that Tennyson is the admitted first of poets of the Victorian age (as Mr. Ben Jonson and all the commentators at his heels, down to our own Mr. Grant White, tell us that "William Shakespeare" was the admitted first of poets of his contemporary Elizabethan age), it would not be the easiest thing in the world to conceive three chroniclers-Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne-sitting themselves down to an enumeration, not of their illustrious contemporaries in general, but of their contemporaneous men of letters only, and, by a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first of poets of their day! Either, then, it seems to us, we are to infer that three such men as Raleigh, Bacon, and his satellite Matthew, had never so much as heard that there was any Shakespeare, in an age which we moderns worship as the age of Shakespeare, or that there was no "Shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "William Shakespeare" was the name of an actor and manager in the Globe and Blackfriars playhouses, of a man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors and co-managers in those establishments, to enumeration among the illustrious ornaments of an illustrious age, the stars of the golden age of English!

Of course, it can be well urged that all this is mere negative evidence; that not only three but three million of men might be found who had never mentioned or ever heard of Shakespeare, without affecting the controversy either way. But, under the circumstances, in view of what the Shakespearean plays are, and of what their author must have been, and of when and where these three men-Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew* --lived and flourished, the chronicles left by these three men-Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew-constitute, at the very least, a "negative pregnant not to be omitted in any review of our controversy that can lay the faintest claim to exhaustiveness or sincerity; and, moreover, a negative pregnant which, if we admitted all the Ben Jonson testimony, in prose and poetry, as evidence on the one side, could not be excluded as evidence on the other. In which event it is fairest to the Shakespeareans to rule Ben out altogether.t Be

"

* And we might add to these Sir John Davies, Selden, Sir John Beaumont, Henry Vaughn, Lord Clarendon, and others.

It is fair to note that another "negative pregnant' arises here, to which the Shakespeareans are as fairly entitled as the other side to theirs. Sir Tobie Matthew died in 1655. He survived Shakespeare thirty-nine years, Bacon twenty-nine years, and Raleigh thirty-seven years! Left in possession of so weighty a secret (as we should consider it), how could such a one as Matthew let the secret die with him? Although we do not meet with it among the arguments of the Shakespeareans, this strikes us as about the strongest they could present, except that

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sides, Ben is what the Scotchmen call “a famous witness" (if the commentators, who enlarge on Shakespeare's bounty and loans to him, can be relied upon), as being under heavy pecuniary obligation to the stage manager, and so his testimony is to be scrutinized with the greatest care, though he certainly did not allow his obligations to overmaster him when writing the Discoveries." But, in any event, it would be easier to believe that Ben Jonson once contradicted himself for the sake of a rhyme, and to "do the handsome thing" by the memory of an old friend and unpaid creditor, than to swallow the incredible results of a literal version of his prose and poetry, read by the light of the Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew remains. And the conclusion of the matter, it seems to us, must be either that the poetry was the result of his obligations to William Shakespeare and to William Shakespeare's memory, or that, having sworn on both sides, Mr. Ben Jonson stands simply dehors the case—a witness for neither.

It is not, then-it is very far from being-because we know so little of the man Shakespeare that we disbelieve in his authorship of the great works ascribed to him. It is because we know so much.

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No sooner did men open their histories, turn to the records and explore the traditions and trace the gossip of the Elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in the face. Long before any "Baconian theory" arose to account for these anomalies, at the instant these plays began to be valued for anything else than their theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the man to his verse" began to be troublesome. "To be told that he played a trick on a brother actor in a licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote Lear,'" cried Mr. Hallam.* “Every accession of information we obtain respecting the man Shakespeare renders it more and more difficult to detect in him the poet," cries Mr. William Henry Smith. "I am one of the many," testified Mr. Furness, “who have never been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary space of

the answer might be that, at the date of Matthew's death, 1655, the Shakespearean plays were not held in much repute, or that Matthew might have reserved his unbosoming of the secret too long; but it is only one fact among a thousand.

* "I laud," says Hallam, "the labors of Mr. Collier, Mr. Hunter, and other collectors of such crumbs, though I am not sure that we should not venerate Shakespeare as much if they had left him undisturbed in his obscurity. ... If there was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to know something."

