It must be conceded, say the new theorists: 
 I. That the plays, whether in the shape we now 
 have them or not, are, at least, under the same 
 
 1 He had not failed to see Dogberry and Shallow in the little 
 villages of Warwickshire — and the wonderful " Watch." The 
 " Watch " of those days was indeed something to wonder at. 
 In a letter of Lord Burleigh to Sir Francis Walsingham, written 
 in 1586, the writer says that he once saw certain of them stand- 
 ing "so openly in pumps" in a public place, that "no suspected 
 person would come nigh them;" and, on his asking them what 
 they stood there for, they answered that they were put there to 
 apprehend three men, the only description they had of them 
 was that one of them had a hooked nose. " If they be no better in- 
 structed but to find three persons by one of them having a 
 hooked nose, they may miss thereof," reflects Burghley, with 
 much reason. Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his "Outline of the 
 Life of William Shakespeare (Brighton, 1881), page 66, thinks 
 that this is unlikely, because the magistrate mentioned by 
 Aubrey would have been too old in 1642, if he had been the 
 model sought. 
 26 
 
306 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 names and with substantially the same dramatis per- 
 sons. 
 
 II. That William Shakespeare was the stage man- 
 ager, or stage editor; or, at any rate, touched up the 
 plays for representation. 
 
 III. That the acting copies of the plays, put into 
 the hands of the players to learn their parts from, 
 were more or less in the handwriting of William 
 Shakespeare, and that from these acting copies the 
 first folio of 1623 was set up and printed. 
 
 At least, the best evidence at hand seems to estab- 
 lish all three of these propositions. This evidence is 
 meager and accidental, but, for that very reason, in- 
 voluntary, and, therefore, not manufactured; and it 
 establishes the above propositions, as far as it goes, as 
 follows : 
 
 I. In a volume, " Poste, with a Packet of Madde- 
 Letters," printed in 1603, a young woman is made to 
 say to her lover : " It is not your hustie rustie can make 
 me afraide of your big lookes, for I saw the plaie of 
 Ancient Pistoll, where a craking coward was well 
 cudgelled for his knavery; your railing is so near the 
 rascall that I am almost ashamed to bestow so good a 
 name as the rogue upon you." 
 
 Again, Sharpham, in his " Fleire," printed in 1607, 
 has this piece of dialogue : 
 
 "Kni. — And how lives he with 'am? 
 
 "Fie. — Faith, like Thisbe in the play, a' has almost 
 killed himselfe with the scabbard I" 
 
 The first author thus makes his young woman to 
 have seen Henry V., and the second alludes to the 
 Midsummer-Night's Dream, where the bumpkin who 
 plays Thisbe is made to kill himself by falling on his 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 307 
 
 scabbard instead of his sword. Besides, in the imper- 
 fect versions of the plays which the printers were able 
 to make up, from such unauthorized sources as best 
 served them, it is thought that there are unmistaka- 
 ble evidences that one of the sources was the short- 
 hand of a listener, who, not catching a word or phrase 
 distinctly, would put down something that sounded 
 enough like it to betray the sources and his copy. 
 For example: In the spring of 1602, a play called 
 " The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," was 
 presented at the Globe theater. In 1603, two book- 
 sellers, Ling and Trundell, printed a play of that title, 
 put William Shakespeare's name to it, and sold it. 
 Now, in this version, we have such errors as " right 
 done" for "write down" (Act L, Scene ii.) ; "inven- 
 om'd .speech" for " in venom steeped" (Act L, Scene 
 i.); "I'll provide for you a grave" for "most secret 
 and most grave" (Act III., Scene iv.) ; " a beast devoid 
 of reason " for " a beast that wants discourse of rea- 
 son," and the like. Ling and Trundell, somehow or 
 other, procured better copy, and printed a corrected 
 edition in the following year; but the errors in their 
 first edition were precisely such as would result from 
 an attempt to report the play phonetically, as it w T as 
 delivered by the actors on the stage. All the printers 
 of the day seem to have made common piracy out of 
 these plays, impelled thereto by their exceeding popu- 
 larity. (Nash says that the first part of King Henry 
 VI., especially, had a wonderful run for those days, 
 being witnessed by at least ten thousand people. 1 Of 
 
 1 We take all these references from " Outlines of the Life of 
 Shakespeare," by I. 0. Halliwell Phillips (Brighton. Printed for 
 the author's friends, for presents only. 1881), page 40, to which 
 capital volume we acknowledge our exceeding obligation. Mr. 
 
308 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 this play a garbled version was put on the market by 
 Millington, who, soon after, did the same thing by the 
 Henry V.) 
 
 II. Davenant instructed Betterton how to render 
 the part of Henry VIII., assuring him that he (Dave- 
 nant) had his own instructions from Lowin, and that 
 Lowin got them from William Shakespeare in per- 
 son. 1 (We have not accepted Davenant's evidence as 
 likely to be of much value, when assuming to be 
 Shakespeare's son, successor, literary executor, and 
 the like, but this does not appear, on its face, improb- 
 able, and is no particular loss if untrue.) Eavens- 
 croft, who re-wrote Titus Andronicus in 1687, says, in 
 his preface : " I have been told by some anciently con- 
 versant w T ith the stage, that it (this play) was not 
 originally his (Shakespeare's), but brought by a pri- 
 vate actor to be acted, and he only gave some master 
 touches to one or two of the principal parts or char- 
 acters." 2 
 
 " I am- assured," says Gildon, 3 " from very good 
 hands, that the person that acted lago was in much 
 esteem as a comedian, which made Shakespeare put 
 several words and expressions into his part, perhaps 
 not so agreeable to his character, to make the audi- 
 ence laugh, who had not yet learned to endure to be 
 serious a whole play." (But if Shakespeare put them 
 in to "catch the ear of the groundlings," who took 
 
 Grant White in the Atlantic Monthly, October 1881, believes 
 that he is able to trace the surreptitious "copy" of this first 
 Hamlet to the actor who took the part of Voltimand. The in- 
 ference from Mr. White's account of the transaction, is precisely 
 that we have noted in the text. 
 
 'Id. 2 Id. 
 
 Reflections on Eymer's "Short View of Tragedy," quoted by 
 Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his work cited in last note. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 309 
 
 them out again for the folio of 1623? The Baconians 
 would probably ask: "Did Bacon, after Shakespeare 
 was dead?" And it could not have been a proof- 
 reader; for, if there was any proof-reader, he was the 
 most careless one that ever lived. The folio of 1623 
 is crowded with typographical errors.) Somebody — 
 not necessarily Shakespeare — was in the habit of in- 
 troducing into these Shakespearean plays the popular 
 songs of the day. For example, the song, "A Lover 
 and His Lass," in "As you Like it." was written by 
 Thomas Morley, and printed in his "First Book of 
 Ayres; or, Little Short Songs," in 1600. 1 And the 
 ballad, « Farewell, Dear Love," in " Twelfth Night," 
 has previously appeared in 1601, in the "Book of 
 Ayres" of Robert Jones. 2 It is probable, however, 
 says Mr. Halliwell Phillips, that William Shakespeare 
 had withdrawn from the management of the Globe; at 
 the date of its destruction during the performance of 
 Henry VIII. (which Mr. Phillips calls the first play 
 on the English stage in which dramatic art was sacri- 
 ficed to stage effect. It is curious, this being the case, 
 to find the New Shakespeare Society rejecting the 
 Henry VIII. as not Shakespearean on the philological 
 evidence, and assuring us that Wolsey's soliloquy is 
 not Shakespeare's, as did Mr. Spedding so many years 
 before). The story of Queen Elizabeth's order for 
 " Fal staff in Love" first appeared, in 1702, in the 
 
 1 In the last issue of the "Transactions of the New Shakes- 
 peare Society" is a copy of what purports to be a manuscript 
 respecting the delivery of certain red cloth to Shakespeare, on 
 the occasion of a reception to James I., by the corporation of 
 London, in 1604, unearthed and guaranteed by Mr. Furnivall. 
 
 2 Folio, London, 1601. 
 
310 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 preface to John Dennis's " Comicale Gallant," from 
 whom Rowe quoted. Although smacking of the same 
 flavor as the Southampton and King James " yarns " — 
 it is worth noting that this story may possess, per- 
 haps, some vestige of foundation. If these sounding 
 plays, so full of religion, politics, philosophy, and 
 statecraft, were presented at Shakespeare's theater, it 
 is only natural that it should come to Elizabeth's ears. 
 The lion Queen did not care to have her subjects in- 
 structed too far. She liked to keep them well in 
 hand, and was only — she and her ministers — too 
 ready to "snuff treason in certain things that went by 
 other's names." The run of comedies at other theaters 
 were harmless enough (an adultery for a plot, and an 
 unsuspecting husband for a butt. This was a comedy ; 
 plus a little blood, it was a tragedy). Let the people 
 have their fill of amusement, but it is better not to 
 meddle with philosophy and politics. So there are 
 things more unlikely to have happened than that 
 Elizabeth, through her Lord Chamberlain, should 
 have intimated to manager Shakespeare to give them 
 something more in the run and appetite of the clay. 1 
 The "Merry Wives of Windsor" was, in due time, 
 underlined. But, somehow or other, it was with a 
 would-be adulterer, rather than an injured husband, 
 for a butt; and, somehow or other, Galen and Escula- 
 pius and Epicurius had intruded where there was no 
 need of them. The salaciousness Elizabeth wanted 
 (if the story is true) was all there, as well as the 
 transformation scene; but, at the end, there is a re- 
 
 1 Collier — "Lives of Shakespeare's Actors, Introduction, page 
 xv." — says that there were at least two, and perhaps three, other 
 William Shakespeares in London in these days. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 311 
 
 buke to lechery and to lecherous minds that is not 
 equivocal in its terms. 1 But that any of this Shakes- 
 peare fortune came, by way of gift or otherwise, from 
 Southampton, there is no ground, except silly and 
 baseless rumor, for believing. If Southampton had 
 been the Rothschild of his time — which he was very far 
 from being — he would not have given a thousand 
 pounds (a sum we have estimated as equaling §25,000 
 to-day, but which Mr. Grant White puts at $30,000, 
 and which Mr. Halliwell Phillips, 2 on account of the 
 "often fictitious importance attached to cash, arising 
 from its comparative scarcity in those days," says 
 ought even be as high as twelve pounds for one) to a 
 casual acquaintance. The mere passing of such a 
 sum would seem to involve other relations; and 
 if Southampton knew Shakespeare, or Shakespeare 
 Southampton, let it be demonstrated from some auto- 
 biographical or historical source— from some other 
 source than the " Biographies of William Shakes- 
 peare," written by those slippery rhapsodists, the 
 Shakespeareans. If Damon and Pythias were friends, 
 let it appear from the biographies of Damon, as well 
 as from the biographies of Pythias. Let us find it in 
 some of Southampton's papers, or in the archives or 
 papers of some of his family, descendants, contem- 
 poraries, or acquaintances; in the chronicles of Eliz- 
 abeth, Ealeigh, Cecil, Essex, Kutland, Montgomery, 
 Camden, Coke, Bacon, Tobie Mathew, Ben Jonson, 
 or of somebody alive and with open eyes in London 
 
 1 Perhaps, if the story ,were true, a rebuke to Elizabeth per- 
 sonally in the line (Act V., Scene v.), " Our radiant Queen hates 
 sluts and sluttery." 
 
 2 "Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare," note, page 17. 
 
312 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 at about that date, before we yield it historical assent, 
 and make oath to it so solemnly. As a matter of fact, 
 and as the industrious Mr. Lodge confesses, 1 there is 
 no such trace or record. Except from the "biogra- 
 phers" of Shakespeare, no note, hint, or surmise, con- 
 necting the two names, can be anywhere unearthed, 
 and they only draw the suggestion on which they 
 build such lofty treatises from a dedication printed in 
 the days when printers helped themselves to any name 
 they wanted without fear of an injunction out of 
 chancery. That any sonnets were ever dedicated to 
 Southampton by anybody, is, we have seen, pure in- 
 vention. 
 
 III. But that the famous First Folio of 1623 was 
 set up from piecemeal parts written for separate actors, 
 and that these were in William Shakespeare's hand- 
 writing, there seems to be contemporary circumstan- 
 tial evidence. 
 
 We have seen that, although Ben Jonson has, for 
 two hundred and fifty years, been believed when he 
 said in poetry that William Shakespeare w T as not only 
 the " Star of Poets " for genius, but that besides he 
 would " sweat and strike the second heat upon the 
 muses's anvil;" when he said in prose that "The 
 players often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare 
 that in writing (whatever he wrote) he never blotted 
 out a line," he was supposed to be using a mere figure 
 of speech. But it seems that he was telling the truth. 
 For, in 1623 — Shakespeare having been dead seven 
 years — Heminges and Condell — two "players" (i.e., 
 
 1 Portraits, Henry Wriothlesey, Earl of Southampton, Vol. 
 III., page 155, Bonn's edition. 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 313 
 
 actors), and the same that Shakespeare in his "Will calls 
 his "fellows" — publish the first edition of the plays 
 we now call " Shakespeare " — and, on the title-page of 
 that edition, advertise them as " published according 
 to the true original copies." Further on in their pre- 
 face, they repeat, almost in his very words, Ben Jon- 
 son's statement, asserting that " We have scarce re- 
 ceived from him (William Shakespeare) a blot in his 
 papers." What papers ? What indeed, but " the true 
 original copies" of these plays which were in William 
 Shakespeare's handwriting ? What else could it have 
 been that "the players" (according to Ben Jonson) 
 saw ? Docs anybody suppose that the poet's own first 
 draft, untouched of the file and unperfumed of the 
 lamp, weilt into "the players'" hands, for them to 
 learn their parts from ? And, even if one player was 
 allowed to study his part from the inspired author's 
 first draft, his fellow "players " must have taken or re- 
 ceived a copy or copies of their parts ; they could not 
 all study their parts from the same manuscript. The 
 only reasonable supposition, therefore, is, that William 
 Shakespeare made it part of his duties at the theater 
 to write out in a fair hand the parts for the different 
 "players" (and no wonder they mentioned it, as " an 
 honor" to him, that he lightened their labors consid- 
 erably by the legibility of his penmanship, by never 
 blotting out a line) and that, in course of time, these 
 " true original copies " were collected from their fel- 
 low-actors by Heminges and Condell, and by them 
 published; they remarking, in turn, upon the excel- 
 lence of the penmanship so familiar to them. There 
 is only wanted to confirm this supposition, a piece of 
 27 
 
314 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 actual evidence as to what Heminges and Condell did 
 print from. 
 
