old romances or treatises or statutes, rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach! In the case of Robert Burns we are content not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us be content if the genius of Robert Burns could glorify the goodwives' fables of his wonted firesides and set in aureole the homeliest cipher in his vicinage, until a field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a Venus! It were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this fire from heaven, at once and on the instant, invest a letterless peasant-lad with all the lore and law which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten-with all the learning that the past had gathered into great tomes and piled away in libraries. And yet, if Robert Burns had sung of the wars of the Roses, or molded a system of ethics, some Malone or Grant White would doubtless-with history staring him in the face-have arisen to put his index-finger upon the sources of his authority. Judging by the record in the case of William Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty over which a Malone or a Grant White can not easily clamber. If William Shakespeare was a born genius, a true son of nature, his soul overflowing with a sense of the beauty of life and of love, and of all around him, we might expect to find his poems brimful of the sweet, downcast eyes of his Anne, of sunny Stratford fields, of Shottery and the lordly oaks of Charlecote-to find him "Fancy's child," warbling "his native wood-notes wild," indeed! But of Troy, Tyre, and Epidamnium, of Priam and Cressid and Cleopatra, of the propulsion of blood from the vital heart, and of the eternal mysteries of physics, who dreams that "sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child," could sing in the very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns and times, or within the mathematical exactitude of sciences that had not yet been treated of in books? Or, again, John Bunyan is a case in point. John Bunyan was as squalid and irredeemable a tinker as ever flourished in the days when "a tinker was rogue by statute." "'* And yet he, according to Macaulay, produced the second of the two books of which England should be proudest. What was the miracle in the case of John Bunyan? He produced a book which, "while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. . . . This is the highest miracle of art, that things which are not should be as though they were; that the * Cockayne vs. Hopkins, 2 Lev., 214. "Though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree. One of these minds produced the 'Paradise Lost,' and the other the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'" imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker has wrought." But this great praise was not abstracted from Macaulay by wealth of antique learning, universal accuracy of information, or vivid portraiture of forgotten civilizations. There was no trace of Bunyan's perfect familiarity with Plato and Euripides, with Galen, Paracelsus, Plautus, Seneca, and the long line of authors down to Boccaccio, Rabelais, Saxo-Grammaticus, and the rest! The critic did not find in Bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the sonorous speech of the ancients, or the elegant and punctilious Norman of the court. "The Bunyan vocabulary," says Macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical theological terms, which would puzzle the rudest peasant." In short, we need not pause, marvelous as are the pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress," to ask of John Bunyan, as indeed we must ask of William Shakespeare, the question, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" Peerless as the result all is, there is nothing in the writings of John Bunyan which can not be accounted for by natural (that is to say, by what we have been obliged by the course of human experience to accept as not impossible) causes. "The years of Bunyan's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit was in the highest vigor over all England. . . . It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad, to whom nature had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and his sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him. . . . He enters the Parliamentary army, and, to the last, he loves to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner. . . . His 'Greatheart,' his ' Captain Boanerges,' and his 'Captain Credence' are evidently portraits of which the originals were among those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army. . . . He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavaliers . . . to oppress the Dissenters. . . . He was flung into Bedford Jail, with pen and paper for company,"* etc., etc. Here are the school and the experience, and the result is writings" which show a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience."t * "Bunyan," in "Encyclopædia Britannica," by Macaulay. + Ibid. ... Moreover, here is a scholar like Macaulay striving to account for the extraordinary phenomenon of a "Pilgrim's Progress" written by a village tinker. But in the case of the at least equally extraordinary phenomenon of the Shakespearean drama, the creation of a village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born to the Shakespeareans who deems it necessary or profitable to try his hand at any such investigation. Where did he get his material?" "Oh, he picked it up around Stratford somehow!" "But his learning?" "Oh, he found it lying around the theatre somewhere!" Probably there were encyclopædias to be fished out of the mud of the bank-side in those days, of which we can find no mention in the chroniclers! And so, although scarcely a commentator on the glowing text has not paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of this material, leading him on to vaster and more magnificent treasuries at every step, so far as we are able to discover, not one of them has attempted to trace the intellectual experience of the man who wrought it all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. Not one of them has paused to ask the Scriptural question, "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" It is simply impossible to turn one's researches into any channel that leads into the vicinity of Stratford without noticing