Part 15

Whether Shakespeare had other chances for book-lore than those which the grammar school afforded, whether there was any interesting parson at hand, as often in small towns, to guide and stimulate his unfolding thoughts,--upon such points we have no information. But there were things to be learned in the country town quite outside of books and pedagogues. There, while the poet listened to the "strain of strutting chanticleer," and watched the "sun-burn'd sicklemen, of August weary," putting on their rye-straw hats and making holiday with rustic nymphs, he could rejoice in

"Earth's increase, foison plenty, Barns and garners never empty; Vines with clust'ring bunches growing; Plants with goodly burthen bowing;"

there he could see the "unbacked colts" prick their ears, advance their eyelids, lift up their noses, as if they smelt music; there he knew, doubtless, many a bank where the wild thyme grew and on which the moonlight sweetly slept; there he watched the coming of "violets dim," "pale primroses," flower-de-luce, carnations, with "rosemary and rue" to keep their "savour all the winter long,"

"When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail."

Such lore as this no books or college could impart.

It was this that Milton had in mind when he introduced Shakespeare and Ben Jonson into his poem "L'Allegro." Milton was in his thirtieth year when Jonson, poet laureate, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey; he was only a boy of eight years when Shakespeare died, but the beautiful sonnet written fourteen years later shows how lovingly he studied his works:--

"What needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones," etc.

The poem "L'Allegro" and its fellow "Il Penseroso" describe the delights of Milton's life at his father's country house near Windsor Castle. He used often to ride into London to hear music or pass an evening at the theatre, as in the following lines:--

"Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, Warble his native woodnotes wild."

This accurate and happy contrast exasperates the Baconizers, for it spoils their stock in trade, and accordingly they try their best to assure us that Milton did not know what he was writing about. They asseverate with vehemence that in all the seven-and-thirty plays there is no such thing as a native woodnote wild.

But before leaving the contrast we may pause for a moment to ask, Where did Ben Jonson get his learning? He was, as he himself tells us, "poorly brought up" by his stepfather, a bricklayer. He went to Westminster School, where he was taught by Camden, and he may have spent a short time at Cambridge, though this is doubtful. His schooling was nipped in the bud, for he had to go home and lay brick; and when he found such an existence insupportable he went into the army and fought in the Netherlands. At about the age of twenty we find him back in London, and there lose sight of him for five years, when all at once his great comedy "Every Man in his Humour" is performed, and makes him famous. Now, in such a life, when did Jonson get the time for his immense reading and his finished classical scholarship? Reasoning after the manner of the Delia-Baconians, we may safely say that he could not possibly have accumulated the learning which is shown in his plays: therefore he could not have written those plays; therefore Lord Bacon must have written them! There are daring soarers in the empyrean who do not shrink from this conclusion; a doctor in Michigan, named Owen, has published a pamphlet to prove, among other things, that Bacon was the author of the plays which were performed and printed as Jonson's.

To return to Shakespeare. Somewhere about 1585, when he was one-and-twenty, he went to London, leaving his wife and three young children at Stratford. His father had lost money, and the fortunes of the family were at the lowest ebb. In London we lose sight of Shakespeare for a while, just as we lose sight of Jonson, until literary works appear. The work first published is "Venus and Adonis," one of the most exquisite pieces of diction in the English language. It was dedicated to Henry, Earl of Southampton, by William Shakespeare, whose authorship of the poem is asserted as distinctly as the title-page of "David Copperfield" proclaims that novel to be by Charles Dickens, yet some precious critics assure us that Shakespeare "could not" have written the poem, and never knew the Earl of Southampton. Some years ago, Mr. Appleton Morgan, who does not wish to be regarded as a Baconizer, published an essay on the Warwickshire dialect, in which he maintained that since no traces of that kind of speech occur in "Venus and Adonis," therefore it could not have been written by a young man fresh from a small Warwickshire town. This is a specimen of the loose kind of criticism which prepares soil for Delia-Baconian weeds to grow in. The poem was published in 1593, seven or eight years after Shakespeare's coming to London; and we are asked to believe that the world's greatest genius, one of the most consummate masters of speech that ever lived, could tarry seven years in the city without learning how to write what Hosea Biglow calls "citified English"! One can only exclaim with Gloster, "O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought!"