 Now, it happens that, by their own careless proof 
 reading, Heminges and Condell have actually sup- 
 plied this piece of missing circumstantial evidence, as 
 follows: Naturally, in these true original copies of a 
 particular actor's part, the name of the actor assuming 
 that part would be written in the margin, opposite to 
 or instead of the name of the character he was to per- 
 sonate ; precisely as is done to-day by the theater copy- 
 ist in copying parts tor distribution among the com- 
 pany. It happened that, in setting up the types for 
 this first edition from these fragmentary actors' copies, 
 the printers would often accident aly, from following 
 " copy" too closely, set up these real names of the ac- 
 tors instead of the names of the characters. And — as 
 any one taking up a copy or fac-simile of this famous 
 "first folio " can see for himself — the editors carelessly 
 overlooked these errors in the proof, and there they 
 remain to this day : "Jacke Wilson," for " Balthazar ;" 
 "Andrew" and " Cowley," for "Dogberry;" "Kempe," 
 for "Verges," and the like — the names of Shakespeare's 
 actors — instead of the parts they took in the piece. 
 It seems superfluous to again suggest that these un- 
 blotted " copies " could not have been the author's first 
 draft of a play, or that an author does not write his 
 compositions in manifold, or that there had been many 
 actors to learn their parts in the course of from six- 
 teen to twenty years. 
 
 Besides — even if Heminges and Condell had not told 
 us — it would have still been perfectly evident, from an 
 inspection of the "first folio," that the "copy" it was 
 set up from was. never completely in their hands, but 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 315 
 
 was collected piecemeal during the manufacture. For 
 iustauce, we see w T here the printers i eft a space of twenty- 
 nine pages, between "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius 
 Csesar," in which to print the " Timon of Athens." But 
 all the copy they could find of the " Timon " only 
 made eighteen pages, and so — by huge " head pieces " 
 and "tail pieces," and a " Table of the Actor's Names " 
 (given in no other instance) in coarse capitals — they 
 eked out the "signature; " and, by omitting the whole 
 of the next "signature," carried the pagination over 
 from " 98 " to " 109." The copy for " Troilus and Cres- 
 sida" seems not to have been received until the vol- 
 ume was in the binder's hands (which is remarkable, 
 too, for that play had been in print for fourteen years). 
 The play is not mentioned in the table of contents, 
 but is tucked in without paging (except that the first 
 five pages are numbered 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, whereas 
 the paging of the volume had already reached 232). 
 "Troilus and Cressida," thus printed, fills two " sig 
 natures " lacking one page, and so somebody at hand 
 wrote a "Prologue" in rhyme — setting out the argu- 
 ment—to save the blank page, and the like. What- 
 ever "papers" Heminges and Condell "received from 
 William Shakespeare then, were fair, unblotted copies 
 of the actors' parts, made by him for their use. It ap- 
 pears then, that — minute scholarships and the records 
 apart — the foreman of a printing-house would have 
 been at any time in the past two hundred and fifty 
 years, without assistance from the commentators, able 
 to settle the great Shakespearean authorship contro- 
 versy. 
 
 While — from one standpoint — this testimony of 
 the types is strong circumstantial evidence against 
 
316 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 
 
 the Baconian theory, taken from another standpoint 
 it is quite as strongly corroborative. For on the 
 one hand, Bacon was alive when this folio was 
 printed, and the man who rewrote his essays eleven 
 times would scarcely have allowed his plays to go 
 to the public so shiftlessly printed. But on the 
 other hand, if the book was printed without consult- 
 ing him, that insurmountable barrier — the fact that 
 Bacon never claimed these plays — is sw T ept away at 
 once. ' We have simply to assume that he always in- 
 tended, at some convenient season, to acknowledge 
 them : that he was not satisfied with them as they 
 appeared in the Heminges and Condell edition, and 
 proposed revising them himself before claiming them, 
 (we know how difficult he found it to satisfy his own 
 censorship) or that he purposed completing the series, 
 (for which the sketch of the Henry VII may have been 
 placed among his private memoranda) at his leisure. 
 We have then only to imagine that death over- 
 took him suddenly (his death was sudden) before this 
 programme had been completed, and his not acknowl- 
 edging them ; not leaving them — incomplete as he be- 
 lieved them — to " the next ages," was characteristic of 
 the man. 
 
 "If I go, who remains? If I remain, who goes?" 
 said Dante to the Council of Florence. Take the 
 Shakespearean pages away from English literature, 
 and what remains? Retain them, and what departs? 
 And yet are men to believe that the writer of these 
 pages left no impress on the history of his age and no 
 item in the chronicle of his time? that, in the intens- 
 est focus of the clear, calm, electric-light of nineteenth 
 century inspection and investigation, their author 
 
PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 317 
 
 stands only revealed in the gossip of goodwives or the 
 drivel of a pot-house clientage? Who is it — his rea- 
 son and judgment once enlisted — who believes this 
 thing? 
 
 Columbus discovered the continent we call after the 
 name of another. Where shall we find written the 
 names of the genii whose fruit and fame this Shakes- 
 peare has stolen. Having lost "our Shakespeare" 
 both to-day and forever, it will doubtless remain — as 
 it is — the question, " Who wrote the Shakespearean 
 dramas?" The evidence is all in — the testimony is 
 all taken. Perhaps it is a secret that even Time will 
 never tell, that is hidden deep down in the crypt 
 and sacristy of the Past, whose seal shall never more 
 be broken. In the wise land of China it is said that 
 when a man has deserved well of the state, his 
 countrymen honor, with houses and lands and gifts 
 and decorations, not himself, but his father and his 
 mother. Perhaps, learning a lesson from the Celestials, 
 we might rear a shaft to the fathers and the mothers 
 of the Immortality that wrote the Book of Nature, 
 the mighty book which "age can not wither, nor cus- 
 tom stale" and whose infinite variety for three centur- 
 ies has been and, until Time shall be no more, will be 
 close to the hearts of every age and cycle of men — 
 household words for ever and ever, The Book — 
 thank heaven ! — that nothing can divorce from us. 
 
 THE END. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Actors, names of Shakespeare's printed by mistake in first folio, 
 
 314. 
 Actors, fellows of W. S. Did they suspect imposition ? 37. 
 
 Of Shakespeare's day, expected to improvise, 260. 
 Actresses, none in Shakespeare's day, 273. 
 Addison, Joseph, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 26. 
 Alterations of the plays in 1st folio. See Emendations. 
 Althea, classical error as to, 210. 
 Angling, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 228. 
 Anonymous authorship, 283. 
 
 Or pseudonymic, fashionable in those days, 176. 
 Anti-Shakespearean theories — 
 
 A compromise of, suggested, 300. 
 
 Theobald anticipates, 301. 
 Areopagitica, Milton's, first asserted author's rights, 108. 
 Aristotle, Bacon and Shakespeare misquote passage of, 241. 
 Arms, John Shakespeare's, purchased by his son, 97. 
 
 Coat of, " cut from whole cloth," 274. 
 
 Obtained by falsehood, 274-275, note. 
 
 Protest against them, 274, note. 
 
 Purchased with Shakespeare's first earnings, 274. 
 
 Why Shakespeare purchased, 274. 
 Article in Chambers'. Journal first raises authorship question, 185. 
 Aubrey, his testimony, 47, 69-71. 
 
 Expert evidence of, 303-304. 
 Audiences. See Plays. 
 
 Did not want scientific treatises, 229. 
 
 Formative days of, 263. 
 
 Not critical, 13. 
 
 The Shakespearean, 114-259. 
 
 (319) 
 
320 INDEX. 
 
 Author, his interest to be anonymous, 113. 
 
 Rights, what were, 108. 
 
 Compensation, how obtained, 108. 
 Author of the plays. See Plays. 
 
 His fidelity to national characteristics, 42. 
 
 Insight of, into the human heart, no guess work, 43. 
 
 Of text, did not write stage business, 117. 
 Authorship of Henry VI., R. G. White's idea of, 303. 
 
 Anonymous, 283. 
 
 Anonymous or pseudonymic authorship, prevalent, 176. 
 See Joint authorship. 
 
 Insecurity of. See Author, Copyright, Nashe, Printers, 
 Plays. 
 
 Insecurity of authorship. See Star Chamber. 
 Autographs of W. S. See " Florio"' autograph. 
 
 B. 
 
 Bacon, and Shakespeare misquote passage of Aristotle, 241. 
 And Shakespeare, unknown to each other, 144. 
 Appears in New Theory, 284. 
 Believes in teaching history by drama, 242. 
 Could have appraised the S. Drama 180. 
 Did William Shakespeare write works of, 38, 39. 
 Directs certain MS. locked up, 244. 
 Driven to " the Jews,' 233. See " Shylock." 
 His acquirements, 232. 
 His estimate of the theatre, 203. 
 His letter to the Queen, 237. 
 His "Northumberland MS.," 242. 
 His reasons for concealment, 201, 316. 
 His "Sonnet" what may be, 280, 281. * 
 His youth compared with Shakespeare's, 232. 
 Last act of, his memorandum concerning, 297. 
 Letter to Sir John Davies, 236, 237. 
 May have brought together first folio, 236. 
 Neglected nothing, 297. 
 No cause to mourn for Elizabeth, 243. 
 Not mentioned to Shakespeare by Jonson, 145. 
 
INDEX. 321 
 
 Bacon, often wrote in other's names, 243. 
 
 Or is he told of Shakespeare by, 145. 
 
 Possesses the qualities assigned to author of the dramas, 175. 
 
 Silent as to William Shakespeare, 180. 
 
 Surmised philosophical purpose, 203. 
 
 When appointed attorney-general plays cease to appear, 233. 
 Bacon, Delia, apparent audacity of announcement, 186. 
 
 Believed in a joint authorship, 206. 
 
 Believes " Hamlet" to be key-note of the plays, 190. 
 
 Claims to have discovered Bacon's clew, 192. 
 
 Death of, 200. 
 
 Estimate of her book, 196, note. 
 
 Extracts from her first paper, 189. 
 
 Her approach to an overt act, 197-199. 
 
 Her belief as to the manuscripts, 193, 194. 
 
 Her poverty, 188-195. 
 
 Her question as to the MS. answered, 244. 
 
 History of her theory, 188. 
 What it really was, 191. 
 
 Reception of her theory in America, 187. 
 In England, 187. 
 
 Supposed to be mad, 10, 11. 
 
 But her madness contageous, 11. 
 
 Visits Stratford, 174-195. 
 Old Verulam, id. 
 
 What her madness was, 191, 300. 
 
 Writes her first paper in 1855, 186. 
 "Baconian" and " Delia Bacon" theories discriminated, 201. 
 Baconian theory, abstract of, 232. 
 
 Bibliography of the, 246. 
 
 Indifferent as to Wm. S. being a law student, 245. 
 
 In general, what, 203. 
 
 Preponderance for, 297. 
 Bailey, Rev. John, invents a new Shakespeare story, 160, note. 
 " Bartholomew Fair," induction to. See Jonson, Ben, 139. 
 Becker Death Mask, the, 103. 
 Bed, the second best, 50. 
 
 Not explained by R. Gr. White or by Steevens, 65. 
 u Beeston," author of " Schoolmaster story," 60. 
 
322 INDEX. 
 
 " Beeston," who was he ? 160. 
 
 Belleforest, borrowed from in the plays, 221. 
 
 Berni, paraphrased by Iago, 64. 
 
 Best seats at theatres on the stage, 273. 
 
 Bible, Shakespeare and the, 60, note, 231. 
 
 Bibliography of the Baconian theory, 246. 
 
 " Biographies" of William Shakespeare, modern, 161. 
 
 De Quincy's, 157. 
 Birthday of W. S. See St. George's day. 
 Blackfriars Theater, James Burbage builds, 256. 
 Blood, circulation of the, 208-210. 
 Boaden, James, his summary of the portraits, 93. 
 Boccaccio, borrowed from in the plays, 221. 
 Bohemia. See Sea-coast of Bohemia. 
 
 Book-making, knowledge of, displayed in plays. See Printing. 
 Botany, knowledge of, displayed in the plays. See Flowers. 
 Boucicault, Dion, a surmised example of what W. S. was, 31. 
 
 His suggestion, 285. 
 Answer to, 285. 
 Boys, took female parts in Shakespeare's day, 273. 
 Brother of W. S. See Oldys. 
 
 Brown C. Armitage, his discovery as to Sonnets, 278. 
 Brown, Henry, theory of the Sonnets, 279. 
 Bunyan, John, analogy of life to Shakespeare, 165, 166. 
 
 Illustrations of what genius can not do, 164. 
 Burbage, James, builds the Blackfriars theater, 256. 
 Burbage, Richard, lines interpolated in Hamlet to suit, 34, note. 
 
 Said to have painted portraits of W. S., 99. 
 Burns, Robert, an example of genius, 162. 
 
 Comparison between, and " Shakespeare," 219. 
 
 Illustration of what genius can not do, 163. 
 "Business" of Wm. Shakespeare, now obsolete, 298. 
 Bust in possession of Garrick Club, 105. See Garrick Club Bust- 
 Bust, the Stratford, 97. See Portraits. 
 
