Instruction on editing in tmp/BritannicaShakespeare/
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SHAKE
no allusion to Shakespeare is really intended. The material
for T roilus and Cressida was taken by Shakespeare from Chaucer’s
T railus and Criseyde, Caxton’s Recuyell of the H istoryes of Troye,
and Chapman’s Homer.
26. It is almost wholly on grounds of style that All’s Well that
Ends Well is placed by most critics in or about 1602, and, as in
the case of T roilus and Cressida, it has been argued, though with
little justification, that parts of the play are of considerably earlier
date, and perhaps represent the Lo·ve’s Lab0ur’s Won referred to by
Meres. The story is derived from Boccaccio’s Decarneron through
the medium of William Paynte1·’s Palace of Pleasure (1566).
27. Measure for Measure is believed to have been played at
court on the 26th of December 1604. The evidence for this is to be
found, partly in an extract made for Malone from oiiicial records
now lost, and partly in a forged document, which may, however,
rest upon genuine information, placed amongst the account—books
of the Office of the Revels. If this is correct the play was probably
produced when the theatres were reopened after the plague in
1604. The plot is taken from a story already used by George
Whetstone, both in his play of Promos and Cassandra (1578)
and in his prose H eptameron 0f Civil Discourses (1582), and
borrowed by him from Giraldi Cinthio’s H eeatornmithi (1 566).
28. A performance at court of Othello on November 1, 1604,
is noted in the same records as those quoted with regard to
Measure for Measure, and the play may be reasonably assigned
to the same year. An alleged performance at Harefield in 1602
certainly rests upon a forgery. The play was revived in 1610
and seen by Prince Louisjof Wiirttemberg at the Globe on April 3c
of that year. It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on
October 6, 1621, and a First Quarto was published in 1622. The
text of this is less satisfactory than that of the First Folio, and
omits a good many lines found therein and almost certainly
belonging to the play as first written. It also contains some
profane expressions which have been modified in the Folio,
and thereby points to a date for the original production earlier
than the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players passed in the spring
of 1606. The plot, like that of Measure for Measure, comes
from the H ecatommithi (1566) of Giraldi Cinthio.
29. M acbeth cannot,`in view of its obvious allusions to ]ames I.
be of earlier date than 1603. The style and some trifling allusion:
point to about I60S or 1606, and a hint for the theme may have
been given by Matthew Gwynne’s entertainment of the Tre:
Sibyllae, with which james was welcomed to Oxford on August
27, 1605. The play was revived in 1610 and Simon Forman savs
it at the Globe on April 20. The only extant text, that of th<
First Folio, bears traces of shortening, and has been interpolatec
with additional rhymed dialogues for the witches by a seconc
. hand, probably that of Thomas Middleton. But the exten
of Midd1eton’s contribution has been exaggerated; it is probably
confined to act iii. sc. 5, and a few lines in act. iv. sc. 1. A ballac
of M acdobeth was entered in the Stationers’ Register on Augus
27, 1596, but is not known. It is not likely that Shakespeare har
consulted any Scottish history other than that included i1
Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle; he may have gathered witchlon
from Reginald Scot’s Diseooerie of Witchcraft (1584) or Kin;
]ames’s own Demonologie (1599).
30. The entry of King Lear in the Stationers’ Register 01
November 26, 1607, records the performance of the play at cour
on December 26, 1606. This suggests 1605 or I606 as the datt
of production, and this is confirmed by the publication in 160
of the older play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, whicl
Shakespeare used as his source. Two Quartos of King Lea
were published in 1608, and contain a text rather longer, bu
in other respects less accurate, than that of the First Folic
The material of the play consists of fragments of Celtic mytl
which found their way into history through Geoffrey of Mon
mouth. It was accessible to Shakespeare in Holinshed and iz
Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as well as in the old play.
31. It is not quite clear whether Antony and Cleopatra wa
the play of that name entered in the Stationers’ Register on Ma
20, 1608, for no Quarto is extant, and a fresh entry was mad
in the Register before the issue of the First Folio. Apart fror
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SPE ARE 7 8 1
this entry, there is little external evidence to fix the date of the
play, but it is in Shakespeare’s later, although not his last
manner, and may very well belong to 1606.
32. In the case of Ccrivlanus the external evidence available
is even scantier, and all that can be said is that its closest afhnities
are to Antony and Cleopatra, which in all probability it directly
followed or preceded in order of composition. Both plays, like
Julius Caesar, are based upon the Lives of Plutarch, as Englished
by Sir Thomas North.
33. There is no external evidence as to the date of Timcn
of Athens, but it may safely be grouped on the strength of its
internal characteristics with the plays just named, and there is
~ a clear gulf between it and those that follow. It may be placed
, provisionally in 1607. The critical problems which it presents
have never been thoroughly worked out. The extraordinary
. incoherencies of its action and inequalities of its style have
prevented modern scholars from accepting it as a finished pro-
duction of Shakespeare, but there agreement ceases. It is some-
= times regarded as an incomplete draft for an intended play;
sometimes as a Shakespearian fragment worked over by a
. second hand either for the stage or for printing in the First Folio;
sometimes, but not very plausibly, as an old play by an inferior
, writer which Shakespeare had partly remodelled. It does not
» seem to have had any relations to an extant academic play of
l Tirnon which remained in manuscript until.1842. The sources
: are to be found, partly in Plutarch’s Life of Marcus Antonius,
» partly in Lucian’s dialogue of T irnvn or M isanthrapvs, and partly
» in William Paynter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566).
n 34. Similar difficulties, equally unsolved, cling about Pericles.
: It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on May 20, I60S, and
l published in 1609 as " the late and much admired play " acted
* by the King’s men at the Globe. The title-page bears Shake-
: speare’s name, but the play was not includedin the First Folio,
, and was only added to Shakespeards collected works in the
‘ Third Folio, in company. with others which, although they also
; had been printed under his name or initials in quarto form,
s are certainly not his. In I60S was published a prose story,
The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince cf Tyre. This claims
, to be the history of the play as it was presented by the King’s
s players, and is described in a dedication by George Wilkins
2 as " a poore infant of my braine. " The production of the play
s is therefore to be put in 1608 or a little earlier. It can hardly be
t doubted on internal evidence that Shakespeare is the author of
W the verse-scenes in the last three acts, with the exception of the
e doggerel choruses. It is probable, although it has been doubted,
l that he was also the author of the prose—scenes in those acts.
l To the first two acts he can at most only have contributed a
t touch or two. It seems reasonable to suppose that the non-
r Shakespearian part of the play is by Wilkins, by whom other
l dramatic work was produced about 1607. The prose story
t quotes a line or two from Shakespeare’s contribution, and it
l follows that this must have been made by 1608. The close
1 resemblances of the style to that of Shakespeare’s latest plays
e make it impossible to place it much earlier. But whether Shake-
g speare and Wilkins collaborated in the play, or Shakespeare
partially rewrote Wilkins, or Wilkins completed Shakespeare,
:1 must be regarded as yet undetermined. Unless there was an
t earlier Shakespearian version now lost, Dryden’s statement
e that " Shakespeare’s own Muse her Pericles first bore "· must
5 be held to be an error. The story is an ancient one which exists
h in many versions. In all of these except the play, the name of
r the hero is Apollonius of Tyre. The play is directly based upon
t a version in Gower’s Ccnfessio Arnantis, and the use of Gower as a
>. “ presenter " is thereby explained, But another version in Laur-
1, ence Twine’s Patterne cf Painefull Adventures (c. 1576), of which
t- a new edition appeared in 1607, may also have been consulted.
n 35. Cymbeline shows a further development than Pericles
in the direction of Shakespeare’s final style, and can hardly have
.s come earlier. A description of it is in a note-book of Simon
y Forman, who died in September 1611, and describes in the same
.e book other plays seen by him in 1610 and 1611. But these were
n notnecessarily new plays, and Cymbeline may perhaps be assigned
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7 8 2 - SHAKE1
conjecturally to 1609. The mask-like dream in act v. sc. 4
must be an interpolation by another hand. This play also is
based upon a wide-spread story, probably known to Shakespeare
in Boccaccio’s Decameron (day 2, novel 9), and possibly also in
an English book of tales called Westward for Smells. The historical
part is, as usual, from Holinshed.
