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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
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SHAKESPEARE 
 THE MAN AND THE BOOK. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The Man and The Book: 
 
 Being a Collection of Occasional Papers on the Bard 
 
 and his Writings. 
 
 Part the First. 
 
 BY 
 
 C. M. INGLEBY, M.A., LL.D., V.P.R.S.L. 
 
 '"• 
 
 LO N D ON: 
 
 Printed by Josiah Allen, of Birmingham, 
 6- Published by Trubner & Co., 57 6- 59, Ludgate Hill. 
 
 1877. 
 [All Rights Reserved.] 
 
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 SHAKESPEARE THE MAN. 
 
 Chapter I. — The Spelling of the Surname - - i 
 
 Chapter II. — The Meaning of the Surname - - - 12 
 
 Chapter III. — Shakespeare's Traditional Birthday - 21 
 
 Postscript. On certain Annotated Copies of Langbaine's Account 36 
 
 Chapter IV. — The Authorship of the Works attributed to Shakespeare 38 
 
 Chapter V. — The Portraiture of Shakespeare (Recent Contributions to) 73 
 
 Chapter VI. — Matters Personal to Shakespeare - - 92 
 
 Intercalary Notes and Corrections - - - 103 
 
 SHAKESPEARE THE BOOK. 
 
 Chapter VII. — The Modern Prometheus 
 Chapter VIII. — The Idiosyncrasy of Hamlet 
 Chapter IX. — Some Passages Reprieved 
 Chapter X. — The Soule Arayed - 
 Intercalary Notes 
 
 107 
 120 
 
 137 
 
 153 
 169 
 
 3137S0 
 
^ote. 
 
 ICHAEL Faraday, in a letter to Mary Somerville under 
 date 17th January, 1859, wrote, 'It is useful to get 
 one's scattered papers together, with an index.' This is my 
 reason for issuing the ensuing collection, of which three papers 
 are reprinted from the Transactions of the Royal Society of 
 Literature. 
 
 I have excluded from it all reviews of books, besides seven 
 articles on Shakespearian matters, contributed by me to The 
 Birmingham Gazette, The Englishman 's Magazine, and Once a 
 Week, which I did not consider worthy of republication. As 
 to those constituting this instalment, I may honestly say, that, 
 with the exception of the penultimate chapter, it is not likely 
 either reader or reviewer will take a more modest estimate 
 of their value than their author. That chapter has some- 
 what higher pretensions, for it is devoted to the defense of 
 Shakespeare's text in five passages which are usually emended 
 in modern editions. 
 
 The chapter on Recent Contributions to ' the Portraiture 
 of Shakespeare ' was written as a descriptive commentary on 
 a collection of portraits exhibited at a meeting of the above- 
 mentioned Society, and apart from them can have but little 
 interest. 
 
SHAKESPEARE: 
 
 THE MAN AND THE BOOK. 
 
 — o- 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE SPELLING OF THE SURNAME. 
 
 |MIDST the many discrepant literal forms in which our 
 great poet's surname is given by hand-writers, we 
 have, as it seems to us, to adopt that which was 
 usually employed by his contemporaries. Mr. Halliwell tells 
 us {Life of Shakespeare, 1848), p. 281, that it is 
 
 a matter of great uncertainty whether Shakespeare was one of the few persons 
 of the time who adopted a uniform orthography in his signature; but, on 
 the supposition that he always wrote his name Shakspere, it was contended 
 as early as 1784 that it should be printed in this curtailed form. The 
 question is one of very small importance, and the only circumstance worth 
 consideration in the matter is the tendency of this innovation to introduce 
 [or revive] the pronunciation Shaxpere, a piece of affectation so far 
 dangerous, inasmuch as it harmonizes not with the beautiful lines that have 
 
 B 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 been consecrated to his memory by Ben Jonson and other eminent poets;* 
 and those who have adopted it seem to have overlooked the fact, that in 
 the orthography of proper names the printed literature of the day is the only 
 safe criterion. In the case of Shakespeare, there are the poems of Liicrece 
 and Wiiiis and Adonis, published under his own superintendence, in which 
 [/. e. , both on the title-pages and in the Dedicatory Epistles] the name 
 urs as SHAKESPEARE, and so it is found in almost every work printed in 
 the lifetime of the poet. * * [Besides he] was called SHAKESPEARE by 
 bis literary friends. 
 
 * In this mention of 'Ben Jonson and other eminent poets,' the allusion 
 is, among other, to the lines: 
 
 Looke how the father's face 
 Lives in his issue, even so, the race 
 Of Shakespeare's minde and manners brightly shines 
 In his well torned, and true-filed lines: 
 In each of which, he seems to shake a lance, 
 As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance. 
 
 To shake or brandish the spear was a menacing gesture preceding the actual 
 delivery of the weapon. Cf. Spenser's Faery Queen, b. iv, c. iii, st. 10. 
 
 He, all enraged, his quivering speare did shake, 
 And charging him afresh thus felly him bespake : 
 
 and Histrio-mastix, or the Player Whipt, 4to, 1610 (Sig. C. 4 recto). 
 
 Thy knight his valiant elboe weares, 
 That when he shakes his furious Speare, 
 The foe in shivering fearfull sort, 
 May lay him downe in death to snort : 
 
 in which the late lamented Mr. Richard Simpson saw an allusion to 
 Shakespeare. (New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874, p. 391.) 
 Besides, the style which alone forms a basis for this conceit is that 
 uniformly adopted by the writers of commendatory verses (with scarcely 
 an exception), some half dozen of whom give the name Shake-speare (/'. e., 
 with the hyphen) as if to emphasise the pronunciation. 
 
 There is a similar conceit in the 119th Epigram of Thomas Bancroft (1639). 
 
 To Shakespeare. 
 Thou hast so us'd thy Pen (or shooke thy Speare), 
 That Poets startle, nor thy wit come neare. 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 On this point Mr. HalliwelPs decision is identical with that 
 arrived at sixteen years later by M. Victor Hugo. He does 
 indeed, as is usual with him, commit some inaccuracies in 
 dealing with the question of the orthography : he states one 
 document to be extant which ceased to be so at some time in 
 the seventeenth century, and another to have been lost, which 
 is always exposed to public view in the Department of Manu- 
 scripts of the British Museum ; but his verdict is substantially 
 right, and is well expressed. It runs thus ( William Shakespeare, 
 1864):* 
 
 There is little agreement on the orthography of the word Shake-speare, 
 as a family name : it is written variously — Shakspere, Shakespere, Shake- 
 speare, Shakspeare;f in the eighteenth century it was habitually written 
 Shakespear; the present translator [M. Francois Victor Hugo] has adopted 
 the spelling Shakespeare, as the only true method, and gives for it unan- 
 swerable reasons. The only objection that can be made is that Shakspeare 
 is more easily pronounced than Shakespeare, that cutting off the e mute is 
 perhaps useful, and that for their own sake, and in the interests of literary 
 currency, posterity has, as regards surnames, a claim to euphony. It is 
 evident, for example, that in French poetry the orthography Shakspeare 
 is necessary. However, in prose, and convinced by the translator, we write 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 There is little to be excepted to here, save (perhaps) ' the 
 only objection.' That indeed is defensible from M. Victor 
 
 # We cannot give this extract our approbation, without adding our 
 censure on the book. Probably, never in the whole course of biographical 
 literature, were so many ridiculous mistakes and culpable blunders brought 
 together in a single volume devoted to a single mind as in this strange 
 rhapsody. A further accession of blunders came in with M. A. Baillot's 
 wretched English version, which invests the French rhapsodist with a 
 Nessus-shirt of solecisms. 
 
 t And in fifty other forms : see pp. 6-8. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 Hugo's own point of view; he believing that Shakespeare's 
 dedication to Lord Southampton of Venus and Adonis is extant 
 in Shakespeare's autograph. We heartily wish that belief were 
 as true as it is new : for there, as in the Dedication to the 
 same patron of Lucrece, we have the full style of Shakespeare. 
 We go thus far with the great French romancer : we believe 
 both dedications were set up from Shakespeare's autograph; 
 and we therefore hold the spelling, as such, to be entitled to as 
 much respect as any of those which we possess in Shakespeare's 
 autograph. But it is on quite other grounds that we give the 
 preference to the full style in publicly dealing with his life and 
 works. It is the one style uniformly sanctioned by the press 
 of his own day. All the title-pages of the first quarto editions 
 of his separate plays, with one exception, have the surname in 
 that style, or not at all. The exception is Love's Labour's Lost, 
 1598, where the name is given Shakespere. In the title-page 
 of Hamlet, 1603, it is Shake-speare : and in those of Hamlet, 
 1604, &c, Much Adoe About Nothing, 1600; A Midsommer 
 Nighfs Dreame, 1600 (both editions); The Merchant of Venice, 
 1600 (both editions); The Second Part of Henrie the Fourth, 
 1 600 ; Syr John Falstaffe, and the Merrie Wives of Windsor, 
 1602 ; The Famous Historie of Troy/us and Cresseid, 1609 (both 
 editions); Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1609, and Othello, 1622, the 
 name is uniformly Shakespeare. In the case of the remaining 
 eight earliest quartos, the name of the author does not appear. 
 All the folio editions concur in giving the same orthography. 
 Surely such a concurrence of testimony is overwhelming ; and 
 what evidence have we to set against it ] 
 
Shakespeare : the Alan. 
 