 Whitewashed, by Malone, 97. 
 Byron, Lord, his estimate of the Shakespearean plays, 19. 
 
INDEX. 323 
 
 c. 
 
 Campbell, Lord, his notice of the legal acquirements of W. S. 59. 
 Canon of the plays, first folio plus Pericles, 291. 
 Capell, preserves specimens of Shakespeare's wit, 270. 
 Carlyle, Thomas, calls on Delia Bacon, 195. 
 
 Suggested her writing first paper, 195. 
 Cartwright, expert evidence as to, 303. 
 
 Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 264. 
 Catholic, Roman, was Shakespeare a, 117. See Papist. 
 Chandos portrait, the, 97. 
 
 Rumored to have been by Burbage, 99. 
 Chatterton, Thomas, difference between his case and Shakes- 
 peare's, 54. 
 Chettle, wonders that Shakespeare does not mourn Elizabeth, 
 243. 
 
 His apology for Greene's expression, 125. 
 Christian Monastery in Ephesus in days of Pericles, 116. 
 Chronologies of the plays, absurdity of the so-called, 86. 
 " Chronologies," where they all agree, 41. 
 Cinthio, borrowed from in the plays, 221. 
 Circumstantial evidence, corroborated, 303, passim. 
 
 Necessary to these questions, 294. 
 Classical knowledge, displayed in plays, 207, 208. 
 
 Difficulties suggested by, 211. 
 Clergy, benefit of, 262, note. 
 
 Included all learned professions, id. 
 Clown, the principal actor in Shakespearean theaters, 260, 261. 
 Coat of arms, Shakespeare's. See Arms. 
 Cohn, Albert, his theory as to Shakespeare in Germany, 216. 
 Coincidences, Shakespearean's idea of the, 83, note. 
 Coleridge, his opinion as to authorship, 45. 
 Commentators, bore down upon the Shakespearean text, 10. 
 Commentary, sample of the run of, 86. 
 Compromise theory, 300; applied to Henry VI., 302. 
 
 Theobald and others anticipate, 300, 301. 
 Condell, Henry. See Heminges & Condell. 
 Contemporaries of W. S., why they did not suspect him, or si- 
 lent if they did, 57. 
 
324 INDEX. 
 
 Contemporary statements in Baconian theory, 230. 
 Conversations of Ben Jonson with Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den, 139. 
 Copies, " true, original," identified, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
 Copyright, Disraeli thinks first folio a scheme for, 249, note. 
 
 First claimed 28 years after W. S.'s death, 108. 
 
 First English law of, 106. See Author. 
 
 Cornelius, Jansen, said to have been family painter of South- 
 ampton, 101. 
 Court of Star Chamber, takes jurisdiction of matters literary, 106. 
 Curse of Stratford, 299, 300. 
 
 D. 
 
 Davies, Rev. Richard, his account of W. S., 73. 
 
 Davies, Sir John, letter from Bacon to, 237. 
 
 Davenant, Sir William, owned the Chandos portrait, 100. 
 
 Claimed illegitimate descent from W. S., 100, note. 
 Death mask, the Becker, 103. 
 Dedication of the Sonnets, 277. 
 
 Why insulting, 282. 
 
 Twisted out of shape, 277. 
 
 Simple explanation of, 278. 
 "Delia Bacon" and "Baconian" theories, discriminated, 201. 
 Delia Bacon and new theories coincide, 299. See Bacon, Delia. 
 Denham, expert evidence of, 303, 304. 
 
 Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 265. 
 De Quincy, Thomas, his "biography" of W. S., 157. 
 
 Analyzed, 157. 
 
 Ignores authorities, 159. 
 Deer stealing, "rejected on insufficient evidence," 114. 
 Difficulty is that we know so much about W. S., rather than so 
 
 little, 155. 
 Digges, expert evidence of 303, 304. 
 
 Testimony as to Shakesperean acquirements, 264. 
 "Discoveries" of Ben Jonson, fatal to Shakespearean theory, 
 
 134-136. 
 Disraeli thinks first folio a scheme for copyright, 249, note. 
 Dogberry, prototypes of, 304. 
 Doubtful plays, the, 285, 286, 287. 
 
INDEX. 325 
 
 Doubtful plays, the, never disowned by Shakespeare, 287. 
 
 Not doubtful in Shakespeare's day, 285-290. 
 
 One missing, 290. 
 Dowdell Letter, the, 72. 
 
 Dowden, Edward, locates Proserpo's Island, 88, note. 
 Drama, esteemed by Bacon a form of teaching history, 242. 
 Droeshout portrait, 92-94. 
 
 Not flattering to its subject. 93. 
 
 Only one ever " authenticated," 103. 
 
 Probably accurate likeness, 94. 
 
 Was faithfully engraved, 94. 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson's conversations with, 
 
 139. 
 Dryden, John, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 21. 
 Dugdale, his mention of Shakespeare, 77. 
 " Duke Humphrey," a missing, doubtful play, 290. 
 Dyce follows Hallam, 302. 
 
 E. 
 
 Earlom portrait, the, 102. 
 
 Elaborations of the plays. See Emendations. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen. See Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 Elizabeth, the English of, 208. 
 
 Elizabethan Dramatists, estimate of, 202. 
 
 Ellesmere, W. H. Smith's letter to, 187. 
 
 Elze, Dr. Carl, believes the S. was in Germany and Scotland, 221. 
 
 Emendations of the plays in first folio, extensiveness of, 234. 
 
 English, a then neglected accomplishment, 217. 
 
 A very rare accomplishment in Elizabeth's day, 41, 
 
 Probably not taught in Stratford grammar school, 41. 
 
 Purity of, used in plays, 218. 
 
 The, of Elizabeth, 207. 
 
 The, of Shakespeare, not derived from a study of contem- 
 porary writers, 42. 
 English Library, what was the, of Shakespeare's day, 230. 
 English renaissance drama. See Renaissance drama, English. 
 Enlargements of the plays in first folio. See Emendations. 
 Entomology, knowledge of, displayed in the plays, 227-229. 
 Epitaph on Shakespeare's tomb, 124. 
 
 Epitaphs, by William Shakespeare, on Elias James, John a, 
 Coombe, and others, 40. 
 
326 INDEX. 
 
 Epitaphs, how Halliwell accounts for, 270. 
 
 Of W. S. not claimed by anybody else, 231. 
 Complete collection of, 119. 
 Essex connected with plays, 284. 
 Evelyn, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 20. 
 "Evening Mass," not necessarily indicative of Shakespeare's 
 
 creed, 118. 
 Evidence, internal, failure of, 296. 
 
 Of historical plays as to Bacon, 242. 
 
 Poetry not competent of, a fact, 131. 
 
 See Typographical evidence, Printing. 
 Expert evidence as to the plays, 303. 
 
 F. 
 
 Fac similes. See Forgery. 
 
 " Falstaff in love," order for, 309, 310. 
 
 Family of Shakespeare, not zealous of their relative's reputa- 
 
 tion f 83. 
 Farmer, Dr., his solution of the Shakespearean difficulty, 181. 
 
 Specimen of, 182. 
 
 His theory of Shakespeare, quite as incredible as the other, 
 183. 
 
 Stops just short of the truth, 183. 
 Fel ton's portrait, 96. See Portraits. 
 Female parts, taken by boys, 202. 
 
 Fire, great, of London, not accountable for dearth of Shakes- 
 pearean records, 79, 
 First folio, contains only twenty-six known plays, 287. 
 
 Dilemma presented by, 290. 
 
 Evidence of authorship from, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
 
 Inspection of, proves sources of, 314. 
 
 Printed from Shakespeare's copies, 306-312. See Typograph- 
 ical evidence. 
 
 Time of appearance suggestive, 234. See Emendations. 
 " Florio," the. in British Museum, 169. 
 Flowers, knowledge of, displayed, in plays, 229. 
 Forgery, fac simile is usually, 295. 
 
 Literary, not difficult, 295. 
 
 Of a signature, 295. 
 French and Italian, not taught at Stratford school, 221. 
 
INDEX. 327 
 
 Fuller, eight years oia wnen Shakespeare died. 269. 
 
 Expert evidence of, 303, 304. 
 
 Extract from, 269, note. 
 
 His estimate of the Shakespearean plays, 20. 
 
 His mention of Shakespeare, 77. 
 
 Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 265, 266, note. 
 Furness, W. II., unable to accept Shakespearean authorship, 
 154, 201. 
 
 G. 
 
 Gallants, relations with managers, 274. 
 Garrick Club bust, the, 105. See Portraits. 
 Geography, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 219. 
 Geology, knowledge of, in the plays, 213. 
 Germany, Shakespeare in, Cohn's theory, 216. 
 "Good friend, for Jesus's sake, forbear," etc., 124. 
 Grammar School of Stratford. See Stratford School. 
 Gravitation, law of, stated in the plays, 212. 
 Great fire of London. See Fire. 
 Greene, Robert, a father of the English stage, 252 
 
 Cited as a witness, contra, 250, 251. 
 
 Had his admirers, 251, note. 
 
 His estimate of Wm. Shakespeare, 58. 
 
 No worse than his kind, 252. 
 
 Only contemporary of W. S. who exposed the forgery, 58 
 
 The "steal" he complained of, 302. 
 
 Title of his book, 126, note. 
 Contents of, 266. 
 
 Told the truth about Wm. Shakespeare, 124, 125, 126, note. 
 "Groat's worth of wit." See Greene, 126. 
 "Groom, Lord Leicester's," Delia Bacon's name for S., 193. 
 
 H. 
 
 Habitues of Shakespeare's theaters, who were, 37. 
 
 Hallam, Henry, doubtful as to accepting S.'s authorship, 45. 
 
 His estimate of the plays, 207. 
 
 Opinion as to their philology, 207. 
 
328 INDEX. 
 
 Halliwell, accounts for the epitaphs, 270. 
 
 Follows Hallam, 302. 
 Halliwell-Philliphs, J, 0„ his "outlines." 253. 
 
 Does not dispel the difficulties, 254. 
 Hamlet, believed by Delia Bacon to be key-note of plays, 190, 
 Harrison, John, cited as a witness, 250. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, his narrative of Delia Bacon, 197, 198. 
 Hawthornden, Drummond of. See Drummond of Hawthorri- 
 
 den. 
 Heminges & Condell, cited as witnesses, 250. 
 
 Corroborate Jonson's testimony, 35. 
 
 How procured emendations, 234, 235. 
 
 Their " copy " for first folio, 315. 
 
 Their reason for the first folio, 249, note. 
 Henry the Sixth, Grant White's idea of, 303. 
 
 Greene's complaint about, 302. 
 
 Not Shakespeare's, 302. 
 
 Wonderful "run" of, 307. 
 Henry the Seventh, curious evidence of Bacon's, 242. 
 Heywood, author of portions of "Passionate Pilgrim," 109. 
 
 Writes plays of the period, 264. 
 "Historic Doubt," the Shakespearean myth not a, 66. 
 Historical evidence. See Circumstantial evidence. Passim. 
 Historical plays, evidence of, as to Bacon, 242. 
 History, Bacon thinks taught by drama, 242. 
 Hume, David, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 25. 
 Hunter, Rev. Joseph, identifies Proserpo's Island, 87, note. 
 
 Iago, a comedian's part, -308. 
 
 Speech of, a striking paraphrase of Berni, 64. 
 Ideal Shakespeare, every man may select his own, 99 
 "Imogen" name and character, whence taken, 217. 
 Imposture literary, state of the law favorable to, 113. 
 Ingleby, Dr C. M., his plea for Shakespeare, 250 
 Innuendo, evidence by way of, 237. 
 
 Supporting Ben Jonson 238, note. 
 Innuendoes, of Sir Tobie Matthew, 147, 237. 
 
INDEX. 329 
 
 Insecurity of authorship, 109. See Authorship, Copyright, 
 Printers, etc. 
 
 Nashe's, testimony as to, 109. 
 
 Heywood's, testimony as to, 109. 
 Internal evidence. See Evidence, internal. 
 Italian and French, not taught at Stratford school, 221. 
 Italy, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 219, 220. 
 
 Intricate acquaintance with manners and customs of, 220. 
 
 J. 
 
 " Jacques-Peter," probably original form of name " Shakes- 
 peare," 172. 
 James, King. See King James. 
 Jansen, the S. portrait, 101. 
 
 Johnson, Gerard, said to have made Stratford bust, 97. 
 Johnson, Samuel, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 26, 27, 28. 
 
 Specimens of his commentaries on plays, 27. 
 Joint authorship, Miss Bacon's theory was, 200. 
 Jones, Inigo, devises trappings for court masques, 271. 
 Jonson, Ben, a " famous witness," 152. 
 
 An expert witness, 303, 304. 
 
 Applies same words and figure to Bacon and to W. S. 145 
 
 A university man, 43. 
 
 Cited as a witness, contra, 250. 
 
 His conversations with Drummond, 139. 
 
 His "Discoveries" fatal to Shakespearean theory, 134-136. 
 
 His fling at Shakespeare in prologue, etc., 138. 
 
 His obituary verses, 129. 
 
 His testimony, 129. 
 Analysis of, 131. 
 
 His opinion of the Droeshout likeness, 92-94. 
 Why is libel on W. S., 98. 
 
 His plays not popular, 272. 
 
 Never mentions Bacon to W. S. or W. S. to Bacon, 145. 
 
 Plays Boswell to Bacon and Shakespeare alike, 146. 
 
 Studiously inclined, 43. 
 
 Wants to blot out 1,000 Shakespearean lines, 137. 
 Jordan, John, 74. 
 
330 INDEX 
 
 Jordan, John, probable inventor of story and verses, 123. 
 Judith Shakespeare, never taught to write her name. 40, 172. 
 
 K. 
 
 King James's letter, story of, when invented, 44, 167. 
 King, Thomas, his " Plea" for Shakespeare, 248. 
 His argument, 249. 
 