36. The Winter’s Tale was seen by Forman on May 15, 1611,
and as it clearly belongs to the latest group of plays it may well
enough have been produced in the preceding year. A document
amongst the Revels Accounts, which is forged, but may rest on
some authentic basis, gives November 5, 1611 as the date of a
performance at court. The play is recorded to have been
licensed by Sir George Buck, who began to license plays in 1607.
The plot is from Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the Triumph of
Time, or Dorastus and F awnia (1588).
37. The wedding-mask in act iv. of The Tempest has suggested
the possibility that it may have been composed to celebrate
the marriage of the princess Elizabeth and Frederick V., the
elector palatine, on February 14, 1613. But Malone appears
to have had evidence, now lost, that the play was performed
at court as early as 1611, and the forged document amongst
the Revels Accounts gives the precise date of November 1, 1611.
Sylvester ]ourdan’s A Discovery of the Bermudas, containing an
account of the shipwreck of Sir George Somers in 1609, was pub-
lished about October 1610, and this or some other contemporary
narrative of Virginian colonization probably furnished the hint
of the plot.
38. The tale of Shakespeare’s independent dramas is now
complete, but an analysis of the Two Noble Kinsmen leaves no
reason to doubt the accuracy of its ascription on the title-page
of the First Quarto of 1634 to Shakespeare and ]0hn Fletcher.
This appears to have been a case of ordinary collaboration.
There is sufficient resemblance between the styles of the two
writers to render the division of the play between them a matter
of some difficulty; but the parts that may probably be assigned
to Shakespeare are acts i. scc. 1-4; 1; 1, 2; v. 1, 3, 4.
Fletcher’s morris-dance in act iii. sc. 5 is borrowed from that in
Beaumont’s Mask of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, given on
February 20, 1613, and the play may perhaps be dated in 1613.
It is based on Chaucer’s Knighfs Tale.
39. It may now be accepted as a settled result of scholarship
that Henry VIII. is also the result of collaboration, and that one
of the collaborators was Fletcher. There is no good reason to
doubt that the other was Shakespeare, although attempts have
been made to substitute Philip Massinger. The inclusion, how-
ever, of the play in the First Folio must be regarded as conclusive
against this theory. There is some ground for suspicion that the
collaborators may have had an earlier work of Shakespeare
before them, and thislwould explain the reversion to the “ history "
type of play which Shakespeare had long abandoned. His share
appears to consist of act i. scc. 1, 2; act scc. 3, 4; act iii. sc. 2,
ll. 1-203; act v. sc. 1. The play was probably produced in
1613, and originally bore the alternative title of All is True.
It was being performed in the Globe on June 29, 1613, when the
thatch caught nre and the theatre was burnt. The principal
source was Holinshed, but Hall’s Union of Lancaster and York,
Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Church, and perhaps Samuel
Rowley’s play of When You See Me, You Know Me (1605),
appear also to have contributed.
Shakespeare’s non-dramatic writings are not numerous.
The narrative poem of Venus and Adonis was entered in the
Poems Stationers’ Register on April 18, 1593, and thirteen
' editions, dating from 1593 t_o 1636, are known. The
Rape of Luerece was entered in the Register on May 9, 1594,
and the six extant editions range from 1594 to 1624. Each poem
is prefaced by a dedicatory epistle from the author to Henry
Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. The subjects, taken respect-
ively from the M etamorphoses and the Fasti of Ovid, were frequent
in Renaissance literature. It was once supposed that Shakespeare
came from Stratford-on-Avon with Venus and Adonis in his
pocket; but it is more likely that both poems owe their origin
to the comparative leisure afforded to playwrights and actors
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SPEARE
by the plague—period of 1592-1594. In 1599 the stationer
William jaggard published a volume of miscellaneous verse
which he called The Passionate Pilgrim, and placed Shakespeare’s
name on the title-page. Only two of the pieces included herein
are certainly Shakespeare’s, and although others may quite
possibly be his, the authority of the volume is destroyed by the
fact that some of its contents are without doubt the work of
Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Barnheld and Bartholomew
Griffin. In 1601 Shakespeare contributed The Phoenix and
I the Turtle, an elegy on an unknown pair- of wedded lovers, to a
volume called Lo·ve’s Martyr, or Rosalin’s Complaint, which was
collected and mainly written by Robert Chester.
The interest of all these poems sinks into insignificance beside
that of one remaining· volume. The Sonnets were entered in
the Register on May 20, 1609, by the stationer Thomas
Thorpe, and published by him under the title Shake- f;:::""
speares Sonnets, never before Imprinted, in the same Sunnis
year. In addition to a hundred and nfty-four sonnets,
the volume contains the elegiac poem, probably dating from the
Venus and‘Adonis period, of A Lo·uer’s Complaint. In 1640
the Sonnets, together with other poems from The Passionate
Pilgrim and elsewhere, many of them not Shakespeare’s, were
republished by John Benson in Poems Written by Wil. Shake-
speare, Gent. Here the sonnets are arranged in an altogether
different order from that of 1609 and are declared by the publisher
to “ appeare of the same purity, the Authour himselfe then
living avouched. " No Shakespearian controversy has received
so much attention, especially during recent years, as that which
concerns itself with the date, character, and literary history
of the Sonnets. This is intelligible enough, since upon the issues
raised depends the question whether these poems do or do not
give a glimpse into the intimate depths of a personality which
otherwise is at the most only imperfectly revealed through the
plays. On the whole, the balance of authority is now in favour
of regarding them as in a very considerable measure autobio-
graphical. This view has undergone the fires of much destructive
argument. The authenticity of the order in which the sonnets
were printed in 1609 has been doubted; and their subject—matter
has been variously explained as being of the nature of a philo-
sophical allegory, of an edort of the dramatic imagination, or
of a heartless exercise in the forms of the Petrarchan convention.