 Mr. F. J. Furnivall, the Founder and Director of ' The New 
 
 Shakspere Society,' in his ' Prospectus,' adopts the spelling 
 
 Shakspere, and attempts to justify it in the following foot- 
 note. 
 
 This spelling of our great Poet's name is taken from the only unquestion- 
 ably genuine signatures of his that we possess, the three on his will, and the 
 two on his Stratford conveyance and mortgage. None of these signatures 
 have an e after the k ;* four have no a after the first e ; the fifth I read -ear. 
 The e and a had their French sounds, which explain the forms 'Shaxper,' 
 &c. Though it has hitherto been too much to ask people to suppose that 
 Shakspere knew how to spell his own name, I hope the demand may not 
 prove too great for the imagination of the Members of the New Society. 
 
 With the facts before us, we are at a loss to account for the 
 sarcasm of the final sentence. The concession asked for, ' that 
 Shakespeare knew how to spell his own name,' conveys a 
 sophism, which ought not to have imposed on many : and 
 which we take the liberty of exposing for the benefit of the few. 
 In Shakespeare's time there was no such a thing as the 
 orthography, or correct spelling, of a man's name. One or two 
 (as Burghley, perhaps), as far as we know, used one literal form ; 
 but the rule is the other way. Every man spelt his name, and 
 his neighbour's name, as best reconciled his eye and ear; and 
 
 * The second sentence thus stood in the earlier proofs : ' None of these 
 signatures have an e after the /', or an a after the first e.' 
 
 Then it stood thus : ' None of these signatures have an e after the k : 
 four have a after the first e ; the fifth I read -ee/r.' 
 
 Of these earlier versions, the second, through a misprint, is logically 
 inconsistent with the first sentence of the foot-note. Of the later versions, 
 the words, 'the fifth I read -eere' is but the record of a mistake, which, 
 indeed, has been made before, but ought not to blemish the ' Prospectus ' 
 of 'The New Shakspere Society.' 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 in the case of some prominent persons we have nearly a dozen 
 different spellings of one surname. Thus we have Jonson, 
 Johnson, Jhonson : Henslow (or with the e final), Henslo, 
 Hensley, Henchley, Hinchlow (or with the e final), Hinchley, 
 Inclow, &c. ; Raleigh, Rauley, Rawleigh, Rawlegh, Rawley, 
 &c ; Decker, Dekker, Dickers, &c. ; Hall, Hawle, &c: and so 
 forth : and if one thing be more certain than another, it is this, 
 that, as a rule, no one used a single literal form of any 
 surname — his own, or that of another. 
 
 Mr. Halliwell pointed out, in 1848 (Life of Shakespeare, 
 p. 282), the absurdity of erecting any one autograph of a man's 
 name into a standard. Unquestionably some, probably all, 
 of the five signatures of Shakespeare are Shakspere; and 
 certainly none of them has the e after the k: yet Gilbert 
 Shakespeare, the bard's brother, spelt his own name 
 Shakespere. We have no doubt whatever that if we had 
 access to a large number of signatures by members of the 
 family, we should find all sorts of spellings, and that every one 
 adopted several forms of the name on different occasions. 
 
 To judge from the documents from which Mr. Halliwell 
 gives quotations, or which he prints at length, the family of our 
 bard had a pretty extensive assortment of literal forms to choose 
 from. We find most of the following many times repeated : 
 
 i45° to x 55°- 
 Schakespeire. Shakespeyre. 
 
 Schakespere. Shakespeyr. 
 
 Schakspere. Shakspere. 
 
 Chacsper. Shakespere. 
 
SJiakcspcarc : the Ulan. 
 
 Shakspere. j 
 
 Shaksper. 
 
 I 
 
 i55° to l6 5°- 
 Shaxpere. Saxpere. 
 Shaxspere. Saxspere. * 
 Shaxper. Saxsper(?). 
 
 Shaxsper. 
 
 Shaxpeare. 
 
 Shaxpear (?). 
 
 ShaxpeereC?). 
 
 Shaxpeer. 
 
 Shakxspere (I). 
 Shakxsper. 
 
 Shaxkspere. 
 Shaxksper (?). 
 
 Shakspeare. 
 Shakspear (?). 
 
 Shakspeere. 
 
 Shakspeer. 
 
 Shakspeyre. 
 
 Shakspeyr. 
 
 Shackspeare. 
 
 Shackspear. 
 
 Shackspere. 
 
 Shacksper. 
 
 ShackspeerC?). 
 
 Shackspeere. 
 
 Shackspire. 
 
 Shakespere. 
 
 Shakesper. 
 
 Shakespeere. 
 
 Shakespeer(l). 
 
 Shakeseper. 
 
 Shackespeare. 
 
 Shackespear (?) 
 
 Shackespere. 
 
 Shackesper. 
 
 * The Registers of Snitterfield, 1596-7, record the burial of ' Margret 
 Saxpere, widow, being times the wyff of Henry Shakspere.' 1 Doubtless, to 
 the eyes of the scribe, the one literal form was fully as adequate as the other. 
 There was no orthography in those days, pace Mr. Furnivall. 
 
 ShaxepereC?). Shaxkespere. Shagspere. 
 
 Shaxeper. Shaxkesper(?). Sackesper. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 Shakispere. 
 
 Shakisper(?). 
 
 Shakyspare. 
 
 Shakysper. 
 
 Shakuspeare : 
 
 and half a dozen other forms in which an h follows the/.* 
 
 This very curious variation occurs occasionally both 
 in print and in manuscript. In the deed under which 
 Shakespeare purchased, for ^440, the unexpired term in a 
 moiety of the tithes of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, 
 and Welcombe, we find Shakespeare once : Shakespear once : 
 once he is simply initialed : and in the remaining ten cases the 
 name appears with the second // .• viz., 
 
 Shackesphere thrice, 
 Shakesphere five times, 
 Shacksphare once, 
 and Shaksphere once. 
 
 In some editions of Camden's Rcmaines concerning Britaine, 
 e.g., the edd. of 1614 and 1637, the name, which occurs but once, 
 is Shakespheare. In Edward Phillips' Theatrum Poetarum, 
 1675, we find Shakespear four times, and Shakesphear 
 twice. In Milton's epitaph on the bard, as it appears in the 
 Poems of 1640, the name is Sheakespeare : a form we do not 
 
 * We have appended (?) to those spellings which have not been verified. 
 Most of them will assuredly be found in documents of the relative period. 
 Besides the above-recorded forms of spelling our bard's surname, there 
 are several perversions of it which resulted from wantonness or accident. In 
 the Cunningham forgeries of the Revels-books of 1605, we have Shaxberd 
 four times : and in the French translation of Mrs. Montagu's Essay, 
 printed in 1777, the surname appears on the title-page as Sakespeart! 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 remember to have seen elsewhere. From this resume it would 
 be little less than miraculous, if we did find the immediate 
 family of Shakespeare employing only one form of spelling! 
 
 We must add that Mr. Halliwell (p. 283) gives a fac-simile 
 of an endorsement on the indenture of 1602, between Combes 
 and Shakespeare, which he reads 
 
 ' Combe to Shackspeare,' &c, 
 just as (p. 109) we find Judith's name spelt for her on the 
 deed of 161 1. 
 
 Mr. Halliwell sees sufficient resemblance between this 
 manuscript surname and the second and third signatures to 
 Shakespeare's will, to support 'an argument in favour of the 
 appropriation of the above to Shakespeare [i.e., of the inference 
 that it is his autograph], and of the correctness of reading 
 Shakspeare in those two autographs.' Apart from the question 
 of such a resemblance, we contend that the two last signatures 
 to the will are not Shakspeare, but, like Malone's tracing of 
 the first (now partly obliterated), Shakspere. Moreover, 
 to our eyes, the name in the endorsement of 1602 is quite 
 unmistakeably Shackspere. There is a German r, made wide 
 open like a v (as was then the custom in cursives), between two 
 e's made like o's, in the fashion then and long afterwards 
 prevalent, the latter straggling out into a flourish. In judging 
 of the three signatures to the will, we have not wholly relied 
 upon the decision of our late valued friend, Sir Frederic 
 Madden : though his decision was that of the most accom- 
 plished palseographic expert of his day, to which Mr. Furnivall 
 might be expected to bow with deference. However, we will 
 
 c 
 
io SJiakcspcarc : the Man. 
 
 append his own remarks on all five signatures. We quote 
 from his pamphlet Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere, 
 and the Orthography of his Name, 1S37, pp. 11-14. 
 