the fact that the Shakespeare family left in the neighborhoods where it flourished the unmistakable trace-familiar in all cases of vulgar and illiterate families-namely, the fact that they never knew or cared, or made an effort to know, of what vowels or consonants their own name was composed, or even to preserve the skeleton of its pronunciation. They answered-or made their marks—indifferently to "Saxpir" or "Chaksper"; or to any other of the thirty forms given by Mr. Grant White,* or the fifty-five forms which another gentleman of elegant leisure has been able to collect. The name Shakespeare as now accepted and the face now accepted as belonging to William of that name are both modern inventions. Even the "best of that family" (according to the old clerk), William, when called to sign his own last will and testament (obliged by law to sign each of the three sheets upon which it was engrossed) three times, spelled it a different way each time. His daughter Judith lived and died without being able to spell or write it at all; Milton, Spenser, Sidney, even Gower and Chaucer (whom even our own Artemus Ward pronounced "no speller"), had but one way of writing their own names--and never dreamed of thirty ways -let alone fifty-five. * "Shakespeare's Scholar," pp. 478–480. George Russel French, "Shaksperiana Genealogica," p. 348. The name is now supposed to have been simply "Jacques-Pierre" (James Peter), which had been mispronounced-as Englishmen mispronounce French-for unnumbered generations.* But, still this most unsatisfactory person-this man who answers, like Mr. Carroll's skipper, to "hi, or to any loud cry"— "To what-you-may-call-um or what-is-his-name " But especially thing-um-a-jig "— or to whatever the nearest actor or scene-shifter may happen to hit on when he wants the poor little "supernumerary," and "Joannes Factotum "actually lived to clamber astride of the most immortal birthright of his own or of any century, and has clung thereon like another old man of the sea on Sindbad's shoulders, and been carried down through these three hundred years, and is being carried yet, down or up, to an undeterminate immortality of fame that is the true estate of somebody else! For, not only has the world not yet gotten its eyes half open, but it contumaciously refuses to open them to the facts in the case, and prefers to hug as tightly as it ever did this stupendous hoax-(" Shakespearean" indeed, in that it has outlasted and outlived all the other hoaxes put together the witchcraft hoax, the Chatterton hoax, the Ossian hoax, the moon hoax, and all the rest of them); that has carried all sorts of parasite hoaxes, like Ireland's, for example, upon its back, until their little day has been accomplished, and they dropped off— just as one of these days the present hoax must drop off, and breathe its last without a single mourner to stand by the coffin, and confess himself its disciple. For something like three hundred years the present Shakespeare has been allowed to enjoy by default the estates of another, and it is only within the present generation that it has occurred to anybody to move to open that default. But, once this Shakespearean niche is vacated, and who shall slip in to fill the vacancy? At least there need be no fear of Tichborne claimants, nor will the microscopic patience of a state trial be needed to ascertain if they who come fulfill the conditions of the Shakespeare sought. At least we are not opening a highway, and we will not be thronged with claimants. This is the present mispronunciation of Jacques prevalent in Warwickshire: "Thomas Jakes of Wonersh' was one of the list of gentry of the shire 12 Henry IV., 1433. At the surrender of the Abbey of Kenilworth 26 Henry VIII., 1535, the abbot was Simon Jakes, who had the pension of £100 granted him."— (Wilkes, "Shakespeare from an American Point of View." New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1877, p. 464.) Such being the true origin of the name, it is, of course, natural to find it as we do, written in two words, "Shake-speare," in those days. Dr. Richard Farmer (who wrote his famous letter on "The Learning of Shakespeare," in or about 1789) appears to have been the first antiShakespearean and unbeliever. Up to that time everybody appears to have swallowed the mass of impossibilities and absurdities we have so rapidly surveyed, without a suspicion.* Dr. Farmer sought, by demonstrating that much of the learning of the plays COULD have been-by sufficient research-procured at second-hand, to account for (what he could not overlook) the utter inadequacy of the historical man to the immortal work assigned him, just as if it were not, if anything, an increase (or say a substitution) of marvels to suppose a busy actor and manager rummaging England for forgotten manuscripts in the days when no public libraries existed, and when students lived in cloisters; or (let us say) that he knew precisely where to lay his hand on every obscure tract, letter, or memorandum ever drawn from a classical source! And just as if the encyclopedic learning required was lessened by the fact that the plot of the perfected play was borrowed or rewritten from an older drama of the same name! But Dr. Farmer lived and died unsuspicious of the truth-namely, that it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was William Shakespeare's. For it must be remembered that the "without blotting a line" of Ben Jonson was not a mere form of speech, but a fact, confirmed by Heming and Condell, the editors of the "first folio" of 1623, who say in their preface, "We have scarce received from him a blot in his papers." Lope de Vega, the Spaniard, who supplied his native stage with upward of two thousand original dramas-who is computed to have written upward of 21,300,000 verses, and who wrote so hurriedly that he never had time to un ravel his intrigues, but cut them all open at once * And, yet how patent was the absurdity to every-goaded by necessity, who dies, and leaves to comer! E. g. : "Let us finally mention the great come dian, the great tragedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, who was in his lifetime butcher's apprentice, poacher, actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William Shakespeare. In twenty years, amid the duties of his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of instructing his actors, he composed the thirty-two tragedies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an unequaled power of imagination, terrible and comic by turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all that was beyond the range of his experience and for ever remaining the treasure of the ages-all this being accomplished, Shakespeare left the theatre and the busy world at the age of forty-five to return to Stratford-on-Avon, where he lived peacefully in the most modest retirement, writing nothing and never returning to the stage-ignored and unknown if his works had not for ever marked out his place in the world -a strange example of an imagination so powerful suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing, once for all, the door to the efforts of genius."