In those years Shakespeare surely learned much else. It seems clear that he had a good reading acquaintance with French and Italian, though he often uses translations, as for instance Florio's version of Montaigne. In estimating what Shakespeare "must have" known or "could not have" known, one needs to use more caution than some of our critics display. For example, in "The Winter's Tale" the statue of Hermione is called "a piece ... now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano." Now, since Romano is known as a great painter, but not as a sculptor, this has been cited as a blunder on Shakespeare's part. It appears, however, that the first edition of Vasari's "Lives of the Painters," published in 1550 and never translated from its original Italian, informs us that Romano did work in sculpture. In Vasari's second edition, published in 1568 and translated into several languages, this information is not given. From these facts, the erudite German critic Dr. Karl Elze, who is not a bit of a Delia-Baconian, but only an occasional sufferer from vesania commentatorum, introduces us to a solemn dilemma: either the author of "The Winter's Tale" must have consulted the first edition of Vasari in the original Italian, or else he must have travelled in Italy and gazed upon statues by Romano. Ah! prithee not so fast, worthy doctor; be not so lavish with these "musts." It is, I think, improbable that Shakespeare ever saw Italy except with the eyes of his imperial fancy. On the other hand, there are many indications that he could read Italian, but among them we cannot attach much importance to this one. Why should he not have learned from hearsay that Romano had made statues? In the name of common sense, are there no sources of knowledge save books? Or, since it was no unusual thing for Italian painters in the sixteenth century to excel in sculpture and architecture, why should not Shakespeare have assumed without verification that it was so in Romano's case? It was a tolerably safe assumption to make, especially in an age utterly careless of historical accuracy, and in a comedy which provides Bohemia with a sea-coast, and mixes up times and customs with as scant heed of probability as a fairy tale.

In arguing about what Shakespeare "must have" or "could not have" known, we must not forget that at no time or place since history began has human thought fermented more briskly than in London while he was living there. The age of Drake and Raleigh was an age of efflorescence in dramatic poetry, such as had not been seen in the twenty centuries since Euripides died. Among Shakespeare's fellow craftsmen were writers of such great and varied endowments as Chapman, Marlowe, Greene, Nash, Peele, Marston, Dekker, Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. During his earlier years in London, Richard Hooker was master of the Middle Temple, and there a little later Ford and Beaumont were studying. The erudite Camden was master of Westminster School; among the lights of the age for legal learning were Edward Coke and Francis Bacon; at the same time, one might have met in London the learned architect Inigo Jones and the learned poet John Donne, both of them excellent classical scholars; there one would have found the divine poet Edmund Spenser, just come over from Ireland to see to the publication of his "Faerie Queene;" not long afterward came John Fletcher from Cambridge, and the acute philosopher Edward Herbert from Oxford and one and all might listen to the incomparable table-talk of that giant of scholarship, John Selden. The delights of the Mermaid Tavern, where these rare wits were wont to assemble, still live in tradition. As Keats says:--

"Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"

It has always been believed that this place was one of Shakespeare's favourite haunts. By common consent of scholars, it has been accepted as the scene of those contests of wit between Shakespeare and Jonson of which Fuller tells us when he compares Jonson to a Spanish galleon, built high with learning, but slow in movement, while he likens Shakespeare to an English cruiser, less heavily weighted, but apt for victory because of its nimbleness,--the same kind of contrast, by the way, as that which occurred to Milton.