 The first of these signatures [i.e., to the will], subscribed on the first 
 idieet, at the right-hand corner of the paper, is decidedly WILLIAM 
 SHAKSPERE, and no one has ventured to raise a doubt respecting the six 
 last letters.* The second signature is at the left-hand corner of the second 
 ^heet, and is also clearly WlLL'M SHAKSPERE, although from the tail of the 
 letter h of the line above intervening between the <• and ;-, Chalmers would 
 fain raise an idle quibble as to the omission of a letter. The third signature 
 has been the subject of greater controversy, and has usually been read, By 
 ME, WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE. M alone, however, was the first publicly to 
 abjure this reading, and in his Inquiry, p. 117, owns the error to have been 
 [jointed out to him by an anonymous correspondent, who 'shewed most 
 clearly, that the superfluous stroke in the letter r was only the tremor of his 
 (Shakspere's) hand, and no #.' In this opinion, after the most scrupulous 
 examination, I entirely concur. ******* 
 
 The next document is the mortgage deed, which was discovered in 1768 by 
 Mr. Albany Wallis, a solicitor, among the title-deeds of the Rev. Mr. 
 Featherstonehaugh, of Oxted, in Surrey, and was presented to Garrick. 
 From the label of this, the fac-simile in Malone's edition of Shakspere, 
 1790, was executed, bearing this appearance, Wm. Shakspe ; and on this, 
 in conjunction with the third signature of the will, was founded Malone's 
 mistake in printing the name with an a in the second syllable. The deed 
 was at that time in the possession of Mrs. Garrick; but in 1796, when 
 Malone published his Inquiry, and had become convinced of his error, and 
 of the fault of his engraver, in substituting what looks like the letter a 
 instead of re (which it ought to be), the original document was missing, and 
 could not be consulted for the purpose of rectifying the mistake. * 
 
 The third document bearing Shakspere's signature, viz., the counterpart of 
 the deed of bargain and sale, dated the day before the mortgage deed, was 
 also found among Mr. Featherstonehaugh's Fvidences, and in 1796 was 
 in the hands of Mr. Wallis, who lent it to Mr. Malone to print in his 
 often-quoted Inquiry. Here the signature is, beyond all cavil or 
 
SJiakespeare : the Man. 11 
 
 suspicion, William SHAKSPER, where the mark above is the usual 
 abbreviation of the period for the final e. 
 
 The deed lost by Garrick is, as we have said, in the British 
 Museum ; the deed which Mr. Wallis lent to Malone is in the 
 City of London Library, Guildhall. 
 
 With Sir F. Madden we adopt the view that all five 
 signatures are alike, Shakspere; yet Mr. Furnivall's conclusion 
 is not justified. The actual case is familiar to the mathe- 
 matician, in the guise of an urn containing a very large 
 number of balls, of the colour of which we know nothing : 
 from which a very small number of white balls are drawn. 
 The number drawn being very small in comparison of the 
 number in the urn, the drawing furnishes no ground whatever 
 for the expectation that the urn contains more white balls than 
 balls of any other single colour : still less, if possible, that the 
 urn contains more white balls than balls that are non-white, 
 /'. e., of any other colours. The fact is that such a drawing does 
 not raise any probability as to the colour of the undrawn balls. 
 Now, Shakespeare may very well have signed his name from 
 3,000 to 5,000 times in his life : and therefore the balls in the 
 urn are very great in comparison of the number drawn, viz., five : 
 and we cannot from such a drawing infer, even if ' Shakespeare 
 knew how to spell his own name,' how he usually spelt it. 
 
 We must therefore fall back upon the style which (as Mr. 
 Halliwell puts it) was bequeathed to us by Shakespeare's 
 friends, was approved by himself in his two printed dedications 
 to Lord Southampton, and which, with scarcely an exception, 
 was adopted by his printers: viz., Shakespeare. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE MEANING OF THE SURNAME. 
 
 ABBLERS in etymology are no worse than other 
 dabblers in their conceit, presumption, and ignorance. 
 How few among them have the least notion of the 
 enormous mass of literature which deals with any one branch 
 of the subject. In this single department of Proper Names 
 there are books to be counted by hundreds in many European 
 languages ; and it is not too much to say that an explorer can 
 as little afford to be ignorant of the leading works among 
 them as the historian of Rome to ignore his Gibbon and his 
 Niebuhr. In all likelihood, a glance at the analytical notice 
 (far from perfect, however) of writers on the etymology and 
 history of proper names, given by M. Noel in his Dictionary 
 (Paris, 1806, pp. 93-97), would serve to scare away the most 
 conceited of dabblers from the frontiers of so vast and 
 perplexed a subject. 
 
 In this brief chapter we have no intention of meddling with 
 it, beyond the ensuing brief notification. Eusebius Salverte, in 
 his History of Names, vol. I, section xi, remarks : 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 13 
 
 The most natural way of distinguishing an individual, and the one which 
 connects itself the most with the identity of name and person, is that of 
 giving a name which shall remind others of his most striking peculiarities.* 
 But this mode of naming is only adapted to a people who have hardly 
 reached the lowest point in the [ascending] scale of civilisation, and who, 
 being but one degree removed from the condition of the senseless savages 
 who inhabit Bornou, are still, like them, destitute of any other system of 
 nomenclature. When the community increases, and its general intercourse 
 with other communities becomes more frequent, and more complicated 
 within itself, there are soon too many members to be described as tall or 
 short, dark or light, &c. ; an allusion, therefore, to those features is not 
 sufficiently distinctive. Remarkable deeds, occupations, tastes, habits, 
 virtues, moral or physical defects, supply other names, which men are soon 
 obliged to recognise and adopt. 
 
 This is our chief guiding light in theorizing on the origin of 
 proper names : but induction has established a number of rules, 
 which should be observed in such speculations. One of these 
 is that we should primarily seek for the etymology of a man's 
 surname in the language and among the customs and habits of 
 the country to which he belongs ; unless we possess evidence 
 of his family having immigrated and become naturalized 
 elsewhere. 
 
 Similarity of sound or of literal form, existing between a 
 man's surname and certain words in his native language, is not 
 a safe guide per se: though it may help us to a true inference 
 in connection with biographical or historical details supporting 
 it. There is not the least doubt that men were named from 
 their exceptionable bodily characteristics, as well as from their 
 avocations. 
 
 * From the English version of the Rev. L. H. Mordacque, 1862, vol. i, 
 
14 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 One class of surnames are indicative of a military extraction. 
 
 The most remarkable of these, as illustrating the surname of 
 
 our great bard, are 
 
 WagstafF, 
 
 Wagspear, 
 
 Shakeshaft, 
 Shakelaunce, 
 Breakspear, 
 and Fewtarspear. 
 
 It is scarcely possible to resist the inference, that all these 
 were intended to describe some warlike action : to wag or 
 shake the staff or shaft: to shake the la mice, to break or to 
 fewtar the spear. Tofewtar a spear, meant to place it in the 
 rest. A correspondent in Notes and Queries (5th S. ii. 2), Mr. 
 C. W. Bardsley, calls attention to the occurrence of four of 
 these names : viz., ' Robert Waggestaff,' in Proc. and Ord. 
 Privy Council (indeed this name and Shakeshaft have living 
 representatives), ' Mabill Wag-spere' in the Coldingham Priory 
 Records (Surtees Society), ' Henry Shake-launce ' in the 
 Hundred Rolls, 'Hugh Shake-shaft' in St. Ann's Register, 
 Manchester (date 1744); and he also adds, 'William Shake- 
 spere' in Bury St. Edmunds Wills (Camden Society). Nicholas 
 Breakspear is a notorious example of the fifth name on our 
 list ; and the last, which is obsolete, was once an ordinary 
 surname. 
 
 Dr. Charnock, in Notes and Queries (5th S. ii. 405), 
 ventured to assert, upon his own unsupported authority, that 
 Wagstaff and Fewtarspear were local names. Whether or not 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 15 
 
 any case can be made out for Wagstaff, it is almost certain 
 that Fewtarspear Avas not taken from a place, but was the name 
 of one who fewtar's the spear: and Rev. W. W. Skeat, in Notes 
 and Queries (5th S. ii. 444) quoted from Spenser's Faery Queen 
 
 (iv. 5-45) the line > 
 
 His speare \& feutred, and at him it bore. 
 
 Mr. W. J. Bernhard Smith, in Notes and Queries (5th S. ii. 484), 
 quoted four examples of the expression to feutre the spear from 
 La Mort d'Arthure, vol. ii. c. 94, 95, 98. 
 
 ' Then was King Marke ashamed, and therewith he feutred his speare, 
 and ran against Sir Trian.' 
 
 ' That saw Sir Dinadan, and hee feutred his speare, and ranne to one of 
 Sir Berluse's fellowes.' 
 
 'And then they feutred their spear es, and this Knight came so egerly 
 that he smote downe Sir Ewane alone.' 
 
 ' So Sir Agrawaine feutred his speare, and that other was ready, and 
 smote him downe over his horse taile to the earth.' 
 
 Nothing could be more complete than the parallel between 
 these two names — Fcwtarspeare and Shakespeare. The heavy 
 speare was used in tilting, and was feutred* before the onset : 
 the light speare, or lance, was brandished or shaken, before 
 being hurled. The derivation of these names from the warlike 
 acts described is simple and natural ; and is confirmed by 
 many other surnames, descriptive of distinguishing actions. 
 Just as Armstrong and Strongitharm express the strength of 
 arm of the warrior, armourer, or smith, so do Fewtarspeare, 
 
 * Does this word mean laid in a rest made of felt ; or does it mean 
 fettled, i. e., made ready, set in order ? We leave the philologers to decide 
 the point. It can hardly be related to fewterer, a hound-keeper. 
 
1 6 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 and Shakespeare, indicate the military calling of the ancestor 
 who first bore the name. 
 
 Dr. R. S. Charnock and Dr. Charles Mackay will not allow 
 that the name of our bard originated in this manner. Dr. 
 Charnock puts forward two totally inconsistent derivations, 
 on an equality with which he puts a conjecture occurring 
 previously in Notes and Queries : Dr. Mackay, in The Atkenannn, 
 confidently proposes a fourth ; and another correspondent of 
 Notes and Queries a fifth. Here is the wonderful pentad. 
 
