Chapter VIII: Part III: The Jonsonian Testimony (2)

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 S! Like his fellow Shakespeareans, Mr. De Quincy makes no use of Aubrey, or the old clerk, or the Rev. Richard Davies, or any one else who, having lived at dates inconveniently contiguous to the real William Shakespeare, were awkward 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 eyesight 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 {160}of him, knew him. As to the difficulties Coleridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Gervinius, Hallam, Holmes, William Henry Smith, Furness, and Delia Bacon find so insurmountable--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 "Beeston?" Some of our modern commentators have conjectured 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 Encyclopædia 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. * His cue has had prolific fol{161}lowing.

* 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 Rev. John Bayley, in
an article on "The Religion of Shakespeare," in the "Sunday
Magazine" (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
energetic preacher of the gospel," and that "we may
reasonably hope for the best of consequences." So simple a
process has Shakespeare-making become!

Now-a-days our "biographies" of William Shakespeare are huge tomes of Elizabethan and other antiquarian lore, commentary, conjecture, argumentation; 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 apparent 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 "biographies" of William Shakespeare--volumes commensurate 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 {162}deer, the difficulty only recurred with redoubled emphasis.

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 lay), 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 tanners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose names history could not be written, is something amazing. 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 himself), 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{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 mercenary 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 and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti 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 Robert Burns we are content not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us be content if the genius of Bobert 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 Bobert Burns had sung of the Punic wars or the return of the Heraclides, some Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight would doubtless--with history staring him in the face--have arisen to put his index-finger upon the sources of his authority. Judging by the record in the case of William Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty {164}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, Land 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," warbling "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 rogue by statute." * And yet he, according to Macaulay, produced the second of the two books of which England should be proudest. ** 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{165}are not should be as though they were; that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought."

* Cockayne vs. Hopkins, 2 Lev., 214.

** "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 degree. One of these minds produced the 'Paradise
Lost,' and the other the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'"

But this great praise was not abstracted from Macaulay by wealth of antique learning, universal 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 vocabulary," 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}were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and bis 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 illustrations 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,5 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 Restoration put it in the power of the Cavaliers... to oppress the Dissenters.... he was flung into Bedford jail, with pen and paper for company, etc., etc. Here are the school and the experience, 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 experience." ** 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 profitable 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!"

* "Bunyan," in "Encyclopaedia Britannica," by Macaulay.

** Ibid.

{167}Probably there were encyclopaedias to be fished ont of the mad 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 magnificent 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 question, "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, philosophical, 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 corresponding 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}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 haberdasher 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 appeared in the year 1710, in a biographical notice affixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one Bernard 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 everybody can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which rival biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, struggle to get hold of a new fact for their columns, and nobody will wonder that, after Mr. Lintot, no "biographer" 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 improbable, considering the record of the youth Shakespeare at Stratford, while those of the first are certainly 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 improbable, seeing that the lad ran away to London----and Rowe and the old sexton both agree that he began--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{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 Shakespeare's life," * 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. *

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 Stratford 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 composed, or even to preserve the skeleton of its pronunciation. They answered--or made their marks--indifferently to "Saxpir" or "Chaksper;" or to any other of the thirty forms given by Mr. Grant White, ** or the fifty-five forms which another gentleman of elegant leisure has been able to collect. ***

* Shakespeare's Works. Boston, 1865. Vol. L, p. 80, in, and
see a note to the same volume, pp. 96-7, as to Ratzei's
ghost, surmised to be an allusion to Shakespeare.

* Ib., p. 128.

** Shakespeare's Scholar, pp. 478-480.

*** George Russel French, Shakespeareana Geologicana. p.
348. {170}

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:----

~ 4 times written Shackesper.

3 times written Shackespere.

4 times written Shacksper.

2 times written Shackspere.

13 times written Shakespere.

1 time written Shaksper.

5 times written Shakspere.

~~

17 times written Shakspeyr.

4 times written Shakysper.

9 times written Shakyspere.

69 times written Shaxpeare.

8 times written Shaxper.

18 times written Shaxpere.

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 orthographies as there are tombstones and inscriptions. Any lawyer's clerk who has had occasion to search for evidence among the uneducated classes, knows how certainly a lower or higher grade of intelligence will manifest itself primarily in an ignorance of or indifference to one's own name or a corresponding zeal for one's own identity, and anxiety that it shall be accurately "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 himself.

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, {171}and the word "hand" substituted. In a letter to Mr. Shedding, * Mr. Smith claims that this erasure and substitution 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 belief, but that the fact could better have been proved if '_hand_' 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 exhibiting one thousand nine hundred and six ways of spelling the Stratford boy's name; ** A commentary on the efforts of Mr. Halliwell and others, to establish the canonical orthography, which might well reduce 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.

* 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.

Even the {172}"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 but 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 Englishmen mispronounce French--for unnumbered generations. *

This is the present mispronunciation of Jacques 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 of $25,000 a year, he should never send his children--especially his daughter Judith--to school, so that the poor girl, on being married, on the 11th day 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 {173}of the world--the Shakespearean Drama! But, still, this most unsatisfactory person--this man who answers, 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 "supernumerary," and "Joannes Factotum"--actually lived to clamber astride of the most immortal birthright of bis 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 contumaciously 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, without a single mourner to stand by the coffin, and confess himself its disciple.

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