 L. 
 
 Ladies, seated on the stage, 273. 
 
 Lampoon on Sir Thomas Lucy, two versions of, 123. 
 
 Latinisms, in the plays, 207. 
 
 Law in " Merchant of Venice," 215, note. 
 
 Lawyers. See Young lawyers. 
 
 Learning contained in the plays, 205. 
 
 No reason for its being there, 229. 
 Legal acquirements of author of the plays, 59, 214. 
 Libraries, public or circulating, none in London, 52. 
 Library. See English library. 
 
 Did he have a, 266, 267. 
 
 Plays can not be studied without a, 266. 
 
 Plays not composed without a, 266. 
 
 Shakespeare's, what it must have been, 212. 
 License to print, meaning of a, 108. 
 Ling & Trundell, procure copies in shorthand, 307. 
 
 Proof of fact, 307. 
 Lintot, Bernard, invented the King James letter story in 1710, 44, 
 
 168. 
 Literary imposture. See Imposture, literary. 
 Literature, persecuted if unlicensed, 107. 
 
 See Star Chamber, Copyright, 107. 
 " Lord Leicester's groom." See " Groom." 
 " Lover's complaint," appears with the Sonnets, 277. 
 " Lucrece," of doubtful authorship, 41, 218. 
 Lucy, Sir Thomas, lampoon on, 123. 
 
 M. 
 
 Macaulay, accounts for Bunyan's works, 165, 166. 
 Maids of honor, seated on the stage, 273. 
 
INDEX. 331 
 
 Malone, Edmund, his " chronologies," 86, 87. 
 
 His contributions to Shakespearean biography, 76, et seq. 
 
 His Shakespearean labors, 76, 80, 85. 
 
 Whitewashes the Stratford bust, 97. 
 Management, theatrical, no sinecure in 17th century, 48. 
 Manuscripts, Bacon's Will directs certain, locked up, 244. 
 
 .Delia Bacon's idea of their disposition, 193, 194. 
 
 May yet come to light, 244. 
 
 Minute and constant search for, 49, 50. 
 
 Northumberland, discovered by Spedding, 242. 
 Marshall's picture, 95. See Portraits. 
 Masques, William Shakespeare wrote none, 271. 
 Massey, Gerald, makes a romance from sonnets, 283. 
 Matthew, Sir Tobie, banters Bacon r 237. 
 
 His postscripts, 180, 181, 236, 237. 
 
 Innuendos of, 181. 
 
 Knew Bacon, but not Shakespeare, 147. 
 Quotation from, to this effect, 148. 
 
 Why he did not reveal Bacon's secret, 152, note. 
 Medicine, knowledge of, displayed in the plays, 210-215. 
 Medico-Legal knowledge, displayed in the plays, 215. 
 Merchant of Venice, law in, 245, note. 
 Meres, Francis, cited as a witness, 250. 
 
 His testimony critical, not historical, 132. 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, story of order for, may be true, 310. 
 
 Eebuke to lechery in, 310. 
 
 Perhaps to Elizabeth, 310, note. 
 Milton, John, first to claim author's copyright, 108. 
 
 His Areopagitica, 108. 
 
 His estimate of Shakespearean plays, 20, 36. 
 Value of his estimate, 20, 36. 
 Mitylene, curious custom prevalent in, alluded to in Pericles, 
 
 55, note. 
 Monasteries, dissolution of the, 175. 
 Monastery, Christian, in Ephesus, 116. 
 Montgomery, perhaps connected with plays, 284. 
 Music, familiarity with, 297, note. 
 
332 INDEX. 
 
 N. 
 
 Nashe, Thomas, his testimony to insecurity of authorship, 109. 
 New and Delia Bacon theories, coincide, 299. 
 New theory, alternative presented by, 262. 
 
 Further details of, 284. 
 
 The, what is, 256. 
 Newton, his discoveries anticipated by plays, 212. 
 Northumberland MSS., discovered by Spedding, 242. 
 " Noverint," what Nashe may have meant by, 245. 
 
 0. 
 
 Oldys, story about a brother of William Shakespeare, 84. 
 
 Orthography of name Shakespeare, 169-171. 
 
 Othello, appears seven years after Shakespeare's death, 290. 
 
 P. 
 
 Palmerston, Lord, convert to Baconian theory, 143. 
 
 His idea of Ben Jonson, 143. 
 Papist, was W. S. a, 74, 117. 
 Parallelisms, argument from in Baconian theory, 238. 
 
 Holmes's list of, 238. 
 
 Examples of, 239, 240. 
 
 Eeduced to an ordo by Holmes, 241. 
 Passionate Pilgrim, not written by W. S., 276. 
 
 Shakespeare's name removed in 3d edition, 276. 
 
 The, written partly by Hey wood, 109. 
 Pascal, difference between his case and Shakespeare's, 55. 
 Pembroke, a dedication of Sonnets to, insulting, 282. 
 
 Sonnets could not be dedicated to, 281. 
 Pepys, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 20. 
 " Pericles," allusion to a peculiar custom in, 55, note. 
 
 Eejected by first folio, but restored by Shakespeareans, 290. 
 Phillips. See Halliwell-Phillips. ' 
 Philological test of Shakespearean plays, 205-207. 
 Pickpockets, pilloried on the stage, 259, note, 
 Plagiarism. See Authorship, Greene, Heywood, Plays, Printers. 
 Plays, anachronisms not misleading, 118. 
 
 Audiences of the, not critical as to the dialogue, 13. 
 
INDEX. 333 
 
 Plays, authorship of, revealed, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
 Boys took female parts in, 273. 
 Classical knowledge of the, 208. 
 Contemporary criticism of the character of, 14. 
 Doubt as to single authorship of, 300. 
 Dramatic license of these, 118. 
 
 Emendations of, in first folio. See Emendations, First folio. 
 Forty-two credited to W. Shakespeare, 290. 
 How put into type, 112, 306, 307. 
 Manuscripts of, jealously guarded by theaters, 115 
 Manuscripts of the, how procured, 110. 
 Name of actors in, 314. 
 Name of author of, 296. 
 Need not have been didactic, 271, 272. 
 Not composed without a library, 266. 
 No tradition connecting Shakespeare with composition of, 
 
 267. 
 Ordinarily mere local sketches, 263, 264. 
 Passed with first audiences as Shakespeare's, 15. 
 Printed instead of acted, 263. 
 Probable reason why called Shakespeare's, 56. 
 Shakespearean, canon of, 291. 
 Sources of unauthorized reprints of, 307. 
 Tabulated, 289. 
 
 Taken down in shorthand, 307. 
 The, a phenomenon in experience, 1. 
 The " copyrights " of, 50. 
 
 Not mentioned in the will, 50. 
 The doubtful. See Doubtful plays. 
 Their action only used, 272. 
 The masses not " up " to, to-day, 261. 
 The philological test of, 205-207. 
 The present text made by piecemeal since W. S.'s death, 
 
 112. 
 The, were popular with their first audiences, 15. 
 Traces in, of aristocratic authorship, 283. 
 Typographical evidence of authorship of, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
 Use of Warwickshire names in the, 248. 
 Use of Warwickshire expressions in the, 248. 
 
334 INDEX. 
 
 Plays, were performed, 305, 306, 307. 
 
 Where did the printers get hold of, 105, 306, 307. See Print- 
 ers, Typographical evidence. 
 
 Why Bacon may not have acknowledged, 316. 
 
 Written to be played, not printed, 106. 
 Poems, dedication of, to Southampton, 179. 
 
 Fathered upon Shakespeare, 180. 
 
 The. See their various titles. 
 " Poetaster," the, a hit at Shakespeare in, 256, note. 
 Poetical works of William Shakespeare, complete collection, 119. 
 Poetry, not competent evidence of a fact, 131. 
 Pope, Alexander, his apprentices write parts of, 295. 
 
 His estimate of plays, 26. 
 
 Indicates portions to admire, 205. 
 Portraits, Boaden's account of the, 90. 
 
 Bust in possession of Garrick Club, 105. 
 
 Criticised as if purely ideal, 92. 
 
 Droeshout, the only one that ever was authenticated, 92. 
 
 Earlom's copy, 102. 
 
 One lately discovered in Australia, 104. 
 
 Shakespearean argument from the, 91, 92. 
 
 The Chandos, 99. 
 
 The Felton Head. 
 
 The Jansen, 101. 
 
 The Marshall. 
 
 The Stratford bust, 97. 
 
 The Zuccharo, 101. 
 " Practicable " scenery, unknown, 260. 
 
 Exceptions, 260, note. 
 Presumption, the, as to the Shakespearean authorship, its value,15. 
 
 Well disturbed in 1856, 187. 
 Printed matter, most careful record of, in those days, 116. 
 Printers, assigned any name they pleased to literary work, 109. 
 
 Did what they pleased with literary work, 109. 
 
 Of first folio followed copy too closely, 314. 
 
 Where did they get " copy " for the plays, 105, 112. 
 Printing, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 222-227. 
 
 Of the Sonnets. See Sonnets. 
 Prologue to " Every Man in his Humour," 138. See Jonson, Ben. 
 
INDEX. 335 
 
 Proof reader, of first folio, 309. 
 
 Prophesy, no such thing as a prophet of the past, 56. 
 
 Proserpo's Island "located," by Hunter, 87, note; by Dowden, 
 
 88, note. 
 Pseudonymic authorship. See anonymous. 
 Putnam's Magazine, article in, 185. See Bacon, Delia. 
 
 a. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth, her apochryphal correspondence with W. S., 
 168. 
 
 Her order for Falbtaff may be true, 309, 310. 
 
 Legend of her order for " Merry Wives," 150, note. 
 Queen Elizabeth's glove, story of, 168. 
 Question of the authorship, why not raised earlier, 18. 
 
 First raised in Chamber's Journal, 185. 
 
 R. 
 
 Kaleigh, knows nothing of William Shakespeare, 149. 
 
 Perhaps connected with plays, 284. 
 
 Suggested as an author of the S. Drama, 175. 
 " Katsei's Ghost," pamphlet of, 243. 
 Ravenscroft, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 23. 
 Readings, various, of the text of the plays, what they prove, 34. 
 Red cloth issued to Shakespeare, 309, note. 
 Renaissance drama, English, 174, 202. 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, copies the Chandos, 99. 
 Roman Catholic, was Shakespeare a, 117. 
 " Rosalin's complaint," not by W. S., 283. 
 Rowe, his life of W. S., probably honest, 76. 
 Rutland, perhaps connected with plays, 284. 
 Rymer, Thomas, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 24 
 
 S. 
 
 Scenery. See Practicable scenery, 260. 
 " Schoolmaster Story." See Beeston. 
 Scotland, Dr. Elze thinks Shakespeare was in, 221. 
 Sea-coast of Bohemia, 230. 
 
 A part of the stage business, 178. 
 
 A theory for, 178, note. 
 
336 INDEX. 
 
 Second-best bed, explained by Shakespeareans, 89. 
 Shaftesbury, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 24. 
 Shakespeare, John, ale-taster of Stratford, 46. 
 
 Fined for throwing muck, 253. 
 
 Records of his life, 46. 
 Shakespeare, Judith. See Judith Shakespeare. 
 Shakespeare, Mrs. Wm., why she did not live with her husband, 
 
 90. 
 Shakespeare, Susanna. See Susanna Hall. 
 
 Slandered by a neighbor, 253. 
 Law suit for 253. 
 Shakespeare, the name, original form probably "Jacques-Peter," 
 
 172. 
 Shakespeare, William, a good penman, 32. 
 
 A reckless borrower, 265. 
 
 Authography of the name, 169. 
 
 Author, not editor, 303. 
 
 A "utility" gentleman in the stock company, 31-33. 
 
 "Autograph" in British Museum, 169. 
 
 A wag, not a worker, 304. 
 
 Born versed in all knowledge? 219. 
 
 Career in Stratford, 47. 
 
 Covers his tracks well, 293. 
 
 Credited with forty-two plays in lifetime, 290. 
 
 Did he make emendations to plays, 234, 235, 236. 
 
 Did he write Bacon's works, 204. 
 
 Did not write his first composition in his native patois, 41. 
 
 Difficulties presented by his Will, 49. 
 
 Does not disclaim authorship of Passionate Pilgrim, 276. 
 
 Dramatic canon of, and Bacon, 203 
 
 Editor, not author. 306-308. 
 
 Expert evidence as to, 303. 
 
 Family. See Family of Shakespeare. 
 
 " Father " anything, willing to, 287. 
 
 Fortunate enough to secure a poet, 176, 177. 
 
 Funny Mr., 304. 
 
 His authorship disproved by first folio, 313, 314, 315. 
 
 His birthday, 157. 
 
 St. George's day selected for, 158. 
 
INDEX. 337 
 
 Shakespeare, William, his "business" rejected, 298. 
 His death bed, 125, 126. 
 His income, in modern figures, $25,000, 40. 
 His income, perhaps exaggerated by Ward, 75. 
 His interest to keep plays out of print, if his, 115. 
 His library. See Library, 266. 
 His literary acquirements, 39. 
 His name a safe pseudonym, 284. 
 His name discovered in Northumberland MSS., 242. 
 His rapid accumulation of wealth, 43. 
 
 A self-made man, 43. 
 His supposed travels, 216. 
 His weakness for pedigrees, 256, note. 
 Holding horses, story not improbable, 168. 
 Interpolates as he copies, 304. 
 Interpolates popular songs, 309. 
 Made his money by acting, 244. 
 Makes Iago a comedian, 308. 
 May have been pre-contracted to his wife, 253. 
 Name possesses market value, 257, 263. 
 Name removed from 3d edition of " Passionate Pilgrim," 276. 
 Natural that he should have followed players to London, 51. 
 Never suspected his reputation, 305. 
 No pride of authorship in, 268. 
 Not a law student, 245. 
 