 French Jacques Pierre (or Jakespear). 
 
 Saxon Sigisbert. 
 
 German Schachs-burh (or Isaacsbury). 
 
 Celtic Schacspeir (/. e., Drylegs). 
 
 Florentine Lapus Biragus (or Jacobsbire). 
 
 I. — Jacques Pierre. 
 
 Shakspeare, Derivation of. The name, Shakspeare, no doubt originated 
 in the Norman or French edition of the double-beloved disciple name 
 (Jacques-Pierre, James-Peter, Jakespear) of which it is composed ; the 
 initial J being pronounced s/i, as in many other instances, viz. : 
 
 Shenkins for Jenkins. 
 Sherard — Gerard. 
 Slides — Giles. 
 
 Sherry — ■ Jerry. 
 Sheridan — Jeridan (Old Jerry). 
 Shenstone ■ — Johnstone (Johnson). 
 
 She — Je, in Switzerland, and elsewhere where the 
 
 French language is provincialised, &c. 
 
 With such a self-evident derivation before us, we may therefore dispense 
 with the unlikely reference to the shaking of a spear, which most probably 
 
Shakespeare: the Alan. 17 
 
 had nothing to do with the origin of the name when first invented, being 
 only a suggestion from its accidental English form ; though the idea once 
 started, the name may with some have seemed to be recommended by it. 
 
 Those who consider that Shakspeare originated in spear-shaking rely on 
 ' Break spear,' ' Winspear,' &c, as analogous, these names having a like 
 termination in, and apparent reference to, action with a spear ; but this 
 illustration is of the kind ignotum per ignotius. We do not know enough 
 of Breakspeare, &c, to justify us in saying that their origin was connected 
 with spears ; nor applying any inferences from them to other names. 
 Probably Breakspear (a priest) was in part named after St. Peter, the 
 chief of the apostles, and not after spears. Winspear almost looks like 
 'Owen' or (John?) ' Peter.'— R. T. A.— Notes and Queries, 2nd S. xi. 86. 
 (See also 4th S. x. 516 and xi. 133.) 
 
 II. — Sigisbert. 
 
 We now have little difficulty in tracing the name ' Shakespere,' which 
 I take to be no other than a corruption of Sigisbert, 'renowned for 
 victory' (from Old German sieg, Anglo-Saxon sige, Franc, et Alam sigo, 
 'victory'); thus Sigisbert, Sigsbert, Sigsber, Siksper, Shiksper, Shaksper, 
 Shakspere. I do not find the name Sigubert, but there is Sigibert 
 (whence very many English names have been corrupted) and Sigi-nnerus, 
 as well as Segimerus and Sigimar, and also Siglrmund, whence by con- 
 traction the Italian form Sismondi. If it should be advanced that we have 
 the name 'Wagstaff,' I answer that the last syllable in that and in many 
 other personal names [this must mean, which a/so occurs in many other 
 personal names] has nothing whatever to do with a ' staff,' which I can prove 
 if necessary.- — Dr. R. S. Charnock. — Notes and Queries, 2nd S. ix. 459.* 
 
 * In Notes and Queries (2nd S. x. 15) Mr. R. Ferguson points out 
 (1) that Sigisbert might produce Sicisper, on known etymological analogues ; 
 but Sicisper could hardly produce Shakspere ; (2) that the surname 
 Shakeshaft (taking the place of the disqualified Wagstaff) is still an obstacle 
 to Dr. Charnock's doctrine. To this Dr. Charnock rejoins that he will 
 not allow the shaft, any more than the staff, to mean what it appears to 
 mean. It is either haft, or haved, or something else : but not our shaft. 
 Staff, he asserts, is sted. 
 
 D 
 
1 8 Shakespeare : tJie Man. 
 
 III. — Shachs-burh (Isaacsbury). 
 
 The most reasonable derivation of 'Shakspeare' is that from "Jacques 
 Pierre; but the name would corrupt from Shachs-burh. The German 
 surname Schach would seem to be a corruption of Isaac. Conf. Sach, 
 Sacchi, from Isaac ; Sachs, Sax, from Isaacs. I suppose we may now 
 expect a new pamphlet, ' Was the divine Williams of Jewish descent?' 
 
 Dr. R. S. Charnock. — Notes and Queries (5th S. ii. 405).* 
 
 * From the concluding sentence one might infer that Dr. Charnock 
 was, all through, poking fun at us: for who, except the all-too-learned 
 Doctor himself, would be likely to advocate the Jewish descent of our 
 great bard — who but the discoverer of this Jewish etymology? However, 
 on the whole, we are bound to give him credit for being in earnest : so 
 that we are led to the following conclusions : 
 
 
 
 1. That Dr. Charnock believes Shaks/>ere to be a corruption of 
 
 Sigisbert, 
 
 2. That Dr. Charnock believes Shakspeare may have corrupted 
 
 from Shachs-burh, which he believes to be identical with 
 Isaacsbury. 
 
 3. That Dr. Charnock — holding both these views — believes 
 
 (nevertheless and notwithstanding) that Jacques Pierre is 
 'the most reasonable derivation.' 
 
 The Rev. Walter W. Skeat remarks : 
 
 I do not see why English etymology should be considered a fit subject 
 for such unintelligent guess work. — Notes and Queries, 5th S. ii. 444. 
 
 We do. It is good for Messrs. Skeat, Morris, Ellis, and all other 
 philologers to see, in an extreme case, how utterly foolish is learning without 
 common sense. Indeed Mr. Skeat assents : for he subsequently remarks, 
 of Mr. Sala's speculations on Shambles, ' I think his remarks are extremely 
 valuable, as showing how much it is still the fashion, in questions of English 
 etymology * * * to disregard entirely not only the history of 
 the words we use, but also the history of the sounds composing those 
 words.' — Notes and Queries, 5th S. v. 261. 
 
Shakespeare : the Alan. 19 
 
 IV. — Schacspeir (Dryshanks). 
 
 Mid-England, where Shakespeare was bom and bred, was not so 
 thoroughly Saxonised, either in speech or blood, as the southern and eastern 
 shores of the island. The river Avon has a Gaelic or British name. The 
 Forest of Arden, where he chased the deer, means in Celtic the ' high ' 
 forest. His mother's name was Celtic, if not his father's ; for it is possible 
 and probable that Shakespeare is but a Saxonised corruption of the Celtic 
 Schacspeir, or Chaksper, as his father wrote it,* which signifies — shoe, or 
 seac, dry : and speir shanks, as we have in our day the Saxon names of 
 Sheepshank and Craikshank, suggested by a personal malformation or 
 deformity, in days when surnames were not common, and applied as a 
 nickname to some early ancestor of the family. Not alone Shakespeare, 
 but Spencer, Ben Jonson, Marlow, and other writers of that time employed 
 British words, which were then well understood by the common people, 
 but which have not been explained by modern commentators, for the 
 sufficient reason that they have never looked for the explanations in the 
 only place where it is possible to find them — the language of the unexter- 
 minated Britons, and of the Anglo-Saxon sons of British mothers, who 
 retained in after-life the homely words of the nursery and the workshop. 
 ****** — Dr. Charles Mackay.— Th e Athcmntm, 
 
 2nd October, 1875, p. 437. 
 
 V. — Schacobspire. 
 
 For myself, however, I cling to the hope that our bard's family came 
 from Italy, and that his surname is a corruption of that of the well-known 
 Florentine historian, Lapus Biragus. It is an undoubted fact that Lapus 
 is the Florentine abbreviation of Jacob, or Jacobs ; so that the Anglicised 
 form of his name would be Jacobsbirage, or Jacobsbire [? Jacobsbirg], 
 or Schacobspire, whence Shakspere would very naturally corrupt. I wonder 
 Dr. Charnock missed this.— Jabez. — Notes and Queries, 5th S. v. 352. 
 
 * John Shakespeare apparently could not sign his name. He is only 
 known to us as a marksman. 
 
20 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 Even if we allow that Dr. Charnock was not poking fun 
 at us, we cannot as readily suppose the last correspondent to 
 be in earnest, but rather incline to the belief, that by per- 
 petrating an excess of philological absurdity, he is bent on 
 throwing deserved ridicule on the speculation of his prede- 
 cessor, whose sole object was, apparently, to discredit the 
 simplest and most probable derivation of our bard's surname. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S TRADITIONAL BIRTHDAY.* 
 
 HE birth of Shakespeare is, I believe, universally 
 celebrated on the 23rd April. The tradition on 
 which the celebrants rely is, that he was born on the 
 23rd April, 1564, Old Style; and it is somewhat discomforting 
 to precisians to learn that in Shakespeare's day the New Style 
 (which was not then observed in England) was ten days in 
 advance of the Old ; and that there is now a difference of 
 twelve days between them : so that the 23rd April, O.S., was 
 in 1564 the 3rd May, N.S. ; a date which at the present time 
 corresponds to the 5th May, N.S. It has accordingly been 
 made a question whether we should not celebrate the occasion 
 on either the 3rd or the 5th May, in every year. 
 