This last theory has been recently and strenuously maintained,
and may be regarded as the only one which now holds the field
in opposition to the autobiographical interpretation. But it
rests upon the false psychological assumption, which is disproved
by the whole history of poetry and in particular of Petrarchan
poetry, that the use of conventions is inconsistent with the
expression of unfeigned emotions; and it is hardly to be set
against the direct conviction which the sonnets carry to the most
finely critical minds of the strength and sincerity of the spiritual
experience out of which they were wrought. This conviction
makes due allowance for the inevitable heightening of emotion
itself in the act of poetic composition; and it certainly does
not carry with it a belief that all the external events which underlie
the emotional development are capable at this distance of time
of inferential reconstruction. But it does accept the sonnets as
an actual record of a part of Shakespeare’s life during the years
in which they were written, and as revealing at least the outlines
of a drama which played itself out for once, not in his imagination
but in his actual conduct in the world of men and women.
There is no advantage to be gained by rearranging the order
of the 1609 volume, even if there were any basis other than
that of individual whim on which to do so. Many of the sonnets
are obviously linked to those which follow or precede them;
and altogether a few may conceivably be misplaced, the order
as a whole does not jar against the sense of emotional continuity,
which is the only possible test that can be applied. The last
two sonnets, however, are merely alternative versions of a Greek
~ epigram, and the rest fall into two series, which are more probably
l parallel than successive. The shorter of these two series (cxxvii.-
. clii.) appears to be the record of the poet’s relations with a
. mistress, a dark woman with raven brows and mourning eyes.
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SHAKE
In the earlier sonnets he undertakes the half—playful defence
of black beauty against the blonde Elizabethan ideal; but the
greater number are in a more serious vein, and are filled with a
deep consciousness of the bitterness of lustful passion and of
the slavery of the soul to the body. The woman is a wanton.
She has broken her bed-vow for Shakespeare, who on his side is
forsworn in loving her; and she is doubly forsworn in proving
faithless to him with other men. His reason condemns her,
but his heart has not the power to throw off her tyranny. Her
particular offence is that she, " a woman coloured ill, " has cast
her snares not only upon him, but upon his friend, " a man right
fair," who is his " better angel," and that thus his loss is double,
in love and friendship. The longer series (i.—cxxvi.) is written
to a man, appears to extend over a considerable period of time,
and covers a wide range of sentiment. The person addressed
is younger than Shakespeare, and of higher rank. He is lovely,
and the son of a lovely mother, and has hair like the auburn
buds of marjoram. The series falls into a number of groups,
which are rarely separated by any sharp lines of demarcation
Perhaps the first group (i.-xvii.) is the most distinct of all. These
sonnets are a prolonged exhortation by Shakespeare to his
friend to marry and beget children. The friend is now on the
top of happy hours, and should make haste, before the rose o:
beauty dies, to secure himself in his descendants against devouring
time. In the next group (xviii.-xxv.) a much more persona
note is struck, and the writer assumes the attitudes, at once
of the poet whose genius is to be devoted to eternizing tha
beauty and the honour of his patron, and of the friend whos¤
absorbing affection is always on the point of assuming a1
emotional colour indistinguishable from that of love. The con
sciousness of advancing years and that of a fortune which bar;
the triumph of public honour alike find their consolation in thi;
affection. A period of absence (xxvi.-xxxii.) follows, in whic]
the thought of friendship comes to remedy the daily labour o
travel and the sorrows of a life that is " in disgrace with fortun·
and men’s eyes " and filled with melancholy broodings ove
the past. Then (xxxiii.-xlii.) comes an estrangement. Th
friend has committed a sensual fault, which is at the same tim
a sin against friendship. He has been wooed by a woman lovex
by the poet, who deeply resents the treachery, but in the en<
forgives it, and bids the friend take all his loves, since all ar
included in the love that has been freely given him. It is difficul
to escape the suggestion that this episode of the conflict betwee;
love and friendship is the same as that which inspired some c
the " dark woman " sonnets. Another journey (xliii.-lii.)is agai
filled with thoughts of the friend, and its record is followedb
a group of sonnets (liii.-lv.) in which the friend’s beauty and th
immortality which this will find in the poet’s verse are especiall
dwelt upon. Once more there is a parting (lvi.-lxi.) and th
poet waits as patiently as may be his friend’s return to hin
Again (lxii.—lxv.) he looks to his verse to give the friend in
mortality. He is tired of the world, but his friend redeerr
it (lxvi.-lxviii.). Then rumours of some scandal against h
friend (lxix.—lxx.) reach him, and he falls (lxxi.-lxxiv.) int
gloomy thoughts of coming death. The friend, however, is sti
(lxxv.-lxxvii.) his argument; and he is perturbed (lxxviii
lxxxvi.) by the appearance of a rival poet, who claims to be taugl
by spirits to write " above a mortal pitch," and with “ tl
proud full sail of his great verse" has already won the countenam
of Shakespeare’s patron. There is another estrangement (lxxxvii
xc.), and the poet, already crossed with the spite of fortun
is ready not only to acquiesce in the loss of friendship, but 1
find the fault in himself. The friend returns to him, but tl
relation is still clouded by doubts of his fidelity (xci.-xciii
and by public rumours of his wantonness (xciv.—xcvi.). For
third time the poet is absent (xcvii.-xcix.) in summer and sprin
Then comes an apparent interval, after which a love alreac
three years old is renewed (c.·civ.), with even richer prais
(cv.-cviii.). It is now the poet’s turn to offer apologies (ci;
cxii.) for offences against friendship and for some brand upon h
name apparently due to the conditions of his profession. I
Ls again absent (cxiii.) and again renews his protestations of tl
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ZSPEARE 7 8 3
imperishability of love (cxiv.—cxvi.) and of his own unworthiness
(cxvii.-cxxi.), for which his only excuse is in the fact that the
friend was once unkind. If the friend has suffered as Shakespeare
suffered, he has " passed a hell of time." The series closes with
a group (cxxii.—cxxv.) in which love is pitted against time;
and an envoi, not in sonnet form, warns the " lovely boy " that
in the end nature must render up her treasure.
Such an analysis can give no adequate idea of the qualities
‘ in these sonnets, whereby the appeal of universal poetry is built
up on a basis of intimate self—revelation. The human document
, is so legible, and at the same time so incomplete, that it is easy
, to understand the strenuous efforts which have been made to
. throw further light upon it by tracing the identities of those
, other personalities, the man and the woman, through his relations
l to whom the poet was brought to so fiery an ordeal of soul, and
, even to the borders of self-abasement. It must be added that
1 the search has, as a rule, been conducted with more ingenuity
, than judgment. It has generally started from the terms of a
. somewhat mysterious dedication prefixed by the publisher
z Thomas Thorpe to the volume of 1609. This runs as follows :——
; " To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W. H. all
2 happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet
E wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T. T."
g The natural interpretation of this is that the inspirer
l or " begetter " of the sonnets bore the initials W. H.; (Ishii;?