 Not solicitous or expectant of any posthumous fame, 48. 
 No tradition connecting, with composition of plays, 267. 
 No uncertainty as to his character, 38. 
 Nowhere met in tradition or history, as a school-boy, 40. 
 One " biographer " of, 161. 
 
 Only one attempt to prove him a university man, 222. 
 Other duties, 33. 
 
 Out of favor with King James, 150, note. 
 Portraits of, 91. 
 
 Usually criticised as if purely ideal, 92. 
 Probably remodeled the plays, 177. 
 Records of his life, 46. 
 Retires to money lending in Stratford, 233. 
 Rev. Richard Davie's life of, 73. 
 
338 INDEX. 
 
 Shakespeare, William, R. G. White accuses him of " want of 
 probity," 303. 
 
 Sketches Dogberry, 298, 299. 
 
 Specimen of his wit, 270. 
 
 Speculations as to first employment, 257. 
 
 "Wanted art," 140. 
 
 Was he admitted to noble companionship? 274. 
 
 Was he a Roman Catholic? 117. 
 
 Was not lawyer, physician, etc., 297. 
 
 Was there any-thing he did not know? 230. 
 
 Where did he find his leisure? 231. 
 
 Where did he get his material ? question never asked, 166, 
 167. 
 
 Who wrote. See Who wrote Shakespeare. Passim. 
 
 Why he purchased arms, 274. 
 
 Wrote no masques, 271. 
 Shakespearean question, not what, but who? 296. 
 Shakespeare's Poetical Works, complete collection of, 119. 
 Sharpham, his evidence, 306. 
 " Shylock " appears at a suggestive time, 233. 
 Sidney, description of theatrical properties, 258. 
 Siege of Troy, gunpowder at, 179. 
 Signatures, 295. See Forgery. 
 Smith, W. II., can not accept S.'s authorship, 154. 
 
 Follows Miss Bacon, does not claim priority over her, 187. 
 
 Thinks that W. S. could not read or write, 171. 
 Songs, Shakespeare introduces popular, 309. 
 Sonnets, authorship of, not involved in this question, 276. 
 
 Dedicated by their printer to friend of his own, 277. 
 
 Mr. Bernsdorfs theory as to, 280. 
 
 Mr. Boaden's theory of, 279. 
 
 Mr. Brown's theory is of doubtful force, 279. 
 
 M. Chasles's theory as to, 280. 
 
 Mr. Dowden's theory as to, 280. 
 
 Mr. Massey,s theory as to, 282. 
 
 Mr. Minto's theory as to, 280. 
 
 Mr. Niel's theory as to, 282. 
 
 Mr. Thompson's theory as to, 280. 
 
 Mr. Wordsworth's theory as to, 280. 
 
INDEX. 339 
 
 Sonnets, speculations as to meaning of, 278-282. 
 
 Why assigned to Shakespeare, 277. 
 Southampton, a comparatively poor man, 273, 311. 
 
 Dedication to, as "Mr. W. H. ."insulting, 282. 
 
 Alleged acquaintance with Shakespeare, 41, 311, 312. 
 
 Did he forget his caste ? 273, 274. 
 
 His gift to Shakespeare incredible, 41, 180. 
 
 How perhaps connected with plays, 284. 
 
 Never suspected of literary tastes, 1, 273. 
 
 No evidence that he knew Shakespeare, 311, 312. 
 
 Biographers find no trace of it, 311. 
 
 Story manufactured by Shakespeareans, 311, 312. 
 
 Poems dedicated to, 179. 
 
 Story of his munificence, why probably a forgery, 44, 311 , 312. 
 
 Supposed friendship for Shakespeare, 273. 
 
 Why great doubt as to his being a companion of Shakes- 
 peare, 40. 
 Spedding, James, believed in more than one author of Henry 
 
 VIII., 184. • 
 Spenser and Chaucer, the great fire not fatal to records of, 80. 
 Spenser, his reference to " Gentle Willie," explained, 148, note. 
 
 His reference to "iEtion," 147, note. 
 Stage, best seats were on the, 273. 
 
 "Business," probably not written by author of text, 117. 
 See " Business." 
 
 Modern, rejects the Shakespearean "business" 
 
 Then only available depot for literary work, 174. 
 Star Chamber, court of, 106. 
 
 Had jurisdiction of literary matter, id. 
 Stationers' Company, the blood-hound of the Star Chamber, 107. 
 
 The origin of, 107. 
 Steele, Richard, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 26. 
 St. George's day, selected as a birth-day for W. S. 158. 
 Stratford bust, 97. See Portraits. 
 
 Said to be by Gerard Johnson, 97. 
 
 Said to be by Thomas Stanton. 105. 
 Stratford Grammar School, was W. S. a pupil of, 52. 
 Stratford portrait, the, 105. 
 Stratford School, speculations as to, 42, 52, 53, 214, 217. 
 
340 INDEX. 
 
 Stratford, vicar of, treats Miss Bacon tenderly, 198. 
 Style, literary, not reliable evidence, 294. 
 
 Of Bacon and Shakespeare dissimilar, 294. 
 
 Of the Shakespearean plays, 205. 
 
 Reader must judge for himself as to, 294. 
 " Suppers after the play," 274 
 Susanna Hall, enigmatical epitaph over, 85. 
 Swift, Dean, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 23. 
 
 T. 
 
 Taine, his picture of Shakespearean theaters, 258. 
 
 Of Shakespearean audiences, 259. 
 Tate, Nahum, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 21. 
 " Tempest," was a drollery in Ben Jonson's day, 139, note. 
 Theater, management of, a precarious livelihood in the 17th 
 
 century, 48. 
 Theaters, best seats on the stage, 259. 
 
 Of Shakespeare's day, description of, 258. 
 
 Shakespearean habitues of, 37. See Audiences, Plays. 
 Theobald and others, anticipate compromise theory, 301. 
 Theobald believed in more than one Shakespearean author, 181. 
 Theories, compromise between, 300. 
 
 Shakespearean, three well denned, 188. See New Theory, 
 Delia Bacon, and Baconian. 
 
 "Who anticipated, 301. 
 Thompson, Win., his " Renaissance Drama," 247. 
 
 Thinks manuscripts may be safe, 244. 
 Thorpe, Thomas, dedicates the Sonnets to a friend, 277, 278. 
 
 Prints and copyrights the Sonnets, 277. 
 Trade-mark, sort of common in name, 292. 
 Travels, Wm. Shakespeare's supposed, 216. 
 Treatises, scientific, the audiences did not want, 229. 
 " Troilus and Cressida," 285. See Doubtful plays. 
 Troy. See Siege of Troy . 
 " True, original copies," proof of what they were, 313, 314. See 
 
 Copies, First folio, Typographical evidence. 
 Typographical evidence of authorship, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
 
INDEX. 341 
 
 U. 
 
 Ulrici, opinion of, learning of plays, 221. 
 
 Unitary theory, property of Smith and Holmes. See Bacon, 
 Delia, 200. 
 
 V. 
 
 Vega, Lope de, computed to have written 21,300,000 verses, 184. 
 
 Writes " without blotting a line," 184. 
 Venice, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 219. 
 Venus and Adonis, argument from that poem alone, 43. 
 
 Boldness of assignment to W. S., 275. 
 
 Popularity of, 293. 
 
 Why not a first production, 294. 
 
 Why of doubtful authorship, 41, 218. 
 
 w. 
 
 Ward, Dominie, hears about Shakespeare, 304. 
 
 Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 265. 
 Ward, Rev. John, his account of W. S., 68. 
 Warwickshire, names, use of, in the plays, 248. 
 
 Expressions, use of in plays. 248. 
 " Watch," the, actual curiosities, 305. 
 
 Burghley's account of, 305, note. 
 Werner, anticipated by the plays, 213. 
 " Wet combats," wit combats were, 268. 
 
 Is it a misprint ? 269. 
 " W. H.," a friend of Thorpe, dedicator or dedicatee ? 278. 
 
 Theories as to meaning of, 280-282. 
 
 Various translations of, 279. 
 
 Who was he? 109, 279, 280, 282. 
 White, R. G., admits that managers " kept a poet," 85, note. 
 
 His idea of Henry VI., 303. 
 
 Opinion of English of plays, 218. 
 Who wrote Shakespeare ? Passim. Question first asked in 
 
 1852, 185. 
 Wilkes, Geo., his "American Point of View," 247. 
 Will, difficulties of the, explained, 271. 
 
342 INDEX. 
 
 Will, no mention of any plays in, 50. 
 
 Or of any theatrical property, 50. 
 " Wit combats," were "wet combats," 268. 
 Wood, Anthony, his mention of W. S., 78. 
 Works, poetical, of W. S. See Poetical works. 
 Wotton, description of a popular play, 263. 
 
 Description of theaters of his days, 258. 
 
 y. 
 
 " Young ladies' argument," the, 91. 
 
 Young lawyers, wrote plays rapidly, 84, note. 
 
 z. 
 
 Zuccharo, portrait, the, 107. See Portraits. 
 
PUBLICATIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 ROBERT CLARKE & CO., 
 
 CINCINNATI, O. 
 
 HISTORICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 Alzog (John D. D.) A Manual of Universal Church History. 
 Translated by Kev. T. J. Pabisch and Rev. T. S. Byrne. 3 
 vols. 8vo. 15 00 
 
 Anderson (E. L.) Six Weeks in Norway. 18mo. 1 00 
 
 Andre (Major). The Cow Chase; an Heroick Poem. 8vo. 
 Paper. 75 
 
 Antrim (J.) The History of Champaign and Logan Counties, 
 Ohio, from their First Settlement. 12mo. 1 50 
 
 Ballard (Julia P.) Insect Lives; or, Born in Prison. Illus- 
 trated. Sq. 12mo. 1 00 
 
 Bassler (S. S.) The "Weather. A Practical Guide to its Changes. 
 8vo. Paper. 25 
 
 Bell (Thomas J.) History of the Cincinnati Water Works. 
 Plates. 8vo. 75 
 
 Be.vxer (S.) Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices: 
 What Years to Make Money in Pig Iron, Hogs, Corn, and Pro- 
 visions. 2d ed. 24mo. _ 1 00 
 
 Bible in the Public Schools. Records. Arguments, etc., in the 
 
 Case of Minor vs. Board of Education or Cincinnati. 8vo. 2 00 
 
 Arguments in Favor of the Use of the Bible. Separate. 
 
 Paper, 50 
 
 Arguments Against the LTse of the Bible. Separate. Paper, 50 
 
 Bibliothkca Americana. 1883. Being a priced Catalogue of a 
 large Collection (nearly 7,000 items) of Books and Pamphlets 
 relating to America. 8vo. 312 pages. Paper, 50c; Cloth, 100 
 
 Biddle (Horace P.) Elements of Knowledge. 12mo. 1 00 
 
 Biddle (Horace P.) Prose Miscellanies. 12mo. 1 00 
 
 Bouquet (PJ.) The Expedition of, against the Ohio Indians in 
 1764, etc. With Preface by Francis Parkman, Jr. 8vo. 
 $3.00. Large paper, 6 00 
 
 Boyland (G. H., M.D.) Six Months Under the Red Cross with 
 the French Army in the Franco- Prussian War. 12mo. 1 50^ 
 
 Bruxner (A. A.) Elementary and Pronouncing French Reader/ 
 18mo. 60 
 
 Bruxner (A. A.) The Gender of French Verbs Simplified. 
 18mo. 25 
 
 Burt (Rev. N. C, D.D.) The Far East; or Letters from Egypt, 
 Palestine, etc. 12mo. 1 75 
 
 Butterfield (0. W.) The Washington-Crawford Letters; being 
 
 1 
 
2 Robert Clarice & Co.'s Publications. 
 
 the Correspondence between George Washington and William 
 Crawford, concerning Western Lands. 8vo. 1 00 
 
 Butterfield (C. W.) The Discovery of the Northwest in 1634, 
 by John Nicolet, with a Sketch of his Life. 12mo. 1 00 
 
 Clark (Col. George Rogers). Sketches of his Campaign in the 
 Illinois in 1778-9. With an Introduction by Hon. Henry 
 Pirtle, and an Appendix. 8vo. $2 00. Large paper, 4 00 
 
 Coffin (Levi.) The Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed 
 President of the Underground Railroad. A Brief History of 
 the Labors of a Lifetime in behalf of the Slave. With Stories 
 of Fugitive Slaves, etc., etc. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Collier (Peter). Sorghum: its Culture and Manufacture Eco- 
 nomically Considered, and as a Source of Sugar, Syrup and 
 Fodder. Illustrated. 8vo. 3 00 
 
 Constitution of the United States, Etc. The Declaration of 
 Independence, July 4, 1776; the. Articles of Confederation, 
 July 9, 1778; the Constitution of the United States, September 
 17, 1787; the Fifteen Amendment to the Constitution, and 
 Index; Washington's Farewell Address, September 7, 1796. 
 Svo. Paper. 25 
 
 Cornwell (H. G.) Consultation Chart of the Eye-Symptoms 
 and Eye-Complications of General Disease. 14 x 20 inches. 
 Mounted on Roller. 50 
 
 Craig (N. B.) The Olden Time. A Monthly Publication, de- 
 voted to the Preservation of Documents of Early History, 
 etc. Originally Published at Pittsburg, in 1846-47. 2 vols. 
 8vo. 10 00 
 
 Drake (D.) Pioneer Life in Kentucky. Edited, with Notes 
 and a Biographical Sketch by his Son, Hon. Chas. D. Drake. 
 8vo. $3 00. Large paper. 6. 00 
 
 DuBreuil (A.) Vineyard Culture Improved and Cheapened. 
 Edited by Dr. J. A. Warder. 12mo. * 2 00 
 
 Ellard (Virginia G.) Grandma's Christmas Day. Illus. Sq. 
 12mo. 1 00 
 
 Everts (Orpheus). What Shall We Do With the Drunkard? 
 A Rational View of the Use of Brain Stimulants. 8vo. 
 Paper. 50 
 
 Family Expense Book. A Printed Account Book, with Appro- 
 priate Columns and Headings, for keeping a Complete Record 
 of Family Expenses. 12mo. 50 
 
 Finley (I, J.) and Putnam (R.) Pioneer Record and Reminis- 
 cences of the Early Settlers and Settlement of Ross Connty, 
 Ohio. 8vo. m 2 50 
 
 Fletcher (Wm. B., M.D.) Cholera: its Characteristics, History, 
 Treatment, etc. 8vo. Paper. 1 00 
 
 Force (M. F.) Essays: Pre-Historic Man — Darwinism and 
 Deity — The Mound Builders. Svo. Paper. 
 