 I refer to this question, which springs out of the difference 
 of Style, not for the purpose of attempting to settle it, but 
 simply because it has been so often asserted that Shakespeare 
 
 * From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. x. 
 New Series. Read, May 17, 1871. 
 
■7-7 
 
 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 and Cervantes died on the same day : the fact being that 
 Shakespeare survived Cervantes ten days. 
 
 It is even more discomforting to the punctual keeper of 
 birthdays to find that the tradition of Shakespeare's birth on 
 the 23rd April, 1564, O.S., cannot be traced to any authentic 
 source. The student of Shakespeare-biography soon becomes 
 inured to scepticism. One cherished fact after another falls 
 before the scythe of criticism, till only a small and unimportant 
 residue remains. In sheer despair of ascertaining facts, the 
 majority of biographers have been content to weave a tissue 
 of fictions. The most trustworthy memoirs of the bard are 
 those which support the meagre text by a formidable array of 
 foot-notes, adduced in disproof of nearly everything that forms 
 the very staple of the old biographies. 
 
 Such work is like pulling down a National Gallery to make 
 room for a peep-show. There is, indeed, some little proof of 
 Shakespeare's lineage ; and he himself seems to have been 
 born in the year 1564 at the traditional birthplace. Bat 
 having launched our hero on that 'sea of troubles' which 
 every mortal has to navigate as best he may— some to reach 
 the wished-for haven, some, on shoal or quicksand, like the 
 headstrong man in /Eschylus, to perish unwept, unknown 
 ((k-Xoiwroe, aiWoe) — we lose sight of the poet to obtain a few 
 partial and isolated glimpses of his outer life : but in the hands 
 of biographers, these glimpses become the more shining parts 
 of ' a round and varnished tale.' I, too, can find pleasure in 
 the creations of a semi-prophetic ingenuity ; but I cannot 
 treat those creations as historical facts. 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 Sunt et mihi carmina ; me quoque dicunt 
 Vatem pastores ; sed non ego credulus il lis. 
 
 It would occupy too much time and paper if I were to sift, 
 in detail, the traditional life of Shakespeare : but I may at 
 least indicate a few points, besides that of the birthday, which 
 are repeated by almost every biographer, and which have 
 hitherto remained unsupported by any satisfactory evidence. 
 
 i. We are told that Shakespeare 'had been in his younger 
 yeares a schoolmaster in the country.' We get that scrap of 
 news from conscientious John Aubrey, whose manuscript (circa 
 1680) is in the Ashmolean collection ; and Aubrey says he got 
 it ' from Mr. Beeston.' This was probably William Beeston, 
 Governor of ' the King and Queen's young Company of 
 Players,' who lost his office in 1640, and was then succeeded 
 by D'Avenant. 
 
 2. We are told further that Shakespeare had been formerly 
 'bound apprentice to a butcher' in Stratford, but 'run from 
 his master to London.' We get that from a letter dated the 
 10th April, 1693, written by a Mr. John Dowdall to a Mr. 
 Edward Southwell. Who they were we do not know : but 
 we know that this Mr. Dowdall professed to have obtained 
 it from the Parish Clerk of Stratford, who was at that time 
 over eighty years of age. His testimony, after all, was, 
 probably, but ill-remembered gossip. 
 
 3. We are further told that, in all likelihood, Shakespeare 
 had been to school ; but we have no evidence whatever of the 
 fact. Mr. J. O. Halliwell (Phillipps), in his Life of Shake- 
 speare, 1848, p. 92, makes no question of Shakespeare having 
 
24 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 been educated at the Stratford Grammar School, and naively 
 remarks : 
 
 It would be a very difficult task to identify the exact position of the 
 room in which Shakespeare was educated. 
 
 But it would not be a whit more difficult to identify the exact 
 position in that room of the form on which Shakespeare sat ! 
 It is all one, surely, since we really do not know that he ever 
 attended that school, or any other. If he did go to school, I 
 make no doubt that, according to the estimate of the day, he 
 was accounted a shocking dunce; that many a time and oft he 
 felt the remorseless 'bob' of the village pedagogue, and took 
 his stand on a stool in the corner of the school-room, wearing 
 the ensign of duncedom on his head. If, as Mr. Harness 
 fancifully conjectures, he was lame, he may have contracted 
 his lameness through the caning of his master or the tunding 
 of his elders in the school ! Be that as it may, we may 
 be quite sure that he suffered, if not for his pains, at least 
 for his brains ; just as, at a later period, Goldsmith and 
 Byron were punished as incurable dunces, and the immortal 
 Gauss was flogged for his audacity in solving an arithmetical 
 problem before the rest of the school had taken it down. It 
 is pleasant to indulge in such picturesque imaginings : but 
 imagination is not biography. 
 
 4. As to another tradition in Shakespeare's life, viz., the 
 deer-stealing episode, I am disposed, with De Quincey, to 
 discredit it altogether, and even to treat it as a myth invented 
 to account for Shakespeare's seeming animosity toward Sir 
 Thomas Lucy. My late lamented friend, Charles Holte 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 25 
 
 Bracebridge, following the lead of Malone, has apparently 
 settled the question, and proved that Charlecote Park was 
 not a deer preserve,* and that to have sported at Fulbroke 
 would not have been a breach of the law. The tale, after all, 
 rests on a manuscript of the Rev. William Fulman, who died 
 in 1688. Fulman having bequeathed it to the Rev. Richard 
 Davies, and died, that gentleman recorded the story on the 
 manuscript in his own handwriting. Mr. Davies died in 1708 ; 
 and the manuscript is now in Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 
 Whence he obtained the story he does not tell us. 
 
 5. Lastly, we are told that when Shakespeare did get to 
 London, he earned a livelihood by holding horses at the doors 
 of the theatres. I fear that is a myth too. We get the story 
 from the anonymous author of The Lives of the Poets of 
 Great Britain and Ireland, 1753, and he says he obtained it 
 from a gentleman whose name he does not give.f But after 
 these two anonyms we get on a little better : for anonym the 
 second is said to have heard it from Dr. Newton ; and it is 
 further said that Newton got it from Pope ; and that Pope got 
 it from Rowe ; and that Rowe got it — with a mass of similar 
 rubbish — from Betterton, the actor ; and that Betterton got it 
 
 * Since writing this, Mr. J. O. Phillipps has called my attention to a 
 curious entry in The Egerton Papers, 4to, 1840, p. 355, where, among the 
 'List of Presents at Harefield,' in the year 44 Elizabeth, we read : 
 
 vj s viij d Bucke, j Sir Tho. Lucie. 
 
 taking that for what it is worth, it fails to disprove Mr. Bracebridge's 
 conclusion. 
 
 t Said by some to have been Dr. Johnson, because Shiels, who wrote 
 the greater part of the Lives for Cibber, was Dr. Johnson's amanuensis. 
 
 E 
 
26 Shakespeare : tJic Man. 
 
 from Sir William D'Avenant : but there we lose the scent. Of 
 such hearsays is our life of Shakespeare manufactured. 
 
 After this somewhat long exordium, I turn to the principal 
 subject of this paper. Our authorities for the dates of Shake- 
 speare's birth and death are these : (i) the register of his 
 baptism ; (2) the register of his burial; (3) the inscription on 
 the tablet under his bust in the chancel of Stratford Church ; 
 (4) some manuscript notes of Oldys' on Langbaine's Account 
 of tJie English Dramatic Pods, 1691 ; and (5) manuscript 
 notes by the Rev. Joseph Greene, master of the Grammar 
 School at Stratford, and some extracts from the Stratford 
 register. I give exact copies of all these. 
 
 1. — Extract from Register of Baptisms at Stratford Church : 
 1564 
 
 April 
 26 Gulielmus films Johannes Shakspere. 
 
 2. — Extract from Register of Burials at Stratford Church : 
 
 1616 
 
 April 
 25 Will Shakspere, Gent. 
 
 3. — Inscription on the tablet under Shakespeare's bust (in 
 
 the lower right-hand corner): 
 
 obiit ano do" 1616 
 ,<etatis, 53. die 23 ap. 
 
 4. — Certain manuscript notes on Langbaine (1691), by 
 
 Oldys (in the British Museum) : 
 
 Obiit An. Dom. 1616 
 See the Sculpture and 53 
 
 Inscription in Dugdale's jEt. 53. die 23 Apr. 1563 
 
 Warwickshire. # * # * 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 27 
 
 1 have now no more to do, but 
 to close up all, with an account 
 of his Death ; which was on the 
 Q 23rd of April, 1616.* 
 
 5. — Manuscript notes, in the handwriting of Rev. Joseph 
 Greene, on some extracts from the Stratford Register : 
 
 ' Died at the age of 53 ' (on the burial item, as in 2). 
 'Born April 23, 1564' (on the baptismal item, as in 1). 
 
 Boswell, the son of Johnson's biographer, who completed 
 Malone's life of Shakespeare, doubtless had most of these 
 materials before him when he drew the following inference : 
 
 He died on his birthday, April 23rd, 1616, and had exactly completed 
 his fifty-second year. 
 
 But this is not in strict accord with the authorities. If we 
 accept the testimony of the insculpture, we need not disallow 
 that of Greene's second note. That Shakespeare was born on 
 or before the 26th April, 1564, we must allow; for he was 
 baptized on that day ; and we can only bring the insculpture 
 into disagreement with the tradition by supposing that Shake- 
 speare was born on the 24th, the 25th, or the 26th : then, 
 indeed, he would have been still in his fifty-second year when 
 he died. 
 