2 and contemporary history has accordingly been ran- we u,~
2 sacked to find a W. H. whose age and circumstances
e might conceivably fit the conditions of the problem which the
1 sonnets present. It is perhaps a want of historical perspective
- which has led to the centring of controversy around two names
s belonging to the highest ranks of the Elizabethan nobility,
s those of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and William
1 Herbert, earl of Pembroke. There is some evidence to connect
f Shakespeare with both of these. To Southampton he dedicated
e Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrcce in 1594,
r and the story that he received a gift of no less than {1000 from
e the earl is recorded by Rowe. His acquaintance with Pembroke
e can only be inferred from the statement of Heminge and Condell
il in their preface to the First Folio of the plays, that Pembroke
i and his brother Montgomery had " prosequuted both them and
e their Authour living, with so much favour." The personal
.t beauty of the rival claimants and of their mothers, their amours
n and the attempts of their families to persuade them to marry,
1f their relations to poets and actors, and all other points in their
n biographies which do or do not fit in with the indications of the
y sonnets, have been canvassed with great spirit and some erudition,
e but with no very conclusive result. It is in Pembroke’s favour
y that his initials were in fact W. H., whereas Southampton’s
e can only be turned into W. H. by a process of metathesis; and
1. his champions have certainly been more successful than South-
1- ampton’s in producing a dark woman, a certain Mary Fitton,
1s who was a mistress of Pembroke’s,. and was in consequence
is dismissed in disgrace from her post of maid of honour to Elizabeth.
;o Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is in favour of her having
Lll been blonde, and not " black." Moreover, a careful investiga-
.- tion of the sonnets, as regards their style and their relation to the
it plays, renders it almost impossible on chronological grounds that
1e Pembroke can have been their subject. He was born on the
ze 9th of April 1 580, and was therefore much younger than South-
i.- ampton, who was born on the 6th of October 1573. The earliest
e, sonnets postulate a marriageable youth, certainly not younger
to than eighteen, an age which Southampton reached in the autumn
1e of 1591 and Pembroke in the spring of 1598. The writing of the
..) sonnets may have extended over several years, but it is impossible
a to doubt that as a whole it is to the years 1593--1598 rather than
g. to the years 1598-1603 that they belong. There is not, indeed,
ly much external evidence available. Francis _Meres in hisPalladis
es Tamia of 1598 mentions Shakespeare’s " sugred sonnets among
r.- his private friends," but this allusion might come as well at
us 1 " The sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in melliiiuous and honey-
le tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece,
he his sugred sonnets among his private friends."
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7 84. SHAKE
the beginning as at the end of the series; and the fact that two,
not of the latest, sonnets are in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599
is equally inconclusive.
The only reference to an external event in the sonnets them-
selves, which might at first sight seem useful, is in the following
lines (cvii.):—-
" The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age."
This has been variously interpreted as referring to the death of
Elizabeth and accession of james in 1603,, to the relief caused by
the death of Philip II. of Spain in 1598, and to the illness of
Elizabeth and threatened Spanish invasion in 1596. Obviously
the " mortal moon " is Elizabeth, but although "eclipse" may
well mean " death," it is not quite so clear that " endure an
eclipse " can mean " die."
Nor do the allusions to the rival poet help much. " The proud
full sail of his great verse " would fit, on critical grounds, with
Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and possibly Peele, Daniel or
Drayton; and the " aifable familiar ghost," from whom the
rival is said to obtain assistance by night, might conceivably
be an echo of a passage in one of Chapman’s dedications. Daniel
inscribed a poem to Southampton in 16og, but with this exception
none of the poets named are known to have written either for
Southampton or for Pembroke, or for any other W. H. or
H. W., during any year which can possibly be covered by the
sonnets. Two very minor poets, Barnabe Barnes and Gervase
Markham, addressed sonnets to Southampton in 1593 and 1595
respectively, and Thomas Nash composed improper verses for his
delectation.
But even if external guidance fails, the internal evidence for
1593-1598 as approximately the sonnet period in Shakespeare’s
life is very strong indeed. It has been worked out in detail
by two German scholars, Hermann Isaac (now Conrad) in the
Shakespeare-Jahrbuch for 1884, and Gregor Sarrazin in William
Shakespeares Lehrjahre (1897) and Aus Shakespeares Meister-
werkstatt (1906). Isaac’s work, in particular, has hardly received
enough attention even from recent English scholars, probably
because he makes the mistakes of taking the sonnets in Boden-
stedt’s order instead of Shakespeare’s, and of beginning his whole
chronology several years too early in order to gratify a fantastic
identification of W. H. with the earl of Essex. This, however,
does not affect the main force of an argument by which the
affinities of the great bulk of the sonnets are shown, on the ground
of stylistic similarities, parallelisms of expression, and parallel-
isms of theme, to be far more close with the poems and with the
range of plays from L0·ve’s Lab0ur’s Lost to Henry I V. than with
any earlier or later section of Shakespeare’s work. This dating
has the further advantage of putting Shakespeare’s sonnets in
. the full tide of Elizabethan sonnet-production, which began
with the publication of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 and
Daniel’s Delia and Constable’s Diana in 1592, rather than during
years for which this particular kind of poetry had already ceased
to be modish. It is to the three volumes named that the in-
fluence upon Shakespeare of his predecessors can most clearly
be traced; while he seems in his turn to have served as a model
for Drayton, whose sonnets to Idea were published in a series
of volumes in 1594, 1599, 1602, 1605 and 1619. It does not
of course follow that because the sonnets belong to 1593-1598
W. H. is to be identified with Southampton. On general grounds
he is likely, even if above Shakespeare’s own rank, to have been
somewhat nearer that rank than a great earl, some young
gentleman, for example, of such a family as the Sidneys, or as
the Walsinghams of Chislehurst.
It is possible that there is an allusion to Shakespeare’s romance
in a poem called " Willobie his Avisa," published in 1594 as from
the pen of one Henry Willoughby, apparently of West Knoyle in
Wiltshire. In this Willoughby is introduced as taking counsel
when in love with " his familiar friend W. S. who not long before
had tryed the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly
recovered of the like infection." But there is nothing outside
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SPE ARE
the poem to connect Shakespeare with a family of Willoughbys
or with the neighbourhood of West Knoyle. Various other
identifications of W. H. have been suggested, which rarely rest
upon anything except a similarity of initials. There is little
plausibility in a theory broached by Mr Sidney Lee, that W. H.
was not the friend of the sonnets at all, but a certain William
Hall, who was himself a printer, and might, it is conjectured,
have obtained the " copy " of the sonnets for Thorpe. It is, of
course, just possible that the "begetter" of the title~page
might mean, not the “inspirer," but the "procurer for the
press " of the sonnets; but the interpretation is shipwrecked
on the obvious identity of the person to whom Thorpe " wishes "
eternity with the person to whom the poet " promised " that
eternity. The external history of the Samzets must still be
regarded as an unsolved problem; the most that can be said
is that their subject may just possibly be Southampton, and
cannot possibly be Pembroke.
In order to obtain a glimmering of the man that was Shake-
speare, it is necessary to consult all the records and to read
the evidence of his life-work in the plays, alike in the
light of the simple facts of his external career and in T'" “"'“
that of the sudden vision of his passionate and dis- gftjsfe
satisfied soul preserved in the sonnets. By exclusive
attention to any one of these sources of information it is easy
to build up a consistent and wholly false conception of aShake-
speare; of a Shakespeare struggling between his senses and
his conscience in the artistic Bohemianism of the London
taverns; of a sleek, bourgeois Shakespeare to whom his art was
no more than aready way to aposition of respected and influential
competence in his native town; of a great objective artist whose
personal life was passed in detached contemplation of the puppets
of his imagination. Any one of these pictures has the advantage
of being more vivid, and the disadvantage of being less real,
than the somewhat elusive and enigmatic Shakespeare who
glances at us for a perplexing moment, now behind this, now
behind that, of his diverse masks. It is necessary also to lay
aside Shakespeareolatry, the spirit that could wish with Hallam
that Shakespeare had never written the Sonnets, or can refuse
to accept Titus Andronicus on the ground that " the play
declares as plainly as play can speak, ‘ I am not Shakespeare’s;
my repulsive subject, my blood and horrors, are not, and never
were his.’ " The literary historian has no greater enemy than
the sentimentalist. In Shakespeare we have to do with one who
is neither beyond criticism as a man nor impeccable as an artist.