 Force (M. F.) Some Early Notices of the Indians of Ohio. 
 To What Race did the Mound Builders Belong? Svo. 
 Paper. 50 
 
 Freeman (Ellen). Manual of the French Verb, to accompany 
 every French Course. - 16mo. Paper. 25 
 
Robert Clarke & Co.'s Publications. 3 
 
 Gallagher (Wm. D.) Miami Woods, A Golden Wedding, and 
 other Poems. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Giumke (F.) Considerations on the Nature and Tendency of 
 Free Institutions. 8vo. 2 50 
 
 Griswold (W.) Kansas: Her Resources and Developments ; or, 
 the Kansas Pilot. 8vo. Paper. 50 
 
 Hall (James). Legends of the West. Sketches illustrative of 
 the Habits, Occupations, Privations, Adventures, and Sports 
 of the Pioneers of the West. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Hall (James). Romance of Western History ; or, Sketches of 
 History, Life, and Manners in the West. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Hanover (M. D.) A Practical Treatise on the Law of Horses, 
 embracing the Law of Bargain, Sale, and Warranty of Horses 
 and other Live Stock; the Rule as to Unsoundness and Vice, 
 and the Responsibility of the Proprietors of Livery, Auction, 
 and Sale Stables, Inn-keepers, Veterinary Surgeons, and Far- 
 riers, Carriers, etc. 8vo. 4 00 
 
 Hart (J. M.) A Syllabus of Anglo-Saxon Literature. 8vo. 
 Paper. 50 
 
 Hassaurek (F.) The Secret of the Andes. A Romance. 
 12mo. 1 50 
 
 The Same, in German. 8vo. Paper, 50c; cloth, 1 00 
 
 Hassaurek (F.) Four Years Among Spanish Americans. Third 
 Edition. 12mo. 1 50 
 
 Hatch (Col. W. S.) A Chapter in the History of the War of 
 1812, in the Northwest, embracing the Surrender of the 
 Northwestern Army and Fort, at Detroit, August 16, 1813, etc. 
 18mo. 1 25 
 
 Hayes (Rutherford B.) The Life, Public Services, and Select 
 Speeches of. Edited by J. Q. Howard. 12mo. Paper, 75c; 
 Cloth. - 1 25 
 
 Hazex (Gen. W. B.) Our Barren Lands. The Interior of the 
 United States, West of the One-Hundredth Meridian, and 
 East of the Sierra Nevada. 8vo. Paper. 50 
 
 Hexshall (Dr. James A.) Book of the Black Bass; comprising 
 its complete Scientific and Life History, together with a Prac- 
 tical Treatise on Angling and Fly Fishing, and a full de- 
 scription of Tools, Tackle, and Implements. Illustrated. 
 12mo. 3 00 
 
 Hortok (S. Dana). Silver and Gold, and their Relation to the 
 Problem of Resumption. 8vo. 1 50' 
 
 Hortox (S. Dana). The Monetary Situation. 8vo. Paper. 50 
 
 Hough (Franklin B.) Elements of Forestry. Designed to afford 
 Information concerning the Planting and Care of Forest Trees 
 for Ornament and Profit; and giving Suggestions upon the 
 Creation and Care of Woodlands, with the view of securing 
 the greatest benefit for the longest time. Particularly adapted 
 to the wants and conditions of the United States. Illus- 
 trated. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Housekeeping in' the Blue Grass. A New and Practical Cook 
 Book. By Ladies of the Presbyterian Church, Paris, Ky. 
 12mo. 13th thousand. 1 50 
 
 Uovey (Horace C.) Celebrated American Caverns, especially 
 
4 Robert Clarke & Co.'s Publications. 
 
 Mammoth, Wyandot, and Luray ; together with Historical, Sci- 
 entific, and Descriptive Notices of Caves and Grottoes in Other 
 Lands. Maps and Illustrations. 8vo. 2 00 
 
 Howe (II.) Historical Collections of Ohio. Containing a Col- 
 lection of the most Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical 
 Sketches, Anecdotes, etc., relating to its Local and General 
 History. 8vo. 6 00 
 
 Hunt ( W. E.) Historical Collections of Coshocton County, Ohio. 
 8vo. 3 00 
 
 Huston (R. G.) Journey in Honduras, and Jottings by the Way. 
 Inter-Oceanic Railway. 8vo. Paper. 50 
 
 Jackson (John D., M.D.) The Black Arts in Medicine, with 
 an Anniversary Address. Edited by Dr. L. S. McMurtrv. 
 J2mo. I- 00 
 
 Jasper (T.) The Birds of North America. Colored Plates, 
 drawn from Nature, with Descriptive and Scientific Letter- 
 press. In 40 parts, $1.00 each ; or, 2 vols. Royal 4to. Half- 
 morocco, $50 00 ; full morocco, 60 00 
 The Same. Popular portion only with the Colored Plates. 
 1 vol. Half morocco, $36.50; full morocco, 40 00 
 
 Jordan (D. M.) Rosemary Leaves. A Collection of Poems. 
 18mo. 1 50 
 
 Keller (M. J.) Elementary Perspective, explained and applied 
 to Familiar Objects. Illustrated. 12mG. * 1 00 
 
 King (John). A Commentary on the Law and True Construction 
 of the Federal Constitution. 8vo. 2 50 
 
 Klippart (J. H.) The Principles and Practice of Land Drainage. 
 Illustrated. 12mo. 1 75 
 
 Law (J.) Colonial History of Vincennes, Indiana, under the 
 French, British, and American Governments. 12mo. 1 00 
 
 Lloyd (J. LT.) The Chemistry of Medicines. Illus. 12mo. 
 Cloth, $2 75; Sheep, 3 25 
 
 Lloyd (J. U.) Pharmaceutical Preparations; Elixirs, their 
 History, Formulas, and Methods of Preparation. 12mo. 1 25 
 
 Longley (Elias). Eclectic Manual of Phonography. A Com- 
 plete Guide to the Acquisition of Pitman's Phonetic Short- 
 hand, with or without a Master. A new and carefully revised 
 edition. 12mo. Stiff paper binding, 65c. ; Cloth, 75 
 
 Longley (Elias). The Reporter's Guide. Designed for Students 
 in any Style of Phonography; in which are formulated for 
 the first time in any work of the kind Rules for the Contraction 
 of Words, Principles of Phrasing, and Methods of Abbrevia- 
 tion. Abundantly illustrated. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 LoNGLEY-(Elias). American Phonographic Dictionary, exhibit- 
 ing the correct and actual Shorthand Forms for all the useful 
 AVords in the English Language, about 50,000 in number, and, 
 in addition, many Foreign Terms; also, for 2,000 Geographical 
 Names, and as many Family, Personal, and Noted Fictitious 
 Names. 12mo. 2 50 
 
 Longley (Elias). Every Reporter's Own Shorthand Dictionary. 
 The same as the above, but printed on writing paper, leaving 
 out the Shorthand Forms and giving blank lines opposite 
 each word, for the purpose of enabling writers of any System 
 
Robert Clarke & Co.'s Publications. 5 
 
 of Shorthand to put upon record, for convenient reference, the 
 peculiar word-forms they employ. 12mo. 2 50 
 
 Loxgley (Elias). Compend of Phonography, presenting a Table 
 of all Alphabetical Combinations, Hooks, Circles, Loops, etc., 
 at one view ; also, Complete Lists of Word-signs and Con- 
 tracted Word-forms, with Rules for Contracting Words for 
 the Use of Writers of all Styles of Phonography. 12mo. 
 Paper. 25 
 
 Loxgley (Elias). The Phonetic Reader and Writer, containing 
 Reading Exercises, with Translations on opposite pages, which 
 form Writing Exercises. 12mo. 25 
 
 Loxgley (Elias). Phonographic Chart. 28 x 42 inches. 50 
 
 McBride (J.) Pioneer Biography; Sketches of the Lives of 
 some of the Early Settlers of Butler County, Ohio. 2 vols. 
 8vo. $6 50. Large paper. Imp. 8vo. 13 00 
 
 McLaughlix (M. Louise). China Painting. A Practical Manual 
 for the Use of Amateurs in the Decoration of Hard Porce- 
 lain. Sq. 12mo. Boards. 75 
 
 McLaughlix (M. Louise). Pottery Decoration: being a Prac- 
 tical Manual of Underglaize Painting. Sq. 12mo. Boards. 1 00 
 
 McLaughlix (M. Louise). Suggestions for China Painters. Sq. 
 12mo. Boards. 1 00 
 
 MacLeax (J. P.) The Mound Builders, and an Investigation 
 into the Archaeology of Butler County, Ohio. Illus. 12mo. 1 50 
 
 MacLeax (J. P.) A Manual of the Antiquity of Man. Illus- 
 trated. 12mo. 1 00 
 
 MacLean (J. P.) Mastodon, Mammoth,fand Man. Illustrated. 
 12mo. 60 
 
 MacLeax (J. P.) The Worship of the Reciprocal Principles of 
 Nature among the Ancient Hebrews. 18mo. Paper. 25 . 
 
 Mansfield (E. D.) Personal Memories, Social, Political, and 
 Literary 1803-43. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Maxypexxy (G. W.) Our Indian Wards. A History and Dis- 
 cussion of the Indian Question. 8vo. 3 00 
 
 May (Col. J.) Journal and Letters of, relative to Two Journeys 
 to the Ohio Country, 1788 and 1779. 8vo. 2 00 
 
 Mettexheimer (H. J.) Safety Book-keeping. Being a Complete 
 Exposition of Book-keeper's Frauds — how Committed, how 
 discovered, how prevented ; with other Suggestions of Value 
 to Merchants and Book-keepers in the Management ^of Ac- 
 counts. 18mo. Cloth. 1 00 
 
 Mixor (T. C, M.D.) Child-bed Fever. Erysipelas and Puerperal 
 Fever, with a Short Account of both Diseases. 8vo. 2 00 
 
 Mixor (T. C, M.D.) Scarlatina Statistics of the United States. 
 8vo. Paper. 50 
 
 Morgan (Appleton). The Shakespearean Myth; or, William 
 Shakespeare and Circumstantial Evidence. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Morgax (Appleton). Some Shakespearean Commentators. 12mo. 
 Paper. _ 75 
 
 Name and Address Book. A Blank Book, with Printed Headings 
 and Alphabetical Marginal Index, for Recording the Names 
 and Addresses of Professional, Commercial, and Family Cor- 
 respondents. 8vo. 1 00 
 
6 Robert Clarice & Co.'s Publications. 
 
 Xasii (Simeon). Crime and the Family. 12mo. 1 25 
 
 Nemnckx (Rev. Charles). Life of, with Early Catholic Missions 
 
 in Kentucky; the Society of Jesus; the Sisterhood of Loretto, 
 
 etc. By Rev. C. P. Maes. 8vo. 2 50 
 
 Nichols (Gk W.) The Cincinnati Organ; with a Brief Descrip- 
 tion of the Cincinnati Music Hall. 12mo.- Paper. 25 
 
 Ohio Valley Historical Miscellanies. I. Memorandums of a 
 Tour made by Josiah Espy, in the States of Ohio, and Ken- 
 tucky, and Indian Territory, in 1805, " 11. Two Western Cam- 
 paigns in the War of 1812-13: 1. Expedition of Capt. H. Brush, 
 with Supplies for General Hull. 2. Expedition of Gov. Meigs, 
 for the relief of Fort Meigs. By Samuel Williams. III. The 
 Leatherwood God: an account of the Appearance and Preten- 
 tions of J. C. Dylks in Eastern Ohio, in 1828. By R. H. 
 Tanevhill. 1 vol. 8vo. $2 50. Large paper, 5 00 
 
 Once a Year; or, The Doctor's Puzzle. By E. B. S. 16mo. 1 00 
 
 Osborn (H. S.) Ancient Egypt in the Light of Modern Discov- 
 eries. Illustrated. 12mo. 1 25 
 
 Piiisterer (Captain Frederick). The National Guardsman : on 
 "Guard and Kindred Duties. 24mo. Leather. 75 
 
 Physician's Pocket Case Record Prescription Book. 35 
 
 Physician's General Ledger. Half Russia. 4 00 
 
 Piatt (John J.) Penciled Fly-Leaves. A Book of Essays in 
 Town and Country. Sq. 16mo. 1 00 
 
 Poole (W. F.) Anti-Slavery Opinions before 1800. An Essay.' 
 8vo. Paper, 75c; Cloth, 1 25 
 
 Prentice (Geo. D.) Poems of, collected and edited, with Bio- 
 graphical Sketch, by John J. Piatt. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Quick (R. H.) Essays on Educational Reformers. Schools of 
 the Jesuits: Ascham, Montaigne, Ratich, Milton; Comenius; 
 Locke; Rousseau's Emile; Basidow and the Philanthropin, 
 etc, 12mo. 1 50 
 
 Ranck (G. W.) History of Lexington, Kentucky. Its Early 
 Annals and Recent Progress, etc. 8vo. 4 00 
 
 Reemelin (C.) The Wine-Maker's Manual. A Plain, Practical 
 Guide to all the Operations for the Manufacture of Still and 
 Sparkling Wines. 12mo. 1 25 
 