+ "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 886.

each other; are there any other two things in the world more incongruous? "'* It was necessary, therefore, in order to preserve a belief in the Shakespearean authorship, either that William Shakespeare should be historically known as a man of great mental power, a close student, of deep insight into nature and morals—a poet, philosopher, and all the rest or else that, by a failure of the records, history should be silent altogether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time have made it impossible to recover any details whatever as to his tastes, manners, and habits of life. In such a case, of course, there would remain no evidence on the subject other than that of the plays themselves, which would, of course, prove him precisely the myriad-minded genius required. In other words, it was only necessary to so cloud over the facts as to make the "Shakespearean miracle" to be, not that William Shakespeare had written the works, but that history should be so silent concerning a "Shakespeare"! So long as the Shakespeareans could cry, "Behold a mysterious dispensation of Providence-that, of the two mightiest poets the world has ever held-Homer and William Shakespeare—we know absolutely nothing"! -so long as they could assign this silence to the havoc of a great deluge or a great fire, just so long the name "William Shakespeare" was as good and satisfactory a name as any other, and nobody could propose a better. But they can cry so no longer. It is not because we know so little, but because we know so much about the Stratford boy, that we decline to accept him as the master we not only admire and love, but in whose pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery anticipated. As a matter of fact, through the accident of his having been a part proprietor in one of the earliest English playhouses, we know pretty accurately what manner of man he was. We know almost everything about him, in short, except-what we do know about Homer-that the words now attributed to him were his. Homer, at least, we can trace to his "Iliad" and his "Odyssey," as he sang them in fragments from town to town. But neither to his own pen nor his own lips, and only problematically, as we shall see further on, to his own stage, can we trace the plays so long assigned to William Shakespeare. Let the works be placed in our hands for the first time anonymously; given, then, the chronicles of the age of Elizabeth

*In view of Mr. Furness's elegant contribution to Shakespearean study (his Variorum edition), this is worth noticing; the words quoted occur in a letter to Judge Holmes, printed at p. 628, third edition, of the latter's "Authorship of Shakespeare." In "Appletors' Journal" for February, 1879, will be found numerous other testimonies to the same effect as the foregoing.

and James in which to search for an author of those words, would anything we found in either lead us to pronounce William Shakespeare the man? And has anything happened since to induce us to set aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion to blindly and obediently believe that William Shakespeare was not the man he was, lest we should be "disrespectful to our birthright”?

Nothing whatever has happened since, except the labors of the commentators. By the most painfully elaborate explorations on the wrong track, by ingenious postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering carefully clear of the records, they have evolved a butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a divinity student, a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker-but, after all, a Shakespeare. It will not detain us long, as an example of these, to briefly glance at the labors of one of the most intrepid of the ilk, to identify the traditional poet with the traditional man.

In 1839 Thomas De Quincey contributed to the "Encyclopædia Britannica" its article "Shakespeare." That, about the story of the prankish Stratford lad, who loved, and wooed and won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smokyraftered cottage in Stratford town and the snug little thatch at Shottery trudged every sunset to do his courting, there lingers the glamour of youth and love and poetry, no patron of the "Encyclopædia" would probably have doubted. But that a staid and solemn work, designed for exact reference, should have printed so whimsical a fancy sketch as Mr. De Quincey supplied to it, and that it should have been allowed to remain there, must certainly command surprise. There can surely be no complaint as to the variety of the performance. Mr. De Quincey very ably and gravely speculates as to the size of the dowry old Hathaway gave his daughter; as to whether old John Shakespeare mortgaged his homestead to keep up appearances; as to whether that gentleman received the patronage of Stratford corporation when (as there is no direct authority for saying they did not) they had occasion to present a pair of gloves to some favored nobleman (and this portion of the composition winds up with a history of gloves and glove-making which can not fail to interest and instruct the reader). And the speculations as to whether the messengers who sped to Worcester for the "marriage-lines" did or did not ride in such hot haste, in view of an expected but premature Susannah, that they gave vicious orthographies of the names "Shakspeare" and "Hathaway" to the aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially, pretty reading. But, with facilities in 1839 for writing a history of