He was for all time, no doubt; but also very much of an age, ·
the age of the later Renaissance, with its instinct for impetuous
life, and its vigorous rather than discriminating appetite for
literature. When Ben jonson said that Shakespeare lacked
" art," and when Milton wrote of his " native wood—notes wild,"
they judged truly. The Shakespearian drama is magnificent
and incoherent; it belongs to the adolescence of literature,
to a period before the instrument had been sharpened and
polished, and made unerring in its touch upon the sources of
laughter and of tears. Obviously nobody has such power over
our laughter and our tears as Shakespeare. But it is the power
of temperament rather than of art; or rather it is the power of
a capricious and unsystematic artist, with a perfect dramatic
instinct for the exposition of the ideas, the characters, the
situations, which for the moment command his interest, and a
perfect disregard for the laws of dramatic psychology which
require the patient pruning and subordination of all material
that does not make for the main exposition. This want of
finish, this imperfect fusing of the literary ore, is essentially
characteristic of the Renaissance, as compared with ages in
which the creative impulse is weaker and leaves room for a
hner concentration of the means upon the end. There is nearly
always unity of purpose in a Shakespearian play, but it often
requires an intellectual effort to grasp it and does not result
in a unity of effect. The issues are obscured by a careless
generosity which would extend to art the boundless freedom
of life itself. Hence the intrusive and jarring elements which
stand in such curious incongruity with the utmost reaches of
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SHAKE
which the dramatic spirit is capable; the conventional and
melodramatic endings, the inconsistencies of action and even of
character, the emotional confusions of tragicomedy, the com-
plications of plot and subplot, the marring of the give-and-take
of dialogue by superiluities of description and of argument,
the jest and bombast lightly thrown in to suit the taste of the
groundlings, all the flecks that to an instructed modern criticism
are only too apparent upon the Shakespearian sun. It perhaps
follows from this that the most fruitful way of approaching
Shakespeare is by an analysis of his work rather as a process
than as a completed whole. His outstanding positive quality
is a vast comprehensiveness, a capacity for growth and assimila-
tion, which leaves no aspect of life unexplored, and allows of
no finality in the nature of his judgments upon life. It is the
real and sufficient explanation and justification of the pains
taken to determine the chronological order of his plays, that the
secret of his genius lies in its power of development and that
only by the study of its development can he be known. He was
nearly thirty when, so far as we can tell, his career as a dramatist
began; and already there lay behind him those six or seven
unaccounted-for years since his marriage, passed no one knows
where, and filled no one knows with what experience, but assuredly
in that strenuous Elizabethan life with some experience kindling
to his intellect and formative of his character. To the woodcraft
and the familiarity with country sights and sounds which he
brought with him from Stratford, and which mingle so oddly in
his plays with a purely imaginary and euphuistic natural history,
and to the book—learning of a provincial grammar-school boy,
and perhaps, if Aubrey is right, also of a provincial school-
master, he had somehow added, as he continued to add through-
out his life, that curious store of acquaintance with the details
of the most diverse occupations which has so often perplexed
and so often misled his commentators. It was the same faculty
of acquisition that gave him his enormous vocabulary, so far
exceeding in range and variety that of any other English writer.
His first group of plays is largely made up of adaptations and
revisions of existing work, or at the best of essays in the con-
ventions of stage—writing which had already achieved popularity.
In the Yorkist trilogy he takes up the burden of the chronicle
play, in The Comedy of Errors that of the classical school drama
and of the page-humour of Lyly, in Titus Andronicus that of
the crude revenge tragedy of Kyd, and in Richard I II . that of
the Nemesis motive and the exaltation of the Machiavellian
superman which properly belong to Marlowe. But in Richard
III. be begins to come to his own with the subtle study of the
actor’s temperament which betrays the working of a profound
interest in the technique of his chosen profession. The style
of the earliest plays is essentially rhetorical; the blank verse
is stiff and little varied in rhythm; and the periods are built
up of parallel and antithetic sentences, and punctuated with
devices of iterations, plays upon words, and other methods ol
securing emphasis, that derive from the bad tradition of a popular
stage, upon which the players are bound to rant and force the
note in order to hold the attention of a dull-witted audience.
During the plague-vacations of 1592 to 1594, Shakespeare tried
his hand at the ornate descriptive poetry of Venus and Adonis
and Lucrece; and the influence of this exercise, and possibly
also of Italian travel, is apparent in the next group of plays,
with their lyric notes, their tendency to warm southern colouring,
their wealth of decorative imagery, and their elaborate and not
rarely frigid conceits. Rhymed couplets make their appearance,
side by side with blank verse, as a medium of dramatic dialogue.
It is a period of experiment, in farce with The Taming of the
Shrew, in satirical comedy with Lo·ve’s Labour’s Lost, in lyrical
comedy with ArMidsummer Nighfs Dream, in lyrical tragedy
with Romeo and Juliet, in lyrical history with Richard II .,
and finally in romantic tragicomedy with The Two Gentlemen
of Verona and with the masterpiece of this singular genre, The
Merchant of Venice. It is also the period of the sonnets, which
have their echoes both in the phrasing and in the themes of thc
plays; in the black-browed Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost
and in the issue between friendship and love which is variously
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SPEARE 7 8 5
set in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in The Merchant
of Venice. But in the latter play the sentiment is already one of
retrospection; the tempest of spirit has given way to the tender
melancholy of renunciation. The sonnets seemto bear witness,
not only to the personal upheaval of passion, but also to some
despondency at the spite of fate and the disgrace of the actor’s
calling. This mood too may have cleared away in the sunshine
of growing popularity, of financial success, and of the possibly
long-delayed return to Stratford. Certainly the series of plays
written next after the travels of 1597 are light—hearted plays,
less occupied with profound or vexatious searchings of spirit
than with the delightful externalities of things. The histories
from King John to Henry V. form a continuous study of the
conditions of kingship, carrying on the political speculations
begun in Richard II. and culminating in the brilliant picture
of triumphant efficiency, the Henry of Agincourt; Meanwhile
Shakespeare develops the astonishing faculty of humorous
delineation of which he had given foretastes in ]ack Cade, in
Bottom the weaver, and in ]uliet’s nurse; sets the creation of
Falstaii in front of his vivid pictures of contemporary England;
and passes through the half-comedy, half melodrama, of Much
Ado About Nothing to the joyous farce of The Merry Wives of
Windsor, and to his two perfectly sunny comedies the sylvan
comedy of As You Like It and the urban comedy of T wehth
Night.