 Reemelin (C.) A Treatise on Politics as a Science. 8vo. 1 50 
 
 Reemelin (C.) A Critical Review of American Politics. 8vo. 3 50 
 
 Reemelin (C.) Historical Sketch of Green Township, Hamilton 
 County, Ohio. 8vo. Paper. 1 25 
 
 Rives (E. M. D.) A Chart of the Physiological Arrangement 
 of Cranial Nerves. Printed in large type, on a sheet 28 x 15 
 inches. Folded, in cloth case. 50 
 
 Robert (Karl). Charcoal Drawing without a Master. A Com- 
 plete Treatise in Landscape Drawing in Charcoal, with Lessons 
 and Studies alter Allonge. Translated by E. H. Appleton. 
 Illustrated. 8vo. 1 00 
 
 Roy (George). Generalship; or, How I Managed my Husband. 
 A tale. 18mo. Paper, 50c. ; Cloth. 1 00 
 
 Roy (George). The Art of Pleasing. A Lecture. 12mo. Pa- 
 
 ■ --per. . .,..., .25 
 
Robert Clarice & Co.'s Publications. 7 
 
 Roy (George). The Old, Old Story. A Lecture. 12mo. Pa- 
 per. 25 
 
 Russell (A. P.) Thomas Corwin. A Sketch. 16mo. 1 00 
 
 Russell (Wm.) Scientific Horseshoeing for the Different Dis- 
 eases of the Feet. Illustrated. 8vo. 1 00 
 
 Sattler (Eric E.) The History of Tuberculosis from the time 
 of Sylvius to the Present Day. Translated, in part, with ad- 
 ditions, from the German of Dr. Arnold Spina, First Assistant 
 in the Laboratory of Professor Strieker, of Vienna: includ- 
 ing also Dr. Robert Koch's Experiments, and the more recent 
 Investigations of Dr. Spina on the Subject. ,12mo. 1 25 
 
 Sayler (J. A.) American Form Book. A Collection of Legal 
 and Business Forms, embracing Deeds, Mortgages, Leases, 
 Bonds, Wills, Contracts, Bills of Exchange, Promissory Notes, 
 Checks, Bills of Sale, Receipts, and other Legal Instruments, 
 prepared in accordance with the Laws of the several States; 
 with Instructions for drawing and executing the same. For 
 Professional and Business Men. 8vo. 2 00 
 
 Sheets (Mary R.) My Three Angels : Faith, Hope, and Love. 
 With full-page illustration. By E. D. Grafton. 4to. Cloth. 
 Gilt, 5 00 
 
 Skixxer (J. R.) The Source of Measures. A Key to the Hebrew- 
 Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures, etc. 8vo. 5 00 
 
 Smith (Col. James). A Reprint of an Account of the Remark- 
 able Occurrences in his Life and Travels, during his Captivity 
 with the Indians in the years 1755, '56, '57, '58, and '59, etc. 
 8vo. $2 50. Large paper. 5 00 
 
 Stantox(H.) Jacob Brown and other Poems. 12mo. 1 50 
 
 St. Clair Papers. A Collection of the Correspondence and other 
 papers of GeneralArthur St. Clair, Governor of the Northwest 
 Territory. Edited, with a Sketch of his Life and Public Serv- 
 ices, by William Henry Smith. 2 vols. 8vo. 6 00 
 
 Strauch (A.) Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati: its History 
 and Improvements, with Observations on Ancient and Mod- 
 
 . ern Places of Sepulture. The text beautifully printed with 
 ornamental colored borders, and photographic illustrations. 
 4to. Cloth. Gilt. 15 00 
 
 An 8vo. edition, without border and illustrations. 2 00 
 
 Studer (J. H.) Columbus, Ohio: its History, Resources, and 
 Progress, from its Settlement to the Present Time. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Taxeyhill (R. H.) The Leatherwood God: an account of the 
 Appearance and Pretensions of Joseph C. Dylks in Eastern 
 Ohio, in 1826. 12mo. Paper. 30 
 
 Tex Bkook (A.) American State Universities. Their Origin and 
 Progress. A History of the Congressional University Land 
 Grants. A particular account of the Rise and Development of 
 the University of Michigan, and Hints toward the future of 
 the American University System. Svo. 2 00 
 
 Tii.den (Louise W.) Karl and Gretchen's Christmas. Illus- 
 trated. Square 12mo. 75 
 
 Tilden (Louise W.) Poem, Hymn, and Mission Band Exercises. 
 Written and arranged for the use of Foreign Missionary So- 
 cieties and Mission Bands. Square 12mo. Paper. 25 
 
8 Robert Clarke & Co. 's Publications. 
 
 Trent (Capt. Wm.) Journal of, from Logstown to Pickawillany, 
 in 1752. Edited by A. T. Goodman. 8vo. 2 50 
 
 Tripler (C. S., M. D.) and Blackman (Gr. C, M. D.) Handbook 
 for the Military Surgeon. 12mo. 1 00 
 
 Tyler Davidson Fountain. History and Description of the Tyler 
 Davidson Fountain, Donated to the City of Cincinnati, by 
 Henry Probasco. 18mo. Paper. 25 
 
 Vago (A. L.) Instructions in the Art of Modeling in Clay. 
 With an Appendix on Modeling in Foliage, etc., tor Pottery 
 and Architectural Decorations, by Benn Pitman, of Cincinnati 
 School of Design. Illustrated. Square 12mo. J 00 
 
 Van Horne (T. B.) The History of the Army of the Cumber- 
 land; its Organization, Campaigns, and Battles. Library Edi- 
 tion. 2 vols. With Atlas of 22 maps, compiled by Edward 
 Ruger. 8vo. Cloth, $8 00; Sheep, $10 00; Half Morocco, 
 $12 00. Popular Edition. Containing the same Text as the 
 Library Edition, but only one map. 2 vols. 8vo. Cloth. 5 00 
 
 Venable (W. H.) June on the Miami, and other Poems. Second 
 edition, 18mo. 1 50 
 
 Voorhees (D. W.) Speeches of, embracing his most prominent 
 Forensic, Political, Occasional, and Literary Addresses. Com- 
 piled by his son, C. S. Voorhees, with a Biographical Sketch 
 and Portrait. Svo. 5 00 
 
 Walker (C. M.) History of Athens County, Ohio, and inci- 
 dentally of the Ohio Land Company, and the First Settlement 
 of the State at Marietta, etc. 8vo. $6 00. Large Paper. 
 2 vols. $12 00. Popular Edition. 4 00 
 
 Walton (Gr. E.) Hygiene and Education of Infants; or, How to 
 take care of Babies. 24mo. Paper. 25 
 
 Ward (Durbin). American Coinage and Currency. An Essay 
 read, before the Social Science Congress, at Cincinnati, May 22, 
 1878. 8vo. Paper. 10 
 
 Webb (F.) and Johnston (M. C.) An Improved Tally-Book for 
 the use of Lumber Dealers. 18mo. 50 
 
 Whittaker (J. T., M. D.) Physiology ;* Preliminary Lectures.. 
 Illustrated. 12mo. 1 75 
 
 Williams (A. D., M. D.) Diseases of the Ear, including Necessary 
 Anatomy of the Organ. Svo. 3 50 
 
 Young (A.) History of Wayne County, Indiana, from its First 
 Settlement to the Present Time. Svo. 2 00 
 
 LAW TREATISES AND REPORTS. 
 
 Adkinson (F.) Township and Town Officer's Guide for the Stata 
 of Indiana. 12mo. Net. Cloth, $2 00; Sheep. _ 2 50 
 
 Barton (C.) History of a Suit in Equity. Revised and en- 
 larged. 8vo. 2 50 
 
 Bates (C.) Ohio Pleadings, Parties, and Forms under the Code. 
 2 vols. Svo. Net. 12 00 
 
 Bible in the Public Schools. Arguments in favor and against, 
 with Decision of the Cincinnati Superior Court. 8vo. 
 Cloth. 2 00 
 
Robert Clarke & Cb.'s Publicati ns. 9 
 
 Bible in the Public Schools. The arguments in favor of, and 
 against. Separate. Paper. Each, 50 
 
 Bloom (S. S ) Popular Edition of the Laws of Ohio, in Force 
 June, 1882. Net. Cloth, $3 00; Sheep, 4 00 
 
 Bond (L. II.) Reports of Cases Decided in the Circuit and 
 District Courts of the United States for the Southern District 
 of Ohio. 2 vols. 8vo. 14 00 
 
 Burns (H.) An Index or Abbreviated Digest of. the Supreme 
 Court Reports of the State of Indiana, from 1st Blackford to 
 77th Indiana, inclusive. 8vo. Net. 5 00 
 
 Carlton (A. B.) The Law of Homicide; together with the Cel- 
 ebrated Trial of Judge E. C. Wilkinson, Dr. B. R. Wilkinson, 
 and J. Murdaugh, for the Murder of John Rothwell and A. H. 
 Meeks, including the Indictments, the Evidence, and Speeches 
 of Hon. S. S. Prentiss, Hon. Ben. Hardin, E. J. Bullock, Judge 
 John Rowan, Col. Geo. Robertson, and John B. Thompson, of 
 Counsel, in full. 8vo. Net. 2 50 
 
 Cincinnati Superior Court Reporter. 2 vols. 8vo. Net. 10 00 
 See also Handy, Disney. 
 
 Constitution of the United States, with the Fifteen Amend- 
 ments, Declaration of Independence, etc. 8vo. Paper. 25 
 
 Cox (R.) American Trade Mark Cases. A Compilation of all 
 reported Trade Mark cases decided in the United States Courts 
 prior to 1871. 8vo. 8 00 
 
 Curwen (M. E.) Manual of Abstracts of Title to Real Property. 
 Edited by W. H. Whittaker. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Davis (E. A.) New Digest of the Decisions of the Supreme 
 Court of Indiana, to 1875. 2 vols. 8vo. Net. 12 00 
 
 Disney's Reports. Cincinnati Superior Court. 2 vols. 8vo. 
 
 Net, 10 00 
 
 Fisher (S. S.) Reports of Patent Cases decided in the Circuit 
 Courts of the United States, 1843-1873. 6 vols. 8vo. Vols. 
 3 to 6, each. Net. 25 00 
 
 Fisher (W. H.) Reports of Patent Cases decided in the Courts 
 of the United States, 1827-1851. 10 00 
 
 Fisher (R. A.) Digest of English Patent, Trade Mark, and 
 Copyright Cases. Edited by Henry Hooper. 8vo. 4 00 
 
 Fortescue (Sir John). De Laudibus Legum Anglise. A Treatise 
 in Commendation of the Laws of England. 8vo. Cloth. 3 00 
 
 Giauque (F.) The Election Laws of the United States. Being 
 a Compilation of all the Constitutional Provisions and Laws 
 of the United States relating to Elections, the Elective Fran- 
 chise, to Citizenship, and to the Naturalization of Aliens. 
 With Notes of Decisions affecting the same. 8vo. Paper. 
 75c; Cloth. 1 00 
 
 Giauque (F.) Ohio Election Laws. 8vo. Paper, $1.00; Cloth, 1 50 
 
 Giauque (F.) Manual for Road Supervisors in Ohio. 16mo. 
 Boards. 25 
 
 Giauque (F.) Manual for Assignees and Insolvent Debtors in 
 Ohio. Net. Cloth, $2 00; Sheep, 2 50 
 
 Giauque (F.) Manual for Guardians in Ohio. Net. Cloth, 
 $2 00; Sheep, 2 50 
 
10 Robert Clarice & Co.'s Publications. 
 
 Giauque (F.) A complete Manual of the Road Laws of Ohio 
 in force 1883, with Forms and Notes of Decisions. In press. 
 
 Giauque (F.) and McClure (H. B.) Dower and Curtesy Tables, 
 for ascertaining, on the basis of the Carlisle Tables of Mor- 
 tality, the present value of vested and contingent rights of 
 Dower and Curtesy, and of other Life Estates. 8vo. Net. 5 00 
 
 H andy's Reports. Cincinnati Superior Court. 2 vols, in 1. 
 8vo. Net. . 5 00 
 
 Hanover (M. D.) A Practical Treatise on the Law relating to 
 Horses. Second edition. 8vo. 4 00 
 
 Harris (S. F.) Principles of the Criminal Law. Edited bv 
 Hon. M. F. Force. 8vo. Net. 4 00 
 
 Indiana Laws. Being Acts and Joint Resolutions of the General 
 Assembly of the State of Indiana, passed at the Regular 
 Session, which was begun and held at Indianapolis, on Thurs- 
 day, the fourth day of January, 1883, and adjourned without 
 day on Monday, the fifth day of March, 1883. Edited, printed, 
 published, and circulated under authority of law, and with 
 the Secretary of State's authentication. S. R. Downey, Editor. 
 8vo. 1 00 
 
 Kentucky Reports. Reports of cases decided iti the Court of 
 Appeals of Kentucky. 1785-1878. 76 vols, in 61. 
 
 King (J.) A Commentary on the Law and True Construction 
 of the Federal Constition. 8vo. 2 50 
 
 McDonald (D.) Treatise on the Law relating to the Powers and 
 Duties of Justices and Constables in Indiana. Edited by L. 
 0. Schroeder. 8vo. Net. 6 00 
 
 Matthews (Stanley). A Summary of the Law of Partnership. 
 For use of Business Men. 12mo. Cloth, $1 25; Sheep, 1 50 
 
 McLean (J.) Reports of Cases decided in the Circuit Court of 
 the United States for the Seventh District. 1829-1555. 6 
 vols. 8vo. Vols. 2,4,-5,6. Each, 6 50 
 
 Montesquieu (Baron De). The Spirit of Laws. Translated from 
 the French by Thomas Nugent. New edition, with Memoir. 
 2 vols. 8vo. Cloth. | 6 00 
 
 Morgan (J. A.) An English Version of Legal Maxims, with the 
 Original Forms. Alphabeticallv arranged, and an Index of 
 Subjects. Second edition. 12mo. Cloth. Net. 2 00 
 
 Nash (S.) Pleading and Practice under the Codes of Ohio, 
 New York, Kansas, and Nebraska. Fourth edition, 2 vols. 
 8vo. Net. 10 00 
 
 Ohio and Ohio State Reports. Reports of Cases decided in the 
 Supreme Court of Ohio. 1821-1880. 55 vols. Net. 137 50 
 
 Ohio Statutes. Embracing: 
 
 Curwen's Statutes at Large, 1833-1860. 4 vols. 8vo. Net, 20 00 
 Swan & Critchfield's Revised Statutes, 1860. 2 vols. 8vo. 
 