the Stratford lad, which the Stratford lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors, two hundred years and more before Mr. De Quincey, seem never to have possessed, Mr. De Quincey quite surpasses himself in setting us exactly right as to William Shakespeare. And, first, as to the birthday. There has always been a sort of feeling among Englishmen that their greatest poet ought to have had no less a birthday than the day dedicated to their patron saint. The Stratford parish records certifying to the christening of William Shakespeare on the 26th day of April, 1564 (which Mr. De Quincey forgets was "old style," and so, in any event, twelve days before the corresponding date in the present or "new style "), and the anniversary of St. George's day having fallen in that year, as usual, on the 23d of April, it has come to be unanimously resolved by the commentators that, in Warwickshire, it was the custom to christen infants on the third day after birth, and that, therefore, William Shakespeare was born on the anniversary of St. George, April 23, 1564. But Mr. De Quincey will not deceive us. He would rather perish than mislead. "After all," he says, "William might have been born Only one argument," he gravely proceeds, "has sometimes struck us for supposing that the 22d might be the day, and not the 23d, which is, that Shakespeare's sole granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was married on the 22d of April, ten years exactly from the poet's death, and the reason for choosing this day might have had a reference to her illustrious grandfather's birthday, which, there is good reason for thinking, would be celebrated as a festival in the family for generations!" But even Mr. De Quincey concedes that, in writing history, we must draw the line somewhere; for he immediately adds, "Still this choice may have been an accident' (so many things, that is to say, are likely to be considered in fixing a marriage-day, besides one's grandfather's birthday!), "or governed merely by reason of convenience. And, on the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the old belief that Shakespeare was born and died on the 23d of April. We can not do wrong if we drink to his memory both on the 22d and 23d." Mr. De Quincey's proposition to drink twice instead of once ought to for ever secure his popularity; but it nevertheless appears to us remarkable that

on the 22d.

* Mr. De Quincey's own estimate of this performance we take from a preface to the article itself, in the American edition of his collected works (Boston: Shepard & Gill, 1873), vol. xv., p. 11: "No paper ever cost me so much labor; parts of it have been recomposed three times over." And again, "William Shakespeare's article cost me more intense labor than any I ever wrote in my life, and, I believe, if you will examine it, you will not complain of want of novelty." We should say not.

"

a famous encyclopædia should admit this sort of work among its articles on sugar, snakes, Sardinia, soap, Savonarola, and its other references in S! Like his fellow Shakespeareans, Mr. De Quincey makes no use of Jennings, or Aubrey, or the old clerk, or the Rev. Richard Davies, or any one else who lived at dates inconveniently contiguous to the real William Shakespeare, and therefore awkward customers about whom it was best to say nothing. He can not claim never to have heard of Aubrey, because he quotes him as saying that William Shakespeare was "a handsome, well-shaped man.”* But this is the only allusion he makes to Aubrey or to anybody else who lived within eyesight or ear-shot of the William Shakespeare who, we admit, if a well-conducted

*The writer of these papers has been called to account for omitting, in his review of the attempts to produce an actually genuine portrait of Shakespeare, any account of the so-called German "death-mask." It was perhaps, not necessary. A plaster mask of an anonymous dead face is found in a rubbish-shop in Mayence, in 1849. Regarded as a mask of William Shakespeare, it bears a certain resemblance to the Stratford bust; and, regarded as a mask of Count Bismarck (for example), it would be found to bear a very strong resemblance to Count Bismarck. (We write from an inspection of photographs only, never having seen the mask.) Having always been annoyed that a creature so immortal as they had created their Shakespeare left no death-mask, the Shakespeareans at once adopt this anonymous mask as taken from the face of the two-days-defunct William Shakespeare, who died in 1616. Credat Judæus! Either William Shakespeare, at his death, was known to be an immortal bard or he was not. If he was, why should the sole likeness moulded of departed greatness be smuggled away from the land that was pious to claim him as its most distinguished son? If he was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask from the family who cared enough about the dead man's memory to go to the expense of it? But, at any rate, in 1849 it falls into the hands of jealous believers. They search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, Had they made up their minds to find a scrap of Shakespearean cuticle, we may be sure it would have been there. Professor Owen, of the British Museum, declared that, if the fact of the mask having originally come from England could be established, there was "hardly any sum of money which the Museum would not pay for the mask itself." But the missing testimony has not been supplied, though doubtless it is incubating. For now and then we see a newspaper paragraph to the effect that old paintings have turned up (in pawn-shops invariably) which "resemble the death-mask," thus accustoming us to the title which, in time, we shall doubtless come to accept-as we have come to accept Shakespeare himself-from mere force of habit. The last of these discoveries is in Australia, farther off than even Mayence, "said to resemble the Becker death-mask" (see the "Academy," London, May 31, 1879, p. 475). The Stratford portrait of Shakespeare claims no authority further than a resemblance to the accepted ideal, and the terra-cotta bust in the possession of the Garrick club was "found to order," and represents a man who, it would seem, bore not even a resemblance to the accepted Shakespeare for authority.

