Chapter X: Part V: The Baconian Theory (1)

HE English Renaissance Drama seems naturally to group itself into two grand divisions: the Elizabethan drama and--Shakespeare. There is nothing in the first which surprises: which impresses us as too abrupt a departure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the middle age mummeries--"miracle plays" and "mysteries"--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 overshot 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 {203}their names are only a catalogue to-day. If we happen to buy 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 Dramatist. 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 explanation of the whole Shakespeare mystery, and leads to the discovery that "Shakespeare" was only a convenient 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 vernacular) 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 philosophical canon of Bacon and the dramatic canon of "Shakespeare,") are identical, and form together essentially 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}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 language--the language of his race. This he left in English: 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 contemporary 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 demonstration has been followed by Judge Holmes)--it is property within that scope to examine, from the outside, 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."

* See this question asked and answered affirmatively in
"North American Review." February, 1881. New York. D.
Appleton & Co.

How, aside from any _opinion_ as to their value, beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of {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 information 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 peoples--as, for example, the Zulus or the Ashantees--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 indisputable 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 accumulated learning of the world down to his own actual day. Moreover, this scholar would not be compelled 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 Cæsar." *

* See in this connection "The English of Shakespeare
illustrated in a Philological commentary on his 'Julius
Cæsar.' By G. L. Craik." London. Chapman & Hall. 1857.

Even the artificial Alexander Pope (who, so far from being an over-estimator of the Shakes{206}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 Cæsar,' not only the spirit, but the manner of the Romans is exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shown between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former and of the latter. No one is more a master 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," * 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 scholarship may err, the microscope of the philologist cannot err. Like the skill of the chirographical expert, it is infallible, because, just as the hand of a writer, however cramped, affected, or disguised, will unconsciously make its native character of curve or inclination, so the speech of a man will be molded by his familiarity, be it greater or less, with the studies, learning, 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 language he has never learned.

* Smith, p. 86. {207}

corroboration of history, that they were only the forgeries of a precocious boy. To just as moral a certainty are the handiwork of the Elohist and the Jehovist discernible in the Hebrew Scriptures, and just as absolutely 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_' (for _value_) rivers that 'have overborne their _continents_' (the _continenti riva_ of-Horace); '_compact_ of imagination;' 'something of great _constancy_' (for _consistency_); 'sweet Pyramus _translated_ there;' 'the law of Athens, which by no means we may _extenuate_,' etc. I have considerable doubts," continues Mr. Hallam, "whether any of these expressions would be found in the contemporary prose of Elizabeth's reign, which was less overrun 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 their proper meaning would have introduced them into poetry." *

* "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 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.

Young Chatterton deceived 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 {208}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 be hanged)--it requires considerable credulity to assign this classic diction to a rustic apprentice from Stratford, who, at "about eighteen," begins his dramatic labors, fresh from the shambles, and with no hiatus for a college course between.

Add to this the patent fact that the antique allusions 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 exploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the Shakespearean text, can bring evidence only cumulative 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 access to secrets supposed to be locked in the very womb of Time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet distant future, were to immortalize their first _sponsors_.

* Smith, p. 85.

** 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 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 Walter Warner, the mathematician;
and that eminent physician, John Hunter, remarks that
Servetus first, and Realdus 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.

For example, Dr. Harvey does not announce--what is credited to him *--his discovery of the circulation of {209}the blood in the human system--until 1619 (his book was not published until 1628), three years after William 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_.=

```"... had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick

```(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins").

--_King John, Act III, Scene 3._= {210}

```... As dear to me as are tlie ruddy drops

```That visit my sad heart."

--_Julius Caesar, Act IT, Scene 1._=

Harvey's discovery, however, is said to have been the theory of Galen, Paracelsus, and Hippocrates (who substituted the _liter_ for the _heart_), and to have been held also by Rabelais. Neither Galen, Paracelsus, Hippocrates, nor Rabelais 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 passages 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.

```_Lafeu_. 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 Æsculapius? my Galen?"

````--Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II., Scene 3.=

In King Henry VI. Part II., Act ii, Scene 2, the erudite Bardolph and Falstaff's classical page make a learned blunder about Althea, whom the page confounds with Hecuba. And so on. Are we to believe that this sometime butcher's boy and later stage manager 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 {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 unbidden--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): * than to conceive a twelfth manager and proprietor 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 {212}managers, to seek, in the solitude of his library and Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this same Galen and Paracelsus?

* 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--"O, 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
snub her in private); though it is very easy to imagine his
passing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried
perusal in the green-room."--Chambers's Journal, August 7,
1852,p. 89.

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 but to take down his copy of "Troilus and Cressida" (printed in 1606) 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 circulation 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 Theater! 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 {213}morning's routine--the hours to labor over Galen 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 libraries, and when books could be had for the purchasing--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 Stratford 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 no books purchasable, should have known every thing that was written in books! Surely there never was such a miracle as this!

