Projects/Open Shakespeare/Britannica/3

Instruction on editing in tmp/BritannicaShakespeare/


 * 1) START: ED4A809_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A809.TIF

SHAKE no allusion to Shakespeare is really intended. The material for Troilus and Cressida was taken by Shakespeare from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes 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 Troilus and Cressida'', it has been argued, though with little justification, that parts of the play are of considerably earlier date, and perhaps represent the Love’s Labour’s Won referred to by Meres. The story is derived from Boccaccio’s Decameron through the medium of William Paynter’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 official 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 Heptameron 0f Civil Discourses (1582), and borrowed by him from Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1566). 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 Louis’of Württemberg at the Globe on April 30 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 Hecatommithi (1566) of Giraldi Cinthio. 29. Macbeth cannot,`in view of its obvious allusions to ]ames I., be of earlier date than 1603. The style and some trifling allusions point to about 1605 or 1606, and a hint for the theme may have been given by Matthew Gwynne’s entertainment of the ''Tres Sibyllae'', with which James was welcomed to Oxford on August 27, 1605. The play was revived in 1610 and Simon Forman saw it at the Globe on April 20. The only extant text, that of the First Folio, bears traces of shortening, and has been interpolated with additional rhymed dialogues for the witches by a second hand, probably that of Thomas Middleton. But the extent 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 ballad of Macdobeth was entered in the Stationers’ Register on August 27, 1596, but is not known. It is not likely that Shakespeare had consulted any Scottish history other than that included in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle; he may have gathered witchlore from Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) or King ]ames’s own Demonologie (1599). 30. The entry of King Lear in the Stationers’ Register on November 26, 1607, records the performance of the play at court on December 26, 1606. This suggests 1605 or 1606 as the date of production, and this is confirmed by the publication in 1605 of the older play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which Shakespeare used as his source. Two Quartos of King Lear were published in 1608, and contain a text rather longer, but in other respects less accurate, than that of the First Folio. The material of the play consists of fragments of Celtic myth, which found their way into history through Geoffrey of Mon- mouth. It was accessible to Shakespeare in Holinshed and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as well as in the old play. 31. It is not quite clear whether Antony and Cleopatra was the play of that name entered in the Stationers’ Register on May 20, 1608, for no Quarto is extant, and a fresh entry was made in the Register before the issue of the First Folio. Apart from


 * 1) END: ED4A809_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A809_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A809.TIF

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 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,
 * had been printed under his name or initials in quarto form,
 * 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


 * 1) END: ED4A809_1.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A810_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A810.TIF

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


 * 1) END: ED4A810_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A810_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A810.TIF

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.


 * 1) END: ED4A810_1.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A811_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A811.TIF

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


 * 1) END: ED4A811_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A811_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A811.TIF

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 :—— 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. 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."
 * " To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W. H. all
 * o Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is in favour of her having


 * 1) END: ED4A811_1.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A812_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A812.TIF

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


 * 1) END: ED4A812_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A812_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A812.TIF

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


 * 1) END: ED4A812_1.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A813_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A813.TIF

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


 * 1) END: ED4A813_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A813_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A813.TIF

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, is apparently unfinished, and the next play, Pericles, is in an , entirely different vein, and is apparently finished but not begun. , 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 , 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,
 * humanity. Then the stretched cord suddenly snaps. T imon
 * At this point only in the whole course of Shakespeare’s develop-
 * of pessimism behind him, and at peace once more with Heaven
 * 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


 * 1) END: ED4A813_1.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A814_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A814.TIF

spmsmart snftware - http://www.spnnsm¤n.r¤m t 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


 * 1) END: ED4A814_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A814_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A814.TIF

"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


 * 1) END: ED4A814_1.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A815_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A815.TIF

svmsmart snfzwars — http://www.sv¤nsm¤n.r¤m i 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


 * 1) END: ED4A815_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A815_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A815.TIF

’\ >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


 * 1) END: ED4A815_1.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A816_0.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A816.TIF

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 of the favour in which it has been held. It was believed in by Sir Richard Owen and was long on view in the British Museum, and was shown in the Stratford Centenary Exhibition in 1864. The " Droeshout print " derives its importance from its having been executed at the order of Heminge and Condell to represent, as a frontispiece to the Plays, and put forth as his portrait, the man and friend to whose memory they paid the homage of their risky enterprise. The volume was to be his real monument, and the work was regarded by them as a memorial erected in a spirit of love, piety, and veneration. Mrs Shake- speare must have seen the print; Ben jonson extolled it. His dedicatory verses, however, must be regarded in the light of conventional approval as commonly expressed in that age of the performances of portrait-engravers and habitually inscribed beneath them. It is obvious, therefore, that in the circumstances an authentic portrait must necessarily have been the basis of the engraving; and Sir George Scharf, judging from the contra- dictory lights and shadows i11 the head, concluded that the original must have been a limning——more or less an outline drawing—~which the youthful engraver was required to put into chiaroscuro, achievingrhis task with but very partial success. That this is the case is proved by the so-called " unique proof ” discovered by Halliwell-Phillips, and now in America. Another copy of it, also an early proof but not in quite the same " state, " is in the Bodleian Library. No other example is known. In this plate the head is far more human. The nose is here longer than in the bust, but the bony structure corresponds. In the proof, moreover, there is a thin, wiry moustache, much widened in the print as used; and in several other details there are