and for the date of their hero's death, and they find both.

person, ought reasonably to have been the man Mr. De Quincey and his ilk turn him out, and not the man his neighbors, or anybody who happened to be born within a hundred years of him, knew him. As to the difficulties Messrs. Coleridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Gervinius, Hallam, Holmes, William Henry Smith, Furness, and Delia Bacon find so insurmountable-namely, as to where the material of the plays came from-Mr. De Quincey skips over them with his airy two terms at the little grammar-school on Stratford High Street!* (The identical desk which young William occupied during this period of attendance at that institution of learning was promptly supplied by the Stratford guides, upon hearing of Mr. De Quincey's discovery.) And for these "two terms' (of course), no further authority than himself being necessary, he vouchsafes none, although we must admit the hiatus is pleasantly compensated for by his favoring the reader in search for Shakespearean data with two dissertations upon the loveliness of female virtue, one of which covers fourteen pages octavo.t

So long, of course, as this cue was followed, it was easy enough to believe that "William Shakespeare" was the name of the marvelous man who wrote the plays. But, when one left the fiction of Mr. De Quincey and his ilk, and was forced to confront the William Shakespeare who wrote the Lucy lampoon and the epitaph on Elias James, who stuck calves and stole deer, the difficulty only recurred with redoubled emphasis. It was not, of course, because William stuck the calves and stole the deer, because

* Aubrey confesses that his authority for the statement that William Shakespeare was a schoolmaster was only a rumor, founded on the statement of one "Beeston"; but who was "Beeston"? Some of our modern commentators have conjectured that possibly William, being a sort of model or head boy, was trusted to hear some of the little boys' lessons, which gave rise to the "schoolmaster" story.

+ I. e., of Shepard & Gill's reprint (see "Works," pp. 41, 69-83). But if Mr. De Quincey could have lived until November, 1879, even he might have been taught something. The Rev. John Bayley, in an article on "The Religion of Shakespeare," in the "Sunday Magazine" (New York: Frank Leslie, November, 1879, p. 518), says of William Shakespeare, "During the last years of his life it is stated that he and his family attended the parish church where the Rev. Richard Byfield, an eminent Puritan minister, and father of the distinguished commentator on the Epistle to the Colossians, commenced his ministry, A. D. 1676." Of course, the reverend contributor to the "Sunday Magazine" does not inform us where this fact "is stated," but concludes from the fact (he is sure it is a fact) that Shakespeare was "during the last years of his life the constant hearer of this eminent and energetic preacher of the gospel," and that "we may reasonably hope for the best of consequences." So simple a process has Shakespeare-making become !

he wrote the lampoon or the epitaph,* nor bebecause he was son (or apprentice, as some say) to a butcher or a glover, a tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to have been unequal to the Shakespearean authorship. There never yet was cradle too lowly to be the cradle of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. George Stephenson was a colliery-stoker, Turner was the son of a barber, and Faraday the son of a horseshoer. Coleridge was a charity lad, and the number of tanners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose names history could not be written, is something amazing.

We may trace the genius of Turner from the first impulse of his pencil to its latest masterpiece, but we can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum or described the Edison phonograph. He knew and practiced what he was taught (albeit he taught himself), and died quite contented to leave his own works behind him. Robert Burns was fully as unlettered and as rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove the mighty miracle of genius. His history up to a certain point is the very duplicate of the history of William Shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy of Stratford village. Both were obscure, schoolless, and grammarless. But, in the case of Robert Burns, this heaven-born genius did not set him straightway on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the past, and forecast the future, or guide his untaught pen to write of Troy and Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit civilizations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand ages before he had been begotten, the very names of which were not dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details of forgotten polities and commercial customs, such as, for instance, the exceptional usage of a certain trade in Mitylene, the anomalous status of a Moorish mercenary in command of a Venetian army, of a savage queen of Britain led captive by Rome, or a thane of Scotland under one of its primitive kings-matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of

* The version given in "Appletons' Journal" for June, 1879, is suspected of being the composition of John Jordan, "the Stratford poet," a harmless fellow enough, and a contemporary of Malone and Ireland. There is a verse, scrawled under an effigy of, David and Goliath in the old Shakespeare house at Stratford, which has for some hundreds of years been assigned in that vicinity to our William:

"Goliath comes with sword and speare,
And David with a sling;
Although Goliath rage and sware,
Down David doth him bring."

But, possibly-like the "Good friend, for Jesus' sake, forbeare," etc.-this is mere goodwife gossip.