 The use which has been made of Oldys' notes is a curious 
 
 * The black ink represents Langbaine's text, the red letter Oldys' notes 
 and lines. The mark opposite the last underwritten line may be the figure 2 
 or the letter Q. I think it is the latter, and that its function is to express 
 his doubt as to the relative date. 
 
28 SJiakcspcarc : tJic Man. 
 
 and instructive example of the untrustworthiness of critics. As 
 far as my search has extended, all the biographers who cite 
 Oldys do not fairly represent him. The late Mr. Bolton Corney 
 remarks : 
 
 Oldys had much experience in biographic composition ; but he asserts 
 that Shakespeare was born on the 23rd April, 1563, and that he died at the 
 age of 53, A. D. 1616. lie converts the day and month of the decease of 
 Shakespeare into the day and month of his birth ; contradicts the parish 
 register as to the year of his birth ; and contradicts the monumental inscrip- 
 tion as to his age at the time of his decease. The assertions of Oldys as 
 testified by his handwriting, have no other basis than his own miscon- 
 ceptions. — Notes and Queries, 3rd S., v. 225. 
 
 It is a fact that in his manuscript notes for a life of 
 Shakespeare (written on the margins of the Museum copy 
 of Langbaine) Oldys assigns April 23, 1563, as the day of 
 Shakespeare's birth, a mistake which evidently arose from his 
 subtraction of 53 from 16 16 : but he certainly had some 
 doubt on the subject : for he queries the asserted day of 
 Shakespeare's death. Oldys' method of finding the year of his 
 birth is admissible only on the assumption that he knew that 
 Shakespeare was born on one of the three days intervening 
 between the 23rd and the 27th April. If any inference is to 
 be drawn from Oldys' first note, it must be based on the 
 assumption that, by the subtraction of 53 from 1616, he was 
 observing an unexceptionable method, and in that case the 
 inference would be that Shakespeare was believed by him to 
 have been born on the 24th or 25th, or even possibly on the 
 day of his baptism, the 26th April. Clearly he could not have 
 been born later in the month : and if he were born as early as 
 
Shakespeare: the Man, 29 
 
 the 23rd April, in the year 1563, he would have entered his 
 54th year when he died ; just as he must have been born on 
 or before the 23rd April, in the year 1564, in order that his 
 death might take place in his 53rd year. It is plain to us 
 that Oldys did not clearly perceive these simple arithmetical 
 relations : and I dare say they have puzzled many other 
 educated persons. Anyhow, Mr. Corney must have failed to 
 see his way through these various details of date, or he would 
 not have categorically committed himself to the so-called 
 Argument on the assumed birthday of Shakespeare* 
 
 Mr. Bolton Corney's argument is thus epitomized by 
 himself : 
 
 As Shakespeare died on the 23rd April [1616], in his ftfty-tAird year, 
 he must have been born before the 2yd April, 1564. 
 
 This happens to be just one of those precise categorical 
 assertions which admits of exact refutation. It is false in the 
 same sense in which any arithmetical calculation is false. For 
 instance, if it were demanded of me how many days elapse 
 between the first and last days of January, and I should 
 answer, ' there must be less than thirty days,' I am asserting a 
 necessity which follows from something in my thoughts, and 
 
 * Mr. Corney's Argument was in 1864 'reduced to shape' in a 
 pamphlet of 16 pp. ; where he writes, ' So Master Oldys, in some non-lucid 
 moment, underscores die 23 Apr. — subtracts 53 from 1616 — and writes 
 down 1563. He assumes that the words anno cetatis 53 are equivalent to 
 vixit aiuws 53, and that the words die 23 Aprilis refer to anno cetatis, 
 instead of being the object of Obiit. Such is the process, never before 
 described, by which the birthday of Shakspere was discovered.'— Mr. 
 Corney's Tract, p. 7. 
 
30 Shakespeare: t/ie Man. 
 
 not from the mere terms of the question. That assertion is 
 therefore false. Mr. Bolton Corney's assertion is just as 
 false. 
 
 It is also as demonstrably false : and herein lies the only 
 difficulty with which I have to contend in this refutation. I 
 am sorry to say, that, according to my experience, the general 
 mind is averse from demonstration. If a conclusion rest on 
 probable evidence, or on feeling only, and people are invited 
 to entertain it, and exhorted to embrace it, there are reasonable 
 hopes that it will find many adherents, upon whose minds it 
 has wrought to the extent of producing an impression in its 
 favour, which I cannot describe as either belief or faith without 
 doing violence to philosophical language. But if, on the con- 
 trary, the conclusion advanced be supported by an iron chain of 
 demonstration, the general mind, either grudging the exertion 
 of thought necessary to master the proof, or flying off under 
 the influence of anger from what seems an invasion of its 
 freedom, a restriction on its maundering habits, will not away 
 with it.* 
 
 * This position was curiously, and to me very interestingly, exemplified 
 on an occasion when I had to show the rotation of the moon on her 
 axis, in opposition to the crotchet of the late Mr. Jellinger Symons. I 
 reduced my premises to machinery, and exhibited the conclusion by the 
 motion of its parts. I had a model of the earth, into which (merely for 
 convenience) I had inserted an iron rod, to which a ball, representing the 
 moon, was attached. When the latter was made to circulate around the 
 former, the former exhibited the phenomenon (admitted by both parties to 
 the controversy) of one unvarying hemisphere of the moon being constantly 
 presented to the earth. But, firmly fixed on the spindle or axis of the 
 moon (which was perpendicular to the iron rod, and worked freely in it), 
 was also a disc divided at the edge into degrees and numbered, and an 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 31 
 
 The simple denial, or contradictory, of Mr. Corney's 
 
 assertion is this : 
 
 If Shakespere died on the 23rd April [1616], in his fifty-third year, he 
 may have been born on the 23rd April, 1564. 
 
 This is the proposition I undertake to establish. 
 
 But before doing so, I wish it to be understood that by the 
 
 assumption of the most unquestionable premises I can prove 
 
 the direct opposite, or contrary, of Mr. Corney's assertion, viz. : 
 
 If Shakespeare was born on the 23rd April [1564], he must have 
 entered his fifty-third year on the 23rd April, 1616. 
 
 Let me consider this point first. 
 
 A pretty extensive adduction of authorities on the question, 
 ' When does a person complete the first, second, third, etc., 
 year of his age % ' justifies me in the statement that the late 
 Professor De Morgan was the only writer (save, perhaps, 
 Mr. Corney) who ever asserted that the duration of a year is 
 prolonged beyond the vigil of its anniversary. In an article 
 
 index, or pointer, with an arrow head, was inserted into the side of the 
 moon, and thus pointed out the angular amount by which the relative 
 positions of the moon and the disc might be changed. By means of an 
 unnecessary mechanical contrivance, for which I might very well have sub- 
 stituted a weight, this disc was kept constantly in one position with respect 
 to the frame of the machine. By turning a handle the moon was made to 
 revolve, and the index showed the revolution of the moon on the spindle. 
 'This motion is either real or apparent; if it be apparent, it must be the 
 disc which revolves on the moon's axis. But we have "ocular demonstra- 
 tion" that the disc does not so revolve.' There was not, I am certain, a 
 single person in the lecture-room who did not feel, in some degree, the 
 rigour of the proof; and I shall never forget the howl of indignation with 
 which this was greeted. The great majority showed me, in a most unmis- 
 takable manner, that such an interference with their liberty of mind was 
 not to be tolerated for an instant. 
 
32 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 contributed to the Companion to the Almanac, 1850, the 
 learned professor wrote : 
 
 The anniversary of birth used to be celebrated as the first day of a new 
 year ; it is now considered as the completion of an old one. 
 
 To this Mr. A. E. Brae, in his very able work, An 
 Examination of the Century Question, 1850 (p. 25), replied : 
 
 To assert, however, that in this respect moderns differ from the 
 ancients, is a libel upon moderns which they certainly do not deserve. 
 There is no difference in respect of birthday usage. It is with moderns, as 
 it was with ancients, the celebration of renewed birth ; and the very 
 meaning of the expression ' New Year's Day,' the anniversary of the year, 
 is of itself sufficient to show that Mr. De Morgan's modern instances are as 
 incorrect as his ancient inferences. 
 