But our Baconizing friends will not allow that Shakespeare ever went to the Mermaid, or knew the people who met there; at least, none but a few fellow dramatists. We have no documentary proof that he ever met with Raleigh, or Bacon, or Selden. Let us observe that, while these sapient critics are in some cases ready to welcome the slightest circumstantial evidence, there are others in which they will accept nothing short of absolute demonstration. Did Shakespeare ever see a maypole? The word occurs just once in his plays, namely, in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," where little Hermia, quarrelling with tall Helena, calls her a "painted maypole;" but that proves nothing. I am not aware that there is any absolute documentary proof that Shakespeare ever set eyes on a maypole. It is nevertheless certain that in England, at that time, no boy could grow to manhood without seeing many a maypole. Common sense has some rights which we are bound to respect.

Now, Shakespeare's London was a small city of from 150,000 to 200,000 souls, or about the size of Providence or Minneapolis at the present time. In cities of such size, everybody of the slightest eminence is known all over town, and such persons are sure to be more or less acquainted with one another; it is a very rare exception when it is not so. Before his thirtieth year, Shakespeare was well known in London as an actor, a writer of plays, and the manager of a prominent theatre. It was in that year that Spenser, in his "Colin Clout's Come Home Again," alluding to Shakespeare under the name of Aëtion, or "eagle-like," paid him this compliment:--

"And there, though last, not least, is Aëtion; A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found; Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, Doth, like himself, heroically sound."

Four years after this, in 1598, Francis Meres published his book entitled "Palladis Tamia," a very interesting contribution to literary history. The author, who had been an instructor in rhetoric in the University of Oxford, was then living in London, near the Globe Theatre. In this book Meres tells his readers that "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets among his private friends, etc.... As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for comedy, witness his 'Gentlemen of Verona,' his 'Errors,' his 'Love's Labour's Lost,' his 'Love's Labour's Wonne,' his 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and his 'Merchant of Venice;' for tragedy, his 'Richard II.,' 'Richard III.,' 'Henry IV.,' 'King John,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and his 'Romeo and Juliet.' As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speak with Plautus's tongue if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase if they would speak English." In other passages Meres mentions Shakespeare's lyrical quality, for which he likens him to Pindar and Catullus; and the glory of his style, for which he places him along with Virgil and Homer. It thus appears that, at the age of thirty-four, this poet from Stratford was already ranked by critical scholars by the side of the greatest names of antiquity. Let me add that the popularity of his plays was making him a somewhat wealthy man, so that he had relieved his father from pecuniary troubles, and had just bought for himself the Great House at Stratford where the last years of his life were spent. His income seems already to have been equivalent to $10,000 a year in our modern money. His position had come to be such that he could extend patronage to others. It was in 1598 that through his influence Ben Jonson obtained, after many rebuffs, his first hearing before a London audience, when "Every Man in his Humour" was brought out at Blackfriars Theatre, with Shakespeare acting one of the parts.

To suppose that such a man as this, in a town the size of Minneapolis, connected with a principal theatre, writer of the most popular plays of the day, a poet whom men were already coupling with Homer and Pindar,--to suppose that such a man was not known to all the educated people in the town is simply absurd. There were probably very few men, women, or children in London, between 1595 and 1610, who did not know who Shakespeare was when he passed them in the street; and as for such wits as drank ale and sack at the Mermaid, as for Raleigh and Bacon and Selden and the rest, to suppose that Shakespeare did not know them well--nay, to suppose that he was not the leading spirit and brightest wit of those ambrosial nights--is about as sensible as to suppose that he never saw a maypole.

The facts thus far contemplated point to one conclusion. The son of a well-to-do magistrate in a small country town is born with a genius which the world has never seen surpassed. Coming to London at the age of twenty-one, he achieves such swift success that within thirteen years he is recognized as one of the chief glories of English literature. During this time he is living in the midst of such a period of intellectual ferment as the world has seldom seen, and in a position which necessarily brings him into frequent contact with all the most cultivated men. Under such circumstances, there is nothing in the smallest degree strange or surprising in his acquiring the varied knowledge which his plays exhibit. The major premise of the Delia-Baconians has, therefore, nothing in it whatever. It is a mere bubble, an empty vagary,--only this, and nothing more.