 * 1) END: ED4A816_0.tif.txt ###


 * 1) START: ED4A816_1.tif.txt ###
 * 2) Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/scans/EB1911_tiff/VOL24%20SAINTE-CLAIRE%20DEVILLE-SHUTTLE/ED4A816.TIF

SPEARE important divergencies. In this engraving by Droeshout the head is far too large for the body, and the dress—the costume of well-to-do persons of the time-is absurdly out of perspective: an additional argument that the unpractised engraver had only a drawing of a head to work from, for while the head shows the individuality of portraiture the body is as clearly done l de chic. The first proof is conclusive evidence against the con- ‘ tention that the " Flower Portrait " at the Shakespeare Memorial Museum, Stratford—on-Avon—the gift of Mrs Charles Flower (1895) and boldly entitled the “ Droeshout original "— is the original painting from which the engraving was made, and is therefore the actual life-portrait for which Shakespeare sat. This view was entertained by many connoisseurs of repute until it was pointed out that had that been the case the first proof, if it had been engraved from it, would have resembled it in all particulars, for the engraver would have merely copied the picture before him. Instead of that, we find that several details in the proof—the incorrect illumination, the small moustache, the shape of the eyebrow and of the deformed ear, &c.·—have been corrected in the painting, in which further improvements are also imported. The conclusion is therefore irresistible. At the same time the picture may possibly be the earliest painted portrait in existence of the poet, for so far as we can judge of it in its present condition -—(it was to some extent injured by fire at the Alexandra Palace) ——it was probably executed in the earlier half of the 17th century. The ii1scription—Will¢i Shakespeare, 1609- is suspect on account of being written in cursive script, the only known example at the date to which it professes to belong. If it were authentic it might be taken as showing us Shakespeare’s appearance seven years before his death, and fourteen years before the publica- tion of the Droeshout print. The former attribution of it to Cornelis ]anssen’s brush has been abandoned——it is the work of a comparatively unskilful craftsman. The picture’s pedigree cannot definitely be traced far back, but that is of little import- ance, as plausible pedigrees have often been manufactured to bolster up the most obvious impostures. The most interesting of the copies or adaptations of this portrait is perhaps that by William Blake now in the Manchester Corporation Art Gallery. One of the cleverest imitations, if such it be, of an old picture is the " Buttery " or “ Ellis portrait, " acquired by an American collector in IQ02. This small picture, on panel, is very poor judged as a work of art, but it has all the appearance of age. Inthis case the perspective of the dress has been corrected, and Shakespeare’s shield is shown on the background. The head is that of a middle-aged man; the moustache, contrary to the usual type, is drooping. It is curious that the" Thurston miniature"done from the Droeshout print gives the moustache of the " proof. " Two other portraits of the same character of head and arrange- ment are the " Ely Palace portrait " and the “ Felton portrait," both of which in their time have had, and still have, convinced believers. The " Ely Palace portrait " was discovered in 1845. in a broker’s shop, and was bought by Thomas Turton, bishop of Ely, who died in 1864, when it was bought by Henry Graves and by him was presented to the Birthplace. An unsatisfactory statement of its history, similar to that of many other portraits, was put forth; the picture must be judged on its merits. It bears the inscription "E 3Q —|— 1603,,, and it shows a moustache and a right eyebrow identical with those in the Droeshout ” proof ." It was therefore hailed by many competent judges as the original of the print; by others it was dismissed as a "make-up ”; at the same time it is very far from being a proved fraud. Supposing both it and the " Flower portrait " to be genuine, this picture, which came to light long before the latter, antedates it by six years. judged by the test of the Droeshout " proof" it must have preceded and not followed it. The " Felton portrait, " which made its first appearance in 1792, had the valiant championship of the astute and cynical Steevens, of Britton, Drake, and other authorities, as the original of the Droeshout print, while a. few-—·those who believed in the i" Chandos portrait "—denounced it as " a rank forgery. " On the back of the panel was boldly traced in a florid hand " Gul. Shakespear 1597 R.B." (by others read " R.N."). If