"He was the prophet of geology," says Fullom, "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." **

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! ***

* "History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with New
Facts and Traditions." By W. S. Fullom, London: Saunders,
Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864.

** "King Henry IV.," Part II., Act 3, Scene i.

*** See ante, p. 88.

What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous {214}Stratford school, "two terms," of which--between his poaching and his beer-bouting--were all the schooling William Shakespeare ever had, according to all bis biographies. (We say, all he ever had, because his father was so illiterate that he signed every thing with 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 vocabulary and parcel of his thought.... This conveyancer'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 Loudon years, as in those produced at a later period." * And not only in the technique, but in the groundwork of that mighty and abstruse science, the law of England," is he perfect. 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 expounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error." **

* Memoir," p. 47. And see "Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?" By H.
T-------. London: Longmans, Green, Reader A Dyer, 1871.

** "Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements," Lord Campbell, p.
108. And see "Shakespeare a Lawyer," by W. L. Rushton.
London, 1858.

Were medicine and {215}surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill * 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 IV. seems to have been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown ** 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 answer so "broad a question:"=

```"_Warwick_. See how the blood is settled in his face!

```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;=

* "Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare." J. C. Bucknill, M. D.
London, 1860. And see Appendix I.

** The Forum. By David Paul Brown. Philadelphia, 1856.
{216}

```His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped

```And tugged for life, and was by strength subdued. ****

```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 Stratford 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. Cohn will have it that in these unaccounted-for times, he had visited Germany with his troupe and performed in all its principal cities, coining money as he went.) ** Mr. Brown, Dr. Bell, and others, announce that they believe that these travels of his extended to Italy, and Mr. Thoms 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 regards in these investigations), appeared.

* 2 Henry VI., Act 3, scene ii.

** "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 Suppose Travels of Shakespeare. Three Notelets on
Shakespeare. Thoms: London, 1865.

Either at Stratford school, or in the Blackfriars, or else by pure {217}intuition, all this exact learning must have "been absorbed.

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 example. For not only did Rowe and Knight find traces in "Shakespeare" of the Electra of Sophocles, Colman of Ovid, Farmer of Horace and Virgil, Steevens of Plautus, and White of Euripides, which are read today in those universities; but Pope found traces of Dares and Phrygius, and Malone of Lucretius, Status and Catullus, which are not ordinarily used as textbooks to-day in our colleges.

The name and character of "Imogen" is derived from an Italian novel not then--and perhaps not how--translated into English. Tschischwitz finds in "Hamlet" 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 vernacular. 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 capable, there is a greater difficulty beyond, over which {218}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 Genius," 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 Shakespeare'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." * As Mr. White wrote these words, did it not occur to him that, by his own chronology, ** this Warwickshire rustic came to London with "Venus and Adonis" in his pocket, and began, almost immediately, the production of plays, not in the Warwickshire dialect, which he had grown up in from his birth, but in a diction that needs no translating "to be understood by modern English ears?"

* Shakespeare's Works, Vol. I., p. cxcvi.

** Id., p. cxxi.

Robert Burns became {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." * But this uncouth 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 Shakespeare's life appears to have been a miracle: for, according 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 therefrom. There were no guide-books or itineraries of Venice published until after William Shakespeare had ceased writing for the stage: and yet, while schoolboy 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 Rome--are not referred to (the out-door action in "Othello" or the "Merchant of Venice" is *

* "English Men of Letters. Robert Burns.

{220}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 observed, would scarcely have found of enough interest to mention to his neighbors on returning home), are familiarly and incidentally alluded to, making the phenomena 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 sensuous and romantic, goes down in his poem. The scenes Mr. Rogers depicts are those which crowd most upon the cultivated 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 garments" of her learned cousin, Bellario, and to meet her at the "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 Verona," Valentine is made to _embark_ at Verona for Milan, and in "Hamlet," Baptista is used as the name of a woman. Both of these latter were sneered at as mistakes for some hundred years, {221}until one learned German discovers that Baptista is not uncommonly used as a woman's name in Italy, * and another learned German that, in the sixteenth century, Milan and Verona were actually connected by canals, ** with which the surface of Italy was intersected! etc., etc. Dr. Elze was made a careful collation of these instances (which need not detain us here except by way of reference), in an essay on the supposed travels of Shakespeare, 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 emphatically, No! "Italian and French, we may be sure, were _not_ taught at Stratford school." *** And yet William Shakespeare borrowed copiously from Boccaccio, Cinthio, and Belleforest.

Ulrici **** says (quoting Klein) that the author of "Romeo and Juliet" must have read "Hadriana," a tragedy by an Italian named Groto, and Mr. Grant White points out that Iago's speech, "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.

* A Von Beumont. Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 21, 1870.

** Karl Elze on Shakespeare, p. 296. London. Macmillan &
Co. 1874.

*** Memoir. Works, p. xxi.

**** Vol. I, p. 253.

Mr. White furnishes a translation of {222}the stanza of Berni, which is certainly startingly like.1 And yet Mr. White clings to his Stratford school, where "Beeston" told Aubrey that William Shakespeare 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 common use among our forefathers when William Shakespeare was a boy." ** But (though somebody has suggested 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 Beestou story has been rejected by all the commentators 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. ***

* Ante, p. 64, note.

** Id. p. xx.

*** "Some Shakespearean and Spenserian MSS.," "American
Whig Review," December, 1851,

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, technical to and employed in the exact sense of the composing and press-rooms, that they seriously add to {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.