 This seems to me to be undoubtedly correct. Yet, even 
 adopting Professor De Morgan's view, the usage of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would decidedly place 
 Shakespeare in his 53rd year on the day of his death, sup- 
 posing it to have been also the 52nd anniversary of his birth, 
 or, counting the birth itself as one, the 53rd event.* 
 
 * According to the probabilities of the case, an innumerable number of 
 persons would be found to have died on the anniversary of birth, and it is, 
 therefore, not surprising that a considerable number of eminent persons are 
 known to have done so. John Williams, Archbishop of York, died on his 
 birthday, March 25th, in the 69th year of his age : 'anno atatis 68° expletoe' 
 Hackefs Life of Archbishop Williams, 1693, fo. p. 229. He was born 
 March 25th, in 15S2, and therefore died on March 25th, 1650. Archdeacon 
 Sandford (of Coventry) died on his birthday, March 22nd, in the 73rd year 
 of his age; and as he was born March 22nd, 1801, he must have died on 
 March 22nd, 1873. The first Sir Henry Holland died on his birthday, 
 October 27th, in the 87th year of his age. He was born October 27th, 
 1787; and therefore died October 27th, 1873. These examples sufficiently 
 illustrate our position, though many more might readily be adduced. 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 33 
 
 The fact that on every anniversary of a birth a new year 
 has already been entered upon, is evident in the very attempt 
 to deny it ; for, otherwise, in the first year there would be two 
 birthdays, the real one and its anniversary. In order that 
 every year may have its new year's day — i. e., that the first 
 year may have its birthday, and every succeeding year its 
 anniversary, that anniversary, or new year's day, must be the 
 first day of each year. Accordingly, it is quite unquestionable 
 that, supposing Shakespeare to have been born on the 23rd 
 April, 1564, he was already in his fifty-third year at any time 
 on the 23rd April, 161 6. This proof is indeed sans replique, 
 unless we allow a division of days. I am not aware of Mr. 
 Corney having taken refuge in the doctrine that in the 
 inscription on Shakespeare's tomb, the day mentioned is not 
 a unit, but a number (as twenty-four hours) susceptible of 
 division, one part of which might be counted in one year, 
 and the other part in another. But as this is the only resource 
 left to any one attempting the refutation of my position, I 
 will now address myself to that point. 
 
 If the critical exactness of determining such fractions of 
 days be attempted, it must take into its account the fraction 
 by which the year exceeds 365 days ; for by so much must 
 the hour of birth be advanced in each succeeding year, and 
 retrenched again in leap year. The practical effect of this 
 would be that no two birth-epochs would harmonize, and a 
 calculation, something like that of a horoscope, would have 
 to be entered into for every successive anniversary of birth ! 
 Need I add, that there is not a particle of evidence on record 
 
 F 
 
34 Shakespeare : the J fan. 
 
 that such critical exactness in determining births was ever 
 attempted except for astrological purposes. 
 
 The establishment of the contrary position, 
 
 If Shakespeare was born on the 23rd April, 1564, he must have 
 entered his fifty-third year on the 23rd April, 16 1 6, 
 
 logically includes the contradictory of Mr. Corney's thesis. 
 But in order to establish that contradictory independently of 
 the narrower proposition, it is only requisite to exhibit one 
 or more alternatives to the position which he asserts as a 
 necessary inference, i. e., to show that in certain cases, 
 
 If Shakespeare died on the 23rd April, 1616, in his fifty-third year, 
 he may have been born on the 23rd April, 1564. 
 
 The following are three of such alternatives : 
 
 I. If the writer of the inscription on the tomb adopted 
 the usage of his nation and his time, counting the anniversary 
 of Shakespeare's birth as the first day of a new year — 
 disallowing fractions of days. 
 
 II. If he did so — yet allowed a division of the day, and 
 knew that Shakespeare's birth took place in the earlier and his 
 death in the later portion of the day. 
 
 III. If the inscription, though good evidence for the date 
 of Shakespeare's death, is not (in the absence of an exact date) 
 to be regarded as good evidence for the date of his birth — a 
 view by no means absurd, since the term year of age (cetate sua) 
 is open to such uncertain interpretation, and so often the 
 record of mere guesswork or repute. 
 
 In any one of these cases we may accept both the 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 35 
 
 traditional birthday of Shakespeare and the day of his death 
 as recorded on the monumental tablet. Mr. Bolton Corney's 
 argument would require that each of these cases should be 
 severally disallowed. He simply ignored them all ! * 
 
 * These strictures on Mr. Corney's pamphlet were written in his 
 lifetime, and intended to invite his counter-criticism. He died September 10, 
 1870, after this paper was promised. As printed in the Transactions of 
 the Royal Society of Literature, it contains some passages unjustly taxing 
 Mr. Corney with inaccuracy in quoting Oldys' notes. I was misled by the 
 collation of a friend in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum, 
 who strangely overlooked some of the notes of Oldys. 
 
2,6 Sliakcspcarc : the Man. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT ON CERTAIN ANNOTATED COPIES OF 
 
 LANGBAINE. 
 
 The following valuable note is from Notes and Queries, 3rd Series, Feb. 1, 
 1862, pp. 82-83. 
 
 " The most valuable and curious work left by Oldys is an annotated copy 
 of Gerard Langbaine's Account of the Early Dramatick Poets, Oxford, 1691, 
 Svo. It has already been stated {ante, p. 3), that the first copy of this work 
 with his notes had passed into the hands of Mr. Coxeter. After Mr. 
 Coxeter's death his books and manuscripts were purchased by Osborne, 
 and were offered for sale in 1748. The book in question, No. 10,131 in 
 Osborne's Catalogue for that year, was purchased either by Theophilus 
 Cibber, or by some bookseller who afterwards put it into his hands; and 
 from the notes of Oldys and Coxeter, the principal part of the additional 
 matter furnished by Cibber (or rather by Shiels) for the Lives of the Poets, 
 five vols. l2mo, 1753, was unquestionably derived. Mr. Coxeter's manuscripts 
 are mentioned in the title-page, to whom, therefore, the exclusive credit of 
 the work is assigned, but which really belongs as much, if not more, to 
 Oldys. 
 
 Oldys purchased a second Langbaine in 1727, and continued to annotate 
 it till the latest period of his life. This copy was purchased by Dr. Birch, 
 who bequeathed it to the British Museum. [Press Mark, C. 28, g. 1.] 
 It is not interleaved, but filled with notes written in the margins and 
 between the lines in an extremely small hand. Birch granted the loan of 
 it to Dr. Percy, Bishop of Dromore, who made a transcript of the notes 
 into an interleaved copy of Langbaine in four vols. 8vo. It was from 
 Bishop Percy's copy that Mr. Joseph Haslewood annotated his Langbaine. 
 He says, ' His Lordship was so kind as to favour me with the loan of this 
 book, with a generous permission to make what use of it I might think 
 proper; and when he went to Ireland, he left it with Mr. Nichols, for the 
 benefit of the new edition of the Tatter, Spectator, and Guardian, with 
 Notes and Illustrations, to which work his Lordship was by his other 
 valuable communications a very beneficial contributor.' 
 
 George Steevens likewise made a transcript of Oldys's notes into a copy 
 of Langbaine, which at the sale of his library in 1800, was purchased by 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 Richardson, the bookseller, for £g, who resold it to Sir S. Egerton Brydges 
 in the same year for fourteen guineas. At the sale of the Lee Priory Library 
 in 1834, it fell into the hands of Thorpe, of Bedford Street, Covent Garden, 
 from whom the late Dr. Bliss purchased it on February 7, 1835, for nine 
 guineas. It is now in the British Museum. 
 
 Malone, Isaac Reed, and the Rev. Rogers Ruding, also made transcripts 
 of Oldys's notes. The Malone transcript is now at Oxford ; but Ruding's 
 has not been traced. In a cutting from one of Thorpe's catalogues, preserved 
 by Dr. Bliss, it is stated to be in two volumes, the price £$. 5s. ; that 
 Ruding transcribed them in 1784, and that his additions are very numerous. 
 In Heber's Catalogue (part iv, No. 12 15) is another copy of Langbaine, 
 with very important additions by Oldys, Steevens, and Reed. This was 
 purchased by Rodd for £4. 4s. In 1845, Edward Vernon Utterson had an 
 interleaved Langbaine. What became of it?" 
 
 It is more important to inquire what has become of the copy of Langbaine 
 first annotated by Oldys. After making various inquiries in London and 
 Oxford, I am still unable to trace it. — C. M. I. 
 
 313780 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE WORKS ATTRIBUTED TO 
 
 SHAKESPEARE.* 
 
 NE does not look for popularity in the attempt to 
 disturb a popular belief. One may, nevertheless, 
 bespeak a favourable consideration for the most 
 startling views, if only they are supported by facts, and their 
 advocacy is addressed to a competent tribunal. 
 
 An American essayist, who speaks from an intellectual 
 eminence which justifies the speculation, asserts — 
 
 that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man's 
 work, but came by wide social labour, when a thousand wrought like one, 
 sharing the same impulse, f 
 
 He points to the English Bible, the Anglican Ritual, and 
 the Dramas of Shakespeare, as examples in point. He remem- 
 bers, and so must we, that Shakespeare did not write for fame ; 
 
 * From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, Vol. IX, 
 new series. Read, January 22, 1868. 
 
 f Representative Men, by R. W. Emerson. A like passage occurs in 
 his masterly Essay on Compensation, Essays, 1 841, p. 108. 
 
SJiakcspcare : the Man. 39 
 
 that he claimed no property in his published works, and did 
 not assert their originality. If their whole merit has been 
 assigned to him, it was by no act of his. They were produced 
 for representation, not for literature, and their producer was 
 rather a showman than an author. 
 
 The time may come when every personal interest about the 
 man will be forgotten, when the schoolboys of an American 
 empire will confound the man with his works, as schoolboys 
 nowadays are said sometimes to look upon Euclid as the name 
 of a science. When that time comes, the reading public will 
 be no more astonished by the assertion that Lord Bacon 
 wrote Shakespeare than we are by the assertion that Babrius 
 wrote y£sop. But at present we have not wholly identified 
 Shakespeare with ' his booke ; ' and when Lady Bab, in 
 Garrick's farce, High Life below Stairs, asks ' Did you never 
 read Shikspur 1 ' and Mrs. Kitty replies, ' Shikspur 1 Shikspur 1 
 Who wrote it 1 ' the humour is still as fresh as the day when 
 it was written. 
 