Before leaving this part of the subject, however, there are still one or two points of interest to be mentioned. Shakespeare shows a fondness for the use of phrases and illustrations taken from the law; and on such grounds our Delia-Baconians argue that the plays must have been written by an eminent lawyer, such as the Lord Chancellor Bacon undoubtedly was. They feel that this is a great point on their side. One instance, cited by Nathaniel Holmes and other Baconizers, is the celebrated case of Sir James Hales, who committed suicide by drowning, and was accordingly buried at the junction of crossroads, with a stake through his body, while all his property was forfeited to the Crown. Presently his widow brought suit for an estate by survivorship in joint-tenancy. Her case turned upon the question whether the forfeiture occurred during her late husband's lifetime: if it did, he left no estate which she could take; if it did not, she took the estate by survivorship. The lady's counsel argued that so long as Sir James was alive he had not been guilty of suicide, and the instant he died the estate vested in his widow as joint-tenant. But the opposing counsel argued that the instant Sir James voluntarily made the fatal plunge, and therefore before the breath had left his body, the guilt of suicide was incurred and the forfeiture took place. The court decided in favour of this view, and the widow got nothing.

There can be little doubt that this decision is travestied in the conversation of the two clowns in "Hamlet" with regard to Ophelia's right to Christian burial. The first clown makes precisely the point upon which the ingenious counsel for the defendant had rested his argument: "If I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches; it is to act, to do, and to perform." In making this distinction the counsel had maintained that the second branch, or the doing, was the only thing for the law to consider. The talk of the clowns brings out the humour of the case with Shakespeare's inimitable lightness of touch.

The report of the Hales case was published in the volume of "Plowden's Reports" which was issued in 1578; and Mr. Holmes informs us that "there is not the slightest ground for a belief, on the facts which we know, that Shakespeare ever looked into 'Plowden's Reports.'" This is one of the cases where your stern Baconizer will not hear of anything short of absolute demonstration. Mere considerations of human probability might disturb the cogency of a neat little pair of syllogisms:--

(1.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. Shakespeare never read Plowden. Therefore Shakespeare was not the author of "Hamlet."

(2.) The author of "Hamlet" must have read Plowden. The lawyer, Bacon, must have read Plowden. Therefore Bacon wrote "Hamlet."

With regard to the major premise here, one might freely deny it. The author of "Hamlet" might easily have got all the knowledge involved from an evening chat with some legal friend at an alehouse. Then as to the minor premise, what earthly improbability is there in Shakespeare's having dipped into Plowden? Can anybody but lawyers or law students enjoy reading reports of law cases? I remember that, when I was about ten years old, a favourite book with me was one entitled "Criminal Trials of All Countries, by a Member of the Philadelphia Bar." I read it and read it, until forbidden to read such a gruesome book, and then I read it all the more. One of the most elaborate reports in it was that of the famous case of Captain Donellan, tried in 1780 on a charge of poisoning his wife's brother, Sir Theodosius Boughton, a dissipated and diseased young man, who died very suddenly one day. A post-mortem inspection showed spots in the intestine, which three ordinary country doctors ascribed to poisoning by laurel water, while Sir John Hunter, one of the greatest authorities in Europe, testified that they might equally well have ensued upon death from apoplexy. The judge, Sir Francis Buller, saw fit, in his charge, to reckon this as the testimony of three experts against one; and thus the jury were driven to a verdict of murder, though it was not proved that any murder had been committed. Captain Donellan, who lived in his brother-in-law's house, was a man of blameless life, an amateur chemist, much given to fooling with odorous liquids and hissing retorts. It was proved that he had been distilling laurel water, and one or two other suspicious circumstances were alleged. The whole trial was begun and ended on the same day, the jury were about twenty minutes in finding the captain guilty, and three days afterward he was hung. It was a case where reason was submerged and drowned under a wave of angry prejudice shrieking for a victim.