Then there comes a change of mood, already heralded by
Julius Caesar, which stands beside Henry V. as a reminder that
efficiency has its seamy as well as its brilliant side. The tragedy
of political idealism in Brutus is followed by the tragedy of in-
tellectual idealism in Hamlet; and this in its turn by the three
bitter and cynical pseudo-comedies, All’s Well That Ends Well,
in which the creator of Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind and Viola
drags the honour of womanhood in the dust—— Troilus and Cressida,
‘ in which the ideals of heroism and of romance are confounded
in the portraits of a wanton and a poltroon—and Measure for
Measure, in which the searchlight of irony is thrown upon the
» paths of Providence itself. Upon the causes of this new perturba-
tion in the soul of Shakespeare it is perhaps idle to speculate.
~ The evidence of his profound disillusion and discouragement of
. spirit is plain enough; and for some years the tide of his pessi-
` mistic thought advances, swelling through the pathetic tragedy
` of Othello to the cosmic tragedies of Macbeth and King Lear,
. with their Titan-like indictments not of man alone, but of the
Y heavens by whom man was made. Meanwhile Shakespeare’s
r style undergoes changes no less notable than those of his subject-
l matter. The ease and lucidity characteristic of the histories
c and comedies of his middle period give way to a more troubled
: beauty, and the phrasing and rhythm often tend to become
, elliptic and obscure, as if the thoughts were hurrying faster than
i speech can give them utterance. The period closes with Antony
F and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, in which the ideals of the love of
‘ woman and the honour of man are once more stripped bare to
: display the skeletons of lust and egoism, and in the latter of which
. signs of exhaustion are already perceptible; and with Timon
l of Athens, in which the dramatist whips himself to an almost
r incoherent expression of a general loathing and detestation of
* humanity. Then the stretched cord suddenly snaps. T imon
, is apparently unfinished, and the next play, Pericles, is in an
, entirely different vein, and is apparently finished but not begun.
; At this point only in the whole course of Shakespeare’s develop-
, ment there is a complete breach of continuity. One can only
. conjecture the occurrence of some spiritual crisis, an illness
z perhaps, or some process akin to what in the language of religion
l is called conversion, which left him a new man, with the fever
* of pessimism behind him, and at peace once more with Heaven
, and the world.
i The final group of plays, the Shakespearian part of Pericles,
2 Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, all belong to the class
1 of what may be called idyllic romances. They are happy dreams,
: in which all troubles and sorrows are ultimately resolved into
, fortunate endings, and which stand therefore as so many symbols
i of an optimistic faith in the beneficent dispositions of an ordering
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7 8 6 SHAKE‘
Providence. In harmony with this change of temper the style
has likewise undergone another change, and the tense structure
and marmoreal phrasing of Antony and Cleopatra have given
way to relaxed cadences and easy and unaccentuated rhythms.
It is possible that these plays, Shakespeare’s last plays, with the
unimportant exceptions of his contributions to Fletcher’s
Henry VI I I . and The Two Noble Kinsmen, were written in
retirement at Stratford. At any rate the call of the country
is sounding through them; and it is with no regret that in the
last pages of The Tempest the weary magician drowns his book,
and buries his staff certain fathoms deep in the earth.
(E. K. C.)
The Shakespeare-Bacon Theory.
In view of the continued promulgation of the sensational theory
that the plays, and presumably the poems also, so long associated
with the name of Shakespeare, were not written by the man whose
biography is sketched above, but by somebody else who used this
pseudonym——and especially that the writer was Lord Chancellor
Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans (1561-1626)-it appears de-
sirable to deal here briefly with this question. No such idea seems to
have occurred to anybody till the middle of the 19th century (see
Bibliography below), but having once been started it has been elabor-
ated in certain quarters by a variety of appeals, both to internal
evidence as disclosed by the knowledge displayed in Shakespeare’s
works and by their vocabulary and style, and to external evidence as
represented by the problems connected with the facts of Shal<espeare’s
known life and of the publication of the plays. To what may be
called ingenious inferences from data of this sort have even been
added attempts to show that a secret confession exists which may
be detected in a cipher or c ptogram in the printing of the plays.
It must suffice here to say xtliat the contentions of the Americans,
Mr Donnelly and Mrs Gallup, on this score are not only opposed to
the opinion of authoritative bibliographers, who deny the existence
of any such cipher, but have carried their supporters to lengths which
are obviously absurd and impossible. Lord Penzance, a great
lawyer whose support of the Baconian theory may be found in his
" judicial summing-up," published in 1902, expressly admits that
" the attempts to establish a cipher totally failed; there was not
indeed the semblance of a cipher." Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, in
his Bacon is Shakespeare (1910), goes still farther in an attempt to
prove the point by cryptographic evidence. According to him the
classical " long word" cited in Lo·ve’s Lab0ur's Lost, " honorifica-
bilitudinitatibus," is an anagram for " hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti
orbi " (these plays F. Bacon’s offspring preserved for the world);
and he juggles very curiously with the numbers of the words and
lines in the page of the First Folio containing this alleged anagram.
He also cites the evidence of (more or less) contemporary illustra-
tions to books, which he explains as cryptographic, in confirmation.
These interpretations are in the highest egree speculative. But
perhaps his argument is exposed in its full depth of incredibility
when he counts up the letters in Ben ]0nson’s verses “ To the
Reader," describing the Droeshout portrait in the First Folio, and,
fmding them to be 287 (taking each " w " as two " v’s "), concludes
(by adding 287 to 1623, i.e. the date of the First Folio) that Bacon
intended to reveal himself as the author in the year 19 ro! This sort
of argument makes the plain man’s head reel. On similar principles
anything might prove anything. What may be considered the more
reasonable way of approaching the question is shown in Mr G.
Greenwood’s Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908), in which the
alleged difficulties of the Shakespearian authorship are competently
presented without recourse to any such extravagances.
The plausibility of many of the arguments used by Mr Greenwood
and those whom he follows depends a good deal upon the real
obscurity which, for lack of positive evidence, shrouds the biography
of Shakespeare and our knowledge of the precise facts as to the publi-
cation of the works associated with his name; and it has been assisted
by the dogmatism of some modern biographers, or the differences of
opinion between them, when they attempt to interpret the known
facts of Shakespeare's life so as to account for his authorship. But
it must be remembered that, if Shakespeare (or Shakspere) wrote
Shakespeare’s works, it is only possible to reconcile our view of his
biography with our knowledge of the works by giving some interpre-
tation to the known facts or accepting some explanation of what may
have occurred in the obscure arts of his life which will be consistent
with such an identification. That different hypotheses are favoured
by different orthodox critics is therefore no real objection, nor that
some may a pear exceedingly speculative, for the very reason that
positive evidience is irrecoverable and that speculation—consistent
with what is possible——is the only resource. In so far as evidence
is to be twisted and strained at all, it is right, in view of the long
tradition and the prima facie presumptive evidence, to strain it in
any possible direction which can reasonably make the Shakespearian
authorship intelligible. As a matter of fact the evidence is strained
alike by one side and the other; but as between the two it has to be
remembered that the onus lies on the opponent of the Shakespearian
authorship to show, first that there is no possible explanation which
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"I .