`````--_Lovés 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 "Nonpareil 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}Before tlie "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 completed, 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._=

{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, ix, 2._=

````"My red dominical--my golden letter!"

`````--_Loves Labours Lost, V, 2._=

referring to the rubricated editions of books so common 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, 77, 3._=

```"This man's brow, like to a title-leaf,

```Foretells the nature of a tragic volume."

`````--_2 Henry IV, i, 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}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 typographer'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 invariably 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 copyrighted books. The entry was to be expressed, after the printer's name, or at least, conspicuously on the {227}title-page, in the formula, "_cum privilégia ad imprimendum solum;_" and as the formula was to be incessantly 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 counterfeit 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 applicable; for Biondello is counseling Lucertio 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"). *

* Marabren's Parallel List of technical Typographical
Terms--art., "Counterfeit." We take the above from Mr.
Blades' "Shakespeare and Typography." London, 1872.

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 likely 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 succeed 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{228}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 Wight's Bream," "Monsieur, get your weapons in your hand and kill me a red-hipped bumblebee 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," Benedict says to Margaret "Thy wit is as quick as a greyhound's mouth. It catches." The peculiarity of a greyhound is that, unlike other dogs, 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 Viola 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{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 Farolles "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 cawing 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 appears until April. In none of the allusions to nature or natural phenomena in the plays, is there any such thing as guess work. * Now, what was the necessity for all this technical, geographical, botanical, and occult learning, in a simple drama thrown off by an Elizabethan dramatist, earning his living by catering to an Elizabethan audience? It was not only unnecessary, but almost fatal to his success. The Elizabethan audience did not want scientific treatises.

* And see further "The natural History of the Insects
mentioned in Shakespeare," by R. Paterson. London: A. K.
Newman & Co., Leadenhall street, "The natural
History of the Insects mentioned in Shakespeare," by R.
Paterson. London: A. K. Newman & Co., Leadenhall street,
1841.

But {230}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 accounted for?

That Shakespeare borrowed Greene's famous "sea-coast" is a point either way. If he took it supposing that Bohemia had a sea-coast, the omnipotent 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 Bohemia 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." ** One possessing, 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 {231}shelf-full of English hooks that made up all there was in English letters.

* See "Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?" Three Notelets on
Shakespeare, by Wm. J. Thoms, London. John Russell Smith,
1865.

** Essays. Lord Bacon.

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 literature--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." * 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 Theater, 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 esquire 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.

* Shakespeare's use of the Bible. By Charles Wadsworth, p.
345. London. Smith Elder & Co., 1880.

It has only been within the last few years that hardy spirits--like Nathaniel Holmes--whose education has led them to look judicially backward from effects to causes--and whose experience had impressed {232}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 surroundings, 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. * The history of Bacon's life, his massive acquirements, his profound scholarship even as a child: his advantages of foreign travel, his ambitious 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 at which the plays--tallying in matter with the circumstantial surroundings of Bacon's life as, for example, 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 {233}modern needs, and meditating its superseding with labors of his own.

* 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).

The gray-haired Queen, who in youth had called him her little Lord Keeper, will not lift a hand 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 accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get." * This is the very year, 1592, in which Robert Greene "discovers that a new poet has arisen who is becoming the only shake-scene in a county;" and so far forgets himself as to become "jealous" of "William Shakespeare, who, up to this time, has only been a "Johannes Factotum," of not much account until he borrows "our feathers." ** And so, until 1611, 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 1611, when he is suddenly created attorney-general, the Shakespearean plays cease abruptly, to appear no more for ever. William Shakespeare closes out his theatrical interest in London, and retires, to moneylending (as some say), in Stratford. He dies in 1616.

* Speckling, "Letters and Life of Bacon," vol. i, p. 108.

** Ante, p. 125

Lord Bacon reaches his highest pinnacle of greatness, {234}and falls, in 1621. In 1623, while Bacon is again spending his time in the strictest privacy and retirement, 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 emendations 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 newlines in almost every speech.1 Another, "The Merry Wives of Windsor," according to Knight, ** 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 declare that "none but the hand of the master could have superadded them." *** But, if William Shakespeare 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?

* Cited by Holmes, "Authorship of Shakespeare," third
edition, p. 71.

** "Studies of Shakespeare," p. 337.

*** Id.