-(Guizot, "History of England.") William Shakespeare the halo of his genius as well as the profit of his toil-this anonymous writer draws a picture that has something familiar in its coloring. May not William Shakespeare," he asks, "the cautious, calculating man, careless of fame, and intent only on money-making, have found, in some farthest garret overlooking the 'silent highway of the Thames,' some pale, wasted student . . . who, with eyes of genius gleaming through despair, was about, like Chatterton, to spend his last copper coin upon some cheap and speedy means of death? What was to hinder William Shakespeare from reading, appreciating, and purchasing these dramas, and thereafter 'keeping his poet,' like Mrs. Packwood? . . . With this view the dis ... * This passage in Hallam where he alludes to William Shakespeare and Lope de Vega will repay perusal.— ("Literature of Europe," part ii., chap. vi., § 8.) puted passages - those in which critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting the meretricious ornaments sometimes crowded in— the occasional bad taste-in short, all the imperfections discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, are reconcilable with their being the interpolations of Shakespeare himself on his poet's works."* Miss Delia Bacon, a remarkable lady, followed in "Putnam's Magazine," in its issue of January, 1856, and was supposed therein to distinctly announce and maintain that Lord Bacon-her namesake by coincidence—was the Shakespeare wanted a supposition which, as we shall see, was erroneous. And Mr. William Henry Smith, of London, in September, 1856, appeared with his "Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere," in which the Baconian theory was very plainly and circumspectly laid down and admirably maintained. The presumption once disturbed, inquiry began to be diverted from the well-worn track of the commentators, and the result has been, we think, a candid, rational, and patient attempt to study the Shakespearean writings by the aid of contemporary history rather than by mere conjecture, and by the record rather than by fancy, guess-work and gossip. It is too early in the day—the time has been too short-for the reaction to have proved equal to the action, and verified the physical rule; but three well-defined anti-Stratfordian theories have offered themselves already, as substitutes for the mossy and venerable fossil remains of the commentators. These theories are: . 1. The Delia Bacon Theory; 2. The Baconian Theory; and storm of derision, abuse, and merciless malice, until in poverty, sickness, and distress, but still in a grand silence, she passed out of sight for ever, is true enough. That in the midst of it all she still struggled on in what she believed to be "the world's work "--bearing more than it was ever intended a woman should bear-is not to overweigh any merit her scheme of the Shakespearean plays may have possessed, however it may have eventuated in the "madness separably connected with her name. so in Whatever Delia Bacon died, she lived and moved in the conviction that she was a worker in the world's workshop. What to us is a mere cold, historical formulary, seems, however we may smile at the absurdity, to have seized upon her whole life and being; and, as in a great crusade against a universal error, she seems to have struggled in loneliness and wretchedness, with a crusader's faith and a martyr's reward. In all her tragic life, Delia Bacon appears never to have paused to formulate the theory, for ever to be associated with her name, as to the actual authorship of the plays.* Before the world had well opened its eyes to the fact that a formidable anti-Shakespearean proposition had been asserted, its author had left the proposition itself leagues behind, and was well along on her route to the fountain-head of its inspiration. The problem she proposed to herself was not, "Did Bacon and others write the plays?" but "WHY did Bacon and others write the plays under the name of William Shakespeare?” As the fruit of laborious study of the system * The paper, "William Shakespeare and his Plays," although the first she published, seems to treat the mat 3. The New Theory (as we are compelled, for ter as already settled. It was rather sarcasm at the exwant of a better name, to call it). THE DELIA BACON THEORY. It was across no dethroned and shattered intellect that there first flashed the truth it has been the essay of these papers to rehearse. That Delia Bacon-who, earliest in point of time, announced to the world that "Shakespeare" was the name of a book, and not the name of its author; and who, contenting herself with the bare announcement, soon passed on to the theory we are now about to notice-was pelted with a *Chambers's "Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852, p. 88. + This “Letter” was the following year (1857) elaborated into the valuable work on which we have so unsparingly drawn in these papers, and to which we acknowledge our exceeding obligation ("Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Playwriters in the days of Elizabeth. By William Henry Smith. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857 "). pense of those who rejected the theory of a non-Shakespearean authorship than a formulation of the theory itself. That the sarcasm, as a sustained effort, has rarely if ever been equaled, there certainly can be no question. Her indignation at the idea that the magnificent plays sprang from the brain of "the Stratford poacher—now that the deer-stealing fire has gone out of him; now that this youthful impulse has been taught its conventional mental limits, sobered into the mild, sagacious, witty Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe," is intense. "What is to hinder Mr. Shakespeare, the man who keeps the theatre on the bank-side, from working himself into a frenzy when he likes, and scribbling out, unconsciously, Lears, and Macbeths, and Hamlets, merely as the necessary dialogues to the spectacle he professionally exhibits!" Her allusion to Bacon is equally impassioned: "We should have found, ere this, one with learning broad enough and deep enough and subtile enough and comprehensive enough; one with nobility of aim and philosophic and poetic genius enough to be able to claim his own, his own immortal progeny, unwarped, unblinded, undeprived of one ray or dimple of that all-pervading reason that informs them-one who is able to reclaim them, even now, cured and perfected in their limbs, and absolute in full numbers as he conceived them !'" " and structure of the plays, she reached the answer-as she believed, and lived and died believing-hidden and embalmed in the masterpiece of them all, the tragedy of "Hamlet." Hamlet," she maintained, was the master-key that unlocked the whole magnificent system. They were not plays, but chapters in a great Treatise-links in a great chain of philosophy-a new philosophy of politics and of life; and, just as the Lord Hamlet caused certain strolling players, with the set speech he put into their mouths, to "catch the conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of all the golden age put into the mouths of the vagabond Shakespeare and his crew the truth which should, in the fullness of time, catch the conscience of the whole world. But why should these great minds have chosen to put their philosophy into enigmas and ciphers? Miss Bacon's answer was convincing: "It was the time when the cipher, in which one could write 'omnia per omnia,' was in request; when even 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other uses than at present, and when a nomme de plume was required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It was a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles were not mere sport and child's play; when they had need to be close and solvable only to those who should solve them. It was a time when all the latent capacities of the English language were put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling through all its length and breadth, with puns and quips and conceits and jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that opened down into the bottom of a tomb, that opened into the tower, that opened on the scaffold and the block."* This was the "Delia Bacon theory." This was the "madness" for ever associated with her plaintive story, and not the proposition that the author of the plays (whoever he might be or they, if more than one) and William Shakespeare were persons-as distinctly two as were the noble Hamlet and the poor player who played "Gonzago" in the "mouse-trap" that day before the majesty of Denmark. But, madness or not, Miss Bacon never wavered in her conviction that the appointed time to read the oracles had come, and that she, Delia Bacon, a namesake, possibly, of the real Hamlet of the plays, had been raised in her appointed place to be the reader. Alas for her! Like Cas p. x. sandra, she announced her message only to be scorned and flouted in return! By what whim of fortune or fancy the great plays had grown to be known as "Shakespeare's works," any more than Burbage's works, or Johnson's works, she never troubled herself to inquire, but with the details of her mission she was careful to possess herself. She held that "the material evidences of her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare's grave." She claimed to have discovered, by careful study of Lord Bacon's letters, not only the key and clew to the whole mystery, but to an entire Baconian cipher. In these letters-there were over five hundred of them extant, and others have been discovered, we believe, since Miss Bacon's day - however, it still remains, for the secret of Miss Bacon's clew died with her. But she stoutly maintained that in these letters were "definite and minute directions how to find a will and other documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed in a hollow space in the under surface of Shakespeare's gravestone. . . . The directions, she intimated, were completely and precisely to the point, obviating all difficulties in the way of coming to the treasure, and so contrived as to ward off any troublesome consequences likely to arise from the interference of the parish officers. .... There was the precious secret protected by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold in the guardianship of a fiend." The original manuscripts of the plays she did not expect to find there. These she believed the ignorant Shakespeare to have scattered, after the blotless copies for the players had been taken, to have devoted to domestic purposes, or to have never concerned himself about further. This was the gravamen of the charge she brought against "Lord Leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of Stratford, and this the Vandalism for which she never could forgive him. "This fellow," she cried, "never cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at their hands. . . . What is to hinder his boil Hawthorne. ... ... + Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven in 1811, and early devoted herself to literature, writing two works, "The Tales of the Puritans" and "The Bride of Fort Edward." She soon, however, abandoned miscellaneteacher of history, and began her career as a lecturer ous writing and adopted the profession of a student and on history in the city of Boston. Her method was original with herself. She had models, charts, maps, and pictures to illustrate her subject, and we are told by Mrs. Farrar ("Recollections of Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 1866) that, being of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, she was successful and at "Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded," tracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar says, "She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like an angel." |