 Net. 5 00 
 Sayler's Statutes at Large, 1860-1875. 4 vols. 8vo. 20 00 
 
 Peck (11. D.) The Law of Municipal Corporations in the State 
 of Ohio. Second edition. 8vo. 5 00 
 
 Peck (II. D.) The Township-Officer's Guide of Ohio. Second 
 edition. Net. Cloth, $2 00; Sheep, 2 50 
 
Robert Clarke & Co.'s Publications. 11 
 
 Pollock (F.) Principles of Contract at Law and in Equity. 
 Edited by G. II. Wald. 8vo. Net. 6 CO 
 
 Raff (G. W.) Guide to Executors and Administrators in the 
 State of Ohio. Sixth edition. Edited and enlarged by F. 
 Giauque. 12mo. Cloth, $2 00 ; Sheep, 2 50 
 
 Raff (G. W.) Manual of Pensions, Bounty, and Pay. 1789- 
 1863. 12mo. 2 00 
 
 Raff (G. W.) War Claimant's Guide. Laws relating to Pen- 
 sions, Bounty, etc. War of 1861-1865. 8vo. 4 00 
 
 Rfjnhard (G. L ) The Criminal Law of the State of Indiana, 
 with Precedents, Forms for Writs, Docket Entries, etc. 
 8vo. 2 50 
 
 Saint Germain (C.) The Doctor and Student; or, Dialogues be- 
 tween a Doctor of Divinity and a Student in the Laws of 
 England, containing the grounds of those Laws. Revised and 
 corrected. 8vo. Cloth. 3 00 
 
 Saunders (T. W.) A Treatise upon the Law of Negligence. 
 With notes of American Cases. 8vo. 2 50 
 
 Sayler ( J. R.) American Form Book; a Collection of Legal 
 and Business Forms for Professional and Business Men. 8vo. 
 Cloth. Net. 2 00 
 
 Stanton (R. H.) A New Digest of the Kentucky Decisions; em- 
 bracing all Cases decided by the Appellate Courts, from 1785 
 to 1877. Second edition. 2 vols. 8vo. Net. 6 00 
 
 Stanton (R. H.) A Practical Treatise on the Law relating to 
 Justices of the Peace, etc., in Kentucky. Third edition. 
 8vo. 7 50 
 
 Stanton (R. H.) Manual for the Use of Executors, Admin- 
 istrators, Guardians, etc., in Kentucky. Second edition. 
 12mo. 1 75 
 
 Swan (J. R.) Pleadings and Precedents, under the Code of 
 Ohio. 8vo. 6 00 
 
 Swan (J. R.) Treatise on the Law relating to the Powers and 
 Duties of Justices of the Peace, etc., in the State of Ohio. 
 Eleventh edition, 8vo. Net. 6 00 
 
 Swan (J. R.) and Plumb (P. B.) Treatise on the Law relating 
 to the Powers and Duties of Justices, etc., in Kansas. 
 8vo. 5 00 
 
 Walker (J. B.) and Bates (C.) A new Digest of Ohio Decisions. 
 Second edition. 2 vols. 8vo. Net. 12 00 
 
 Vol. 3., 1874-1882. By C. Bates. ■ Net. 5 00 
 
 Warren (M.) Criminal Law and Forms. Third edition. 8vo. 5 00 
 
 Wells (J. C.) Treatise on the Separate Property of Married 
 Women, under the recent Enabling Acts. Second edition. 
 8vo. 6 00 
 
 Wells (J. C.) A Manual of the Laws relating to County Com- 
 missioners in the State of Ohio, with carefully prepared 
 Forms, and References to the Decisions of the Supreme 
 Court. Net. 3 50 
 
 Wild (E. N.) Journal Entries under the Codes of Civil and 
 Criminal Procedure. With Notes of Decisions. Second edi- 
 tion. 8vo. 4 00 
 
12 Robert Clarke & Co.'s Publications. 
 
 Wilcox (J. A.) The Geneml Railroad Laws of the State of Ohio, 
 
 in force January, 1874. 8vo. 5 00 
 
 Wilson (M. F.) The New Criminal Code of Ohio, with Forms 
 
 and Precedents, Digest of Decisions, etc. Second edition. 
 
 8vo. Net. 5 00 
 
 Works (John D.) Indiana Practice, Pleadings, and Forms. 2 
 
 vols. 8vo. Net. 12 00 
 
 Nash (Simeon)- Lawyer's Case Docket, containing printed 
 Headings, and blank spaces for names of Parties, Memoranda 
 of all the Proceedings, with full printed Instructions, and 
 an Index. Crown size. Half roan, $3.75; Full Sheep. 4 50 
 
 Lawyer's Collection Docket. With convenient Ruling, printed 
 Headings, Index, etc. 4to. Half Russia. 3 50 
 
 Attorney's Pocket Docket. Ruled and Printed for number of 
 Case, Parties, and kind of Action, Witnesses, etc., with room 
 for 150 cases. Pocket size. Morocco. 1 00 
 
 Changeable Pocket Docket: The Docket paper is furnished 
 separately, and so arranged that it may be subsequently 
 bound in one volume. Paper, 50c. per quire. Morocco case, 
 with pocket and band. 2 00 
 
 Notary's Official Register. Being a Record of Protests and 
 other Official Transactions. 4to. 2 quires. Half sheep, $2 00; 
 3 quires, half russia. 3 00 
 
 Collection Receipt Book. The Book of Collection Receipts, 
 which is bound in the form of a check book, contains the 
 stub in which is preserved a record of the transaction, and 
 a printed receipt, giving parties, date, interest, indorsers, 
 credits, etc., which is torn off and sent to your correspondent. 
 Book of 50 receipts, 40c; 100 receipts, 75c; 200 (two to a 
 page). 1 25 
 
 A Catalogue of Legal Blanks will be sent on application. 
 
 LAWYEXL'S OFFICE DOCKET. 
 
 The Lawyer's Office Docket. Embracing the History of each 
 Case, and the Proceedings thereon, together with a Digest of the 
 Principles of Law involved, and References to' Authorities. 
 With Index and Memoranda. Quarto. 212 pages. Half russia. 
 Cloth sides. Net. 3 50 
 
 THE UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER'S DOCKET. 
 
 Docket for Commissioners of the United States Circuit Courts, 
 embracing a Full Record of the Proceeding in each Case, with 
 Schedule of Costs, and an Index of Cases. Quarto. Half russia. 
 Net. 3 75 
 
* 
 
BEYOND SHAKESPEARE'S TALENT. 
 
 Leonora Giffenstein's Argument that Ba- 
 con Wrote the Plays. 
 
 Dear Amateur Writers:— When I see the 
 battle growing so warm, and Mr. Barr's 
 side standing valiantly against the assault 
 of many, I am compelled to again appear 
 in these columns. I have been away for 
 Ave months, and during this time I must 
 confess, I saw but little of our page, so 
 in dealing with this question, I am liable 
 to unwittingly repeat much that has been 
 written before. If I do so, pray forgive 
 me, for this will be my last appearance 
 at our meetings for some time in all prob- 
 ability. 
 
 Till the past year, I held the views of 
 the Shakespeare contingent. I knew noth- 
 ing about the arguments of the then op- 
 posing side, but all my sentimentality and 
 romanticism urged me to support Shakes- 
 peare's claim. Bacon assumed the shape 
 of a calculating, cold-blooded, inhuman 
 monster in contrast to the warm-hearted, 
 all-enveloping humanity of William 
 Shakespeare. And nowl have changed— a 
 great change indeed, for my mind has 
 now won my heart over to the anti- 
 Shakespeare cause. It seems to me so 
 improbable— why I might say impossible 
 for a man of Shakespeare's education to 
 have created such masterpieces. You will 
 say that there have been authors time 
 and again who have risen from the low- 
 est depths with little or no education, and 
 yet have composed great works. Ah, yes, 
 Shakespeare may have had the breadth 
 and depth of mind to embody what was 
 given to him in beautiful -and grand form, 
 but it seems impossible to me that he 
 could have had sufficient acquaintance 
 with foreign authorities. He may have 
 had sufficient understanding but deficient 
 knowledge. 
 
 Ben Jonson accords Shakespeare "small 
 Latin and less Greek," and certain his- 
 torians assert that he seems to have ac- 
 „ quired some knowledge of Italian and 
 French. He seems to have had knowledge 
 of many branches of learning, if you 
 judge from his plays, but this is deduc- 
 tive reasoning, whereas in this discussion, 
 we should rather reason inductively. You 
 will say that it is absurd for one to try 
 to prove that Shakespeare wrote the 
 plays, since it has been conceded for so 
 many years. For years and years people 
 believed the earth was shaped like a 
 shield. In these latter days authority is 
 becoming a poor argument. 
 
 In opposition to Shakespeare's common 
 school education, consider the advantages 
 of Francis Bacon. At the age of twelve 
 he was sent to Trinity College, Cam- 
 bridge; when he graduated he traveled 
 abroad; then he studied law, and, mixing 
 with court powers, daily imbibed the at 
 
 •mosphere of wit and learning. Contrast 
 this life with Shakespeare's — barren of 
 studious possibilities. Hofiv much more\ 
 probable Is it th$it a maPt'Jwith such op- 
 portunities, with an ancestry of intelli- 
 gent, accomplished, educated people, 
 wrote "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" and 
 "Midsummer Night's Dream," than a 
 man of small education and very few 
 chances, who sprang from the gentry of 
 the county, it is true, but whose own fa- 
 ther could not write his name, and who 
 himself did not deem education of enough 
 account to have his daughter, Judith, 
 taught how to write. 
 
 It is a much enforced argument on the 
 opposing side that those writings publish- 
 ed over Bacon's name are so entirely 
 different in style and thought and gen- 
 eral trend of character from "William 
 Shakespeare's." It seems rather natural 
 to me that such should be so. The for- 
 mer he wrote as the rising young lawyer, 
 as the eloquent peer, as the Lord Chan- 
 cellor—a man of the world in all things. 
 The latter may have been written in the 
 silence and solitude of his own room, 
 where, knowing his professional capacity 
 was to be kept secret, he could let his 
 genius play unrestrained without fear 
 of comment upon the Lord Chancellor. 
 What a delight such composition must 
 have been to the man who wrote* "The 
 Wisdom of the Ancients." 
 
 Perhaps it is too hard a task for you 
 to change your preconceived and preju- 
 diced idea or' Bacon as a selfish politician, 
 and to reject Shakespeare fov hiro. Then 
 fcA-e idea of jo-nt creation of the plays will 
 \~z easier to you. Shakespeare's biogra- 
 phers admit the little tale of his having 
 stolen a deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, 
 of Charlcote, and the coarse lampooning 
 ballad that he fastened on this gentle- 
 man's gates has come down to us. Con- 
 trast it with "How sweet the moonlight 
 sleeps upon the bank," in "The Merchant 
 of Venice." Shakespeare had some skill 
 at versifying, and perhaps his mind was 
 the sieve through which the first idea of 
 the play was strained— I'll grant you that 
 if you wish — but there must have been 
 collaboration with minds that could sup- 
 ply his deficiency as regards the sources 
 of most of the plots, legal terms, and cus- 
 toms, and the wealth of classical imag- 
 ery. In London Shakespeare attached 
 himself to some theatrical company. In 
 those days of insatiable longing for new 
 plays, each company had its own play- 
 wright. Sometimes as many as six 
 dramatists worked in conjunction upon 
 one play. It is admitted that Shakespeare 
 joined this branch of labor, and, with 
 Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe, 
 wrote plays that he "afterward rewrote 
 alone and brought out as his own, as 'The 
 Taming of the Shrew,' and the second 
 and third parts of 'King Henry VI.' ' 
 Robert Greene afterward, on his death- 
 
bed, made complaint that Shakespeare 
 had stolen these "feathers" from his col- 
 laborators. 
 
 King- James once said of one of Francis 
 Bacon's works, that "it is like the peace 
 of God; it passeth all understanding." We 
 must say such a thing about William 
 Shakespeare, if we admit that he alone 
 supplied all the knowledge that makes 
 the plays so wonderful. 
 
 You say, Mr. Barr, that you do claim it 
 and boast it. Have you any right to do 
 so? The grandeur of the dramas is cer- 
 tainly not lessened by the idea of collab- 
 oration. Whoever wrote them, the plays 
 remain the same, and we can feel as much 
 love for them if the joint work of a num- 
 ber of Elizabethan dramatists as of one | 
 common-school man. We have no right I 
 surely, to explain the writing of the plays I 
 by upholding what would be an almost \ 
 supernatural man, when we can explain 
 the "phenomena" by a simply understood, 
 natural fact. 
 
 LEONORA HOTIDE GIFPENSTEIN. 
 
n<%£k 
 
 ■^c 
 
 ."• t<A^-v-iT,- 
 
T\£ 
 
 ^37 
 
 ('lass 
 
 Knnk <\JS5 
 
 C.Y* 
 
 
 I 
 
 THE McEWEN COLLECTION 
 OF SHAKESPEAREANA 
 
 mm 
 
 ^^ #