>PEARE
would justify the tradition, and secondly that there is positive
evidence which can upset it and which will saddle the authorship of
Shakespeare’s works on Bacon or some one else. The contempt
indiscriminately thrown on supporters of the Baconian theory by
orthodox critics is apt to be expressed in terms which are occasionally
unwarranted. But even if we leave out of account the lunatics and
fabricators who have been so prominently connected with it, the
adventurous amateur~—however eminent as a lawyer or however
acute as a critic of everyday affairs-may easily be too ingenious in
his endeavours to solve a literary problem in which judgment largely
depends on a highly trained and subtle sense of literary style and a
s ecial knowledge of the conditions of Elizabethan England and of
the early drama. In such an exposition of what may be called the
" anti-Shaksperian " case as Mr Greenwood’s, many points appear
to make for his conclusion which are really not more than doubtful
interpretations of evidence; though these interpretations may
be derived from orthodox Shakespearians—orthodox, that is to say,
so far at all events as their view of Shakespearian authorship is
concerned—there have been a good many such interpreters whose
zeal has outrun their knowledge. The fact remains that the most
competent special students of Shakespeare, however they may
differ as to details, and also the most authoritative special students
of Bacon, are unanimous in upholding the traditional view. The
Baconian theory simply stands as a curious illustration of the
dangers which, even in the hands of fair judges of ordinary evidence,
attend certain methods of literary investigation.
There is one simple reason for this: in order to establish even a
prima facie case against the identification of the man Shakespeare
(however the name be spelt) with the author of Shakespeare’s works,
the Baconian must clearly account for the positive contemporary
evidence in its favour, and this cannot well be done; it is highly
significant that it was not attempted or thought of for centuries.
It is comparatively easy to oint to certain difficulties, which are due
to the gaps in our knowledge. As already explained, the orthodox
biographer, armed with the results of accurate scholarship and pro-
longed historical research, attempts to reconstruct the life of the
period so as to offer possible or probable explanations of these diffi-
culties. But he does so backed by the unshaken tradition and the ,
positive contemporary evidence that the Stratford boy and man, the
ondon actor, the author of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and the
dramatist (so far at least as criticism u holds the canon of the plays
ascribed to Shakespeare), were one and) the same.
It may be useful here to add to what has been written in the pre-
ceding article some of the positive contemporary allusions to Shake-
speare which establish this presumption. The evidence of Francis
Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) has already been referred to. It is
incredible that Ben jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon
intimately, who himself dubbed Shakespeare the " swan of Avon,"
and who survived Bacon for eleven years, could have died without
revealing the alleged secret, at a time when there was no reason for
concealing it. Much has been made of jonson’s varying references
to Shakespeare, and of certain inconsistencies in his references to both
Shakespeare and Bacon; but these can be twisted in more than one
direction and their explanation is purely speculative. His positive
allusions to Shakespeare are inexplicable except as the most authori-
tative evidence of his identification of the man and his works.
Richard Barnfield (1598) speaks of Shakespeare as " honey-iiowing,"
and says that his Venus and Lucrece have placed his name " in
Fame’s immortal book." john Weever (1599) speaks of " honey-
tongued Shakespeare," admired for " rose—cheeked Adonis," and
" Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not." john Davies of
Hereford (1610) calls him “ our English Terence, Mr Will Shake-
speare." Thomas Freeman (1614) writes " to Master W. Shake-
speare: "—" Who loves chaste life, there’s Lucrece for a teacher [
Who list read lust there’s Venus and Adonis | . . . | Besides in
plays thy wit winds like Meander." Other contemporary allusions,
all trceating Shakespeare as a great poet and tragedian, are also on
recor .
Finally, it may be remarked that although many problems in
connexion with Shakespeare’s authorship can only be solved by the
answer that he was a " genius," the Baconian view that " genius "
by itself could not confer on Shakespeare, the supposed Stratford
" rustic," the positive knowledge of law, &c., which is revealed in his
works, depends on a theory of his upbringing. and career which
strains the evidence quite as much as anything put forward by
orthodox biographers, if not more. As shown in the preceding article,
it is by no means improbable that the Stratford “ rustic " was quite
well educated, and that his rusticity is a gross exaggeration. We
know very little about his early years, and, in so far as we are ignorant,
it is legitimate to draw inferences in favour of what makes the re-
mainder of his career and achievements intelligible. The Baconian
theory entirely depends on straining every assumption in favour of
Shakespeare’s nm having had any opportunity to acquire knowledge
which in any case it would require " genius ". to absorb and utilize;
and this method of argument is directly opposed to the legitimate
procedure in approaching the undoubted difficulties. _Isolated
phrases, such as Ben jonson’s dictum as to his small knowledge of
atin and Greek, which may well be purely comparative, the con-
temptuous expression of a university scholar for one who had no
academic training, can easily be made too much of. The extreme
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SHAKE‘
inferences as to his illiteracy, drawn from his handwriting, depend 0n
the most meagre data. The preface to the First Folio says that
" what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce
received from him a blot in his papers "; whereas Ben Jonson, in his
Discoveries, says, " I remember the players often mentioned it as an
honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned,
he never blotted a line. My answer had been, would he had blotted
a thousand!—xx·hich they thought a malevolent speech." Reams
have been written about these two sayings, but we do not know the
real circumstances which prompted either, and the non-existence of
any of the Shakespeare manuscripts leaves us open, unfortunately,
to the wildest conjectures. That there were such manuscripts
(unless Ben jonson and the editors of the First Folio were liars) is
certain; but there is nothing peculiar in their not having survived,
though persons unacquainted with the history of the manuscripts of
printed works of the period sometimes seem to think so.
We know so little of the composition of Shakespeare's works, and
the stages they went through, or the influence o other persons on
him, that, so far as technical knowledge is concerned (especially the
legal knowledge, which has given so much colour to the Baconian
theory), various speculations are possible concerning the means
which a dramatic genius may have had to inform his mind or acquire
his vocabulary. The theatrical and social milieu of those days was
small and close; the influence of culture was immediate and mainly
oral. We have no positive knowledge indeed of any relations between
Shakespeare and Bacon; but, after all, Bacon was a great con-
temporary, personally interested in the drama, and one would expect
the contents of his mind and the same sort of literary expression that
we find in his writings to be reflected in the mirror of the stage; the
same phenomenon would be detected in the drama of to-day were
any critic to take the trouble to inquire. Assuming the genius of
Shakespeare, such a poet and playwright would naturally be full of
just the sort of matter that'would represent the culture of the day
and the interests of his patrons. In the purlieus of the Temple and
in literary circles so closely connected with the lawyers and the court,
it is just the dramatic " genius" who would be familiar with any-
thing that could be turned to account, and whose works, especially
plays, the vocabulary of which was open to embody countless sources,
in the different stages of composition, rehearsal, production and
revision, would show the imagination of a poet wor ing upon ideas
culled from the brains of others. Resemblances between phrases
used by Shakespeare and by Bacon, therefore, carry one no farther
than the fact that they were contemporaries. We cannot even say
which, if either, originated the echo. S0 far as vocabulary is con-
cerned, in every age it is the writer whose ‘record remains and who by
degrees becomes its representative; the truth as to the extent to
which the intellectual milieu contributed to the education of the
writer, or his genius was assisted by association with others, is hard
to recover in after years, and only possible in proportion to our
knowledge of the period and of the individual factors in operation.
‘ ., (H. Cn.)
Tm: Pokrnkrrs or SHAKESPEARE
The mystery that surrounds much in the life and work of
Shakespeare extends also to his portraiture. The fact that the
only two likenesses of the poet that can be regarded as carrying
the authority of his co-workers, his friends, and relations—
yet neither of them a life-portrait—difler in certain essential
points, has opened the door to controversy and encouraged the
advance and acceptance of numerous wholly different types.
The result has been a swarm of portraits which may be classed
as follows: (1) the genuine portraits of persons not Shakespeare
but not unlike the various conceptions of him; (2) memorial
portraits often based on one or other of accepted originals,
whether those originals are worthy of acceptance or not; (3)
portraits of persons known or unknown, which have been
fraudulently " faked " into a resemblance of Shakespeare; and
(4) spurious fabrications especially manufactured for imposition
upon the public, whether with or without mercenary motive. It
is curious that some of the crudest and most easily demonstrable
frauds have been among those which have from time to time been,
and still are, most eagerly accepted and most ardently championed.
There are few subjects which have so imposed upon the credulous,
especially those whose intelligence might be supposed proof against
the chicanery practised upon them. Thus, in the past, a president
of the Royal Academy in England, and many of the leading
artists and Shakespearian students of the time, were found to
support the genuineness, as a contemporary portrait of the poet,
of a picture which, in its faked Shakespeare state, a few months
before was not even in existence. This, atleast, proves the intense
interest taken by the world in the personality of Shakespeare,
and the almost passionate desire to know his features. It is
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’\
>PEARE 7 8 7
desirable, therefore, to describe those portraits which have chief
claim to recollection by reason either of their inherent interest
or of the notoriety which they have at some time enjoyed; it
is to be remarked that such notoriety once achieved never
entirely dies away, if only because the art of the engraver, which
has usually perpetuated them either as large plates, or as illustra-
tions to reputable editions of the works, or to commentaries
or biographies, sustains their undeserved credit as likenesses
more or less authentic.
Exhaustive study of the subject, extended over a series of
years, has brought the present writer to the conclusion—identical
with that entertained by leading Shakespearian authorities-
that two portraits only can be accepted without question as
authentic likenesses: the bust (really a half-length statue)
with its structural wall—monument in the choir of Holy Trinity
Church, Stratford-on-Avon, and the copper-plate engraved by
Martin Droeshout as frontispiece to the First Folio of Shake-
speare’s works (and used for three subsequent issues) published
in 162 3 , although first printed in the previous year.
The Stratford bust and monument must have been erected
on the N. wall of the chance] or choir within six years after Shake-
speare’s death in 16 16, as it is mentioned in the prefatory memorial
lines by Leonard Digges in the First Folio. The design in its
general aspect was one often adopted by the " tombe-makers " of
the period, though not originated by them, and according to
Dugdale was executed by a Fleming resident in London since
1567, Garratt johnson (Gerard janssen), a denizen, who was
occasionally a collaborator with Nicholas Stone. The bust is
believed to have been commissioned by the poet’s son-in—law,
Dr ]ohn Hall, and, like the Droeshout print, must have been
seen by and likely enough had the approval of Mrs Shake-
speare, who did not die until August 162 3. It is thought to have
been modelled from either a life or death mask, and inartistic
as it is has the marks of facial individuality; that is to say, it
is a portrait and not a generalization such as was common
in funereal sculpture. According to the practice of the day,
especially at the hands of Flemish sculptors of memorial figures,
the bust was coloured; this is suihcient to account for the
technical summariness of the modelling and of the forms. Thus
the eyebrows are scarcely more than indicated by the chisel,
and a solid surface represents the teeth of the open mouth;
the brush was evoked to supply effect and detail. To the colour,
as reapplied after the removal of the white paint with which
Malone had the bust covered in 1793, must be attributed a
good deal of the wooden appearance which is now a shock to
many. The bust is of soft stone (not alabaster, as incorrectly
stated by " the accurate Dugdale "), but a careful examination
of the work reveals no sign of the alleged breakage and restora-
tion or reparation to which some writers have attributed the
apparently inordinate length of the upper lip. As a matter of
fact the lip is not long; it is less than seven-eighths of an inch:
the appearance is to a great extent an optical illusion, the result
partly of the smallness of the nose and, especially, of the thinness
of the moustache that shows the fiesh above and below. Some
repair was made to the monument in I649, and again in 1748,
but there is no mention in the church records of any meddling
with the bust itself. Owing, however, to the characteristic
inaccuracy of the print by one of Hollars’ assistants in the
illustration of Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (p. 688),
the first edition of which was published in 16 $6, certain writers
have been misled into the belief that the whole monument
and bust were not merely restored but replaced by those which
we see to-day. As other prints in the volume depart grossly
from the objects represented, and as Dugdale, like Vertue
(whose punctilious accuracy has also beenbaselessly extolled
by Walpole), was at times demonstrably loose in his descrip-
tions and presentments, there is no reason to believe that the
bust and the figures above it are other than those originally
placed in position. Other engravers, following the Dugdale
print, have further stultified the original, but as they (Vertue,
Grignion, Foudrinier, and others) differ among themselves,
little importance need be attached to the circumstance. A
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7 8 8 SHAKE
waming should be uttered against many of the so-called " casts "
of the busts. George Bullock took a cast in 1814 and Signor A.
Michele another about forty years after, but those attributed to
W. R. Kite, W. Scoular, and others, are really copies, departing
from the original in important details as well as in general effect.
It is from these that many persons derive incorrect impressions
of the bust itself.
Mention should here be made of the " Kesselstadt Death
Mask, " now at Darmstadt, as that has been claimed as the true
death-mask of Shakespeare, and by it the authenticity of other
portraits has been gauged. It is not in fact a death-mask at
all, but a cast from one and probably not even a direct cast.
In three places on the back of it is the inscription-——|-AEDB 1616:
and this is the sole actual link with Shakespeare. Among the
many rapturous adherents of the theory was William Page, the
American painter, who made many measurements of the mask
and found that nearly half of them agreed with those of the
Stratford bust; the greater number which do not he conveniently
attributed to error in the sculptor. The cast first came to light
in 1849, having been searched for by Dr. Ludwig Becker, the
owner of a miniature in oil or parchment representing a corpse
crowned with a wreath, lying in bed, while on the background,
next to a burning candle, is the date -—A6 1637. This little
picture was by tradition asserted to be Shakespeare, although
the likeness, the death-date, and the wreath all point unmistak-
ably to the poet-laureate Ben jonson. Dr Becker had purchased
it at the death-sale at Mainz of Count Kesselstadt in 1847,
in which also " a plaster of Paris cast " (with no suggestion of
Shakespeare then attached to it) had appeared. This he found
in a broker’s rag-shop, assumed it to be the same, recognized
in it a resemblance to the picture (which most persons cannot
see) and so came to attribute to it the enormous historical value
which it would, were his hypothesis correct, unquestionably
possess. In searching for the link of evidence necessary to be
established, through the Kesselstadt line to England and Shake-
speare, a theory has been elaborated, but nothing has been proved
or carried beyond the point of bare conjecture. The arguments
against the authenticity of the cast are strong and cogent·—
the chief of which is the fact that the skull reproduced is funda-
mentally of a different form and type from that shown in the
Droeshout print—the forehead is receding instead of upright.
Other important divergencies occur. The handsome, refined,
and pleasing aspect of the mask accounts for much