 Before seriously entertaining Lady Bab's question, we must 
 determine in what sense it is to be understood. If the inquiry 
 be after some one man who originated, designed, and executed 
 the various dramas of the ' booke,' let us consider whether 
 such a requirement would be reasonable in the case of any 
 great work of art. Was Tennyson the sole author of those 
 Arthurian Romances which have won for him a corner of 
 Spenser's footstool 1 Not at all. The legends and materials 
 were made to his hand. Yet, in the truest sense, Tennyson 
 may be called the author of the Idylls of the King, for he 
 
40 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 re-imagined and re-created them, without infringing the rights 
 of another. In this sense, then, was the actor, William 
 Shakespeare, the author of The Merry Wives of Windsor, The 
 Taming of the Shrew, The Life and Death of King John, The 
 Life of King Henry V, the First, Second, and Third Parts of 
 King Henry VL, The Life of King Henry VLLI, Titus Andronicus, 
 Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, Hamlet, and Pericles ? It 
 seems not. You may suppose I have not selected those thir- 
 teen plays at random. The fact is, that not one of them is 
 free from the suspicion that another hand has contributed to 
 that fame which has been appropriated to Shakespeare alone. 
 
 We are here introduced into the thick of some of the 
 most intricate problems of dramatic criticism, which I can 
 only glance at now. Among the waifs which the wreck of 
 the early Elizabethan drama has bequeathed to us are four 
 plays bearing the following names : The Troublesome Reigne of 
 John, King of England, 4 to, 1591, 1611, 1622; The First 
 Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of 
 Yorke and Lancaster, small 8vo, 1594, and 4to, 1600 and 
 1619; The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, 4to, 1595, 
 1600, and 16 19; and A Pleasant Conceited Historic called the 
 Taming of a Shrew, 4to, 1594, 1596, and 1607. 
 
 These respectively correspond to four of the plays attributed 
 to Shakespeare, viz., The Life and Death of King John, the 
 Second and Third Parts of King Henry VL, and The Taming of 
 the Shrew. 
 
 It is nearly certain that Shakespeare did not write a line of 
 the old King John, on which he constructed his play so named. 
 
Sliakcspeare : the Man. 41 
 
 It is equally certain that he had no hand whatever in the old 
 Taming of a Shreiv, which we have every reason for believing 
 to have been written by Christopher Marlow ; but, on the other 
 hand, it would be a rash inference that Shakespeare had used 
 this play in the composition of his own. Some day the knot, 
 perhaps, will be untied ; and then we shall probably see Charles 
 Knight's conjecture established by the discovery of evidence 
 that Marlow and Shakespeare used one and the same original 
 in the composition of their dramas. I wish it were possible 
 for us to see our way as clearly in dealing with The First Part 
 of the Contention and The True Tragedie. They seem to have 
 been originally the joint compositions of Marlow and Robert 
 Greene, not improbably touched by Shakespeare subsequently, 
 and exhibiting those touches in the edition of 16 19; anyhow, 
 Marlow's hand is unmistakably apparent in both plays. The 
 following examples are adduced in support of this view by 
 Mr. Halliwell in his edition of the First Sketches of the Second 
 and Third Farts of Henry VI, printed for the Shakespeare 
 Society, 1843 : 
 
 The wild O'Neile, my lord, is up in The wild O'Neile, with swarms of 
 
 arms, Irish kernes, 
 
 With troupes of Irish kernes, that Lives uncontroul'd within the En- 
 
 uncontroul'd glish pale. 
 
 Do plant themselves within the Marlow's Edward II. 
 
 English pale. 
 
 First Part of the Contention. 
 
 This villain, being but captain of I remember, Ismena, that Epi- 
 
 a pinnace, threatens more plagues cuius measured every man's dyet by 
 
 G 
 
42 
 
 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 than Abradas, the great Macedo- 
 nian pirate. — Ibid. 
 
 his own principles, and Abradas, 
 the great Macedonian pirat, thought 
 every one had a letter of mart that 
 bare sayles in the ocean. 
 
 Green's Penelope's Web, 1588. 
 
 What, will the aspiring blood of But when the imperial lion's flesh 
 
 Lancaster is gored, 
 
 Sink into the ground ? I thought He rends and tears it with his 
 it would have mounted. wrathful paw, 
 
 The True Tragedie. And highly scorning, that the lowly 
 
 earth 
 Should drink his blood, mounts up 
 to the air. 
 
 Marlow's Edward II. 
 
 Stern Falconbridge commands the 
 narrow seas. — Ibid. 
 
 The haughty Dane commands the 
 narrow seas. — Ibid. 
 
 I am, however, far from sure that the argument founded on 
 these and other similarities between the Contention and the 
 works of Marlow and of Greene, would not go to prove that 
 some of the very additions to the old plays, in the Second and 
 Third Parts of King Henry VI, with which Shakespeare is 
 credited, were the work of one or other of his contemporaries. 
 I give one example to show what I mean. In The Second Part 
 of Henry VI, i. 3, occurs the line : 
 
 She bears a duke's revenues on her back. 
 
 In the 4to, 16 19, of The First Part of the Contention, the 
 line stands thus : 
 
 She bears a duke's whole revenues on her back ; 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 43 
 
 but it is wholly wanting in the earlier editions; and it is this 
 edition of 16 19, which Mr. Hallivvell regards as an intermediate 
 version, presenting Shakespeare's first draft of The Second 
 Part of Henry VI Now this very addition is almost wholly 
 the property of Marlow, for in his Edward II, we read — 
 
 He wears a lord's revenue on his back. 
 
 Here then is an intricate problem. Was Marlow the 
 amender of the old play of The First Part of the Contention 1 
 and was Shakespeare a purloiner from Marlow? Perhaps neither. 
 
 In order to show in what manner Shakespeare availed 
 himself of the old plays of The First Part of the Contention, 
 and The True Tragedie, I will adduce five passages from 
 these plays, and place in juxtaposition with them the cor- 
 responding passages in The Second and Third Parts of King 
 Henry VI. Further, with a view to afford the reader the 
 means of appreciating the true character of the quarto edition 
 of 1619, which contains both parts of the Contention, I have 
 added the corresponding passages in this edition, which Mr. 
 Halliwell regards as 'an intermediate composition.' I need 
 only add that, with the exception of a passage containing 
 the genealogy of the Duke of York, there is none other 
 which countenances, or at least supports, Mr. Halliwell's view. 
 The other variations are (as it seems to me) of no greater 
 significance than the general run of various readings in the 
 early quarto editions of Shakespeare, and which assuredly 
 have no source more respectable than the blunders of printers 
 and copyists, and the tinkerings of players. 
 
44 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 (l.) Humphrey. This night when I was laid in bed, I dreampt that 
 This my staffe mine Office badge in Court, 
 Was broke in two, and on the ends were plac'd, 
 The heads of the Cardinall of Winchester, 
 And William de la Poule first Duke of Suffolke. 
 
 The First Part of the Contention, 4to, 1594. 
 
 This night when I was laid in bed, I dreamt 
 That this my staffe, mine office badge in Court, 
 Was broke in twaine, by whom I cannot gesse : 
 But as I thinke by the Cardinall. What it bodes 
 God knowes ; and on the ends were plac'd 
 The heads of Edmund Duke of Somerset, 
 And William de la Pole first Duke of Suffolke. 
 
 Ibid., 4to, 16 19. 
 
 Methought this staff, mine office-badge in Court, 
 
 Was broke in twain ; by whom I have forgot, 
 
 But as I think, it was by the Cardinal ; 
 
 And on the pieces of the broken wand 
 
 Were placed the heads of Edmund Duke of Somerset, 
 
 And William de la Pole, first Duke of Suffolk. 
 
 This was my dream : what it doth bode, God knows. 
 
 II Henry VI, folio, 1623. 
 
 (2.) Elnor. lie come after you, for I cannot go before, 
 But ere it be long, He go before them all, 
 Despight of all that seeke to crosse me thus, 
 
 The First Fart of the Contention, 4to, 1594. 
 
 He come after you, for I cannot go before, 
 As long as Gloster beares this base and humble minde : 
 Were I a man, and Protector as he is, 
 I'de reach to th' crowne, or make some hop headlesse. 
 And being but a woman, ile not behinde 
 
 For playing of my part, in spite of all that seek to crosse me thus 
 
 Ibid., 4to, 16 19. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 45 
 
 Yes, my good lord, I'll follow presently, 
 
 Follow I must ; I cannot go before, 
 
 While Gloucester bears this base and humble mind. 
 
 Were I a man, a duke, and next of blood, 
 
 I would remove these tedious stumbling-blocks • 
 
 And smooth my way upon their headless necks ; 
 
 And being a woman, I will not be slack 
 
 To play my part in Fortune's pageant. 
 
 II Henry VI, folio, 1623. 
 
 (3.) And his proud wife, high minded Elanor, 
 
 That ruffles it with such a troupe of Ladies, 
 
 As strangers in the Court takes her for the Queene. 
 
 The First Part of the Contention, 4to, 1 594. 
 
 And his proud wife, high minded Elanor, 
 That ruffles it with such a troupe of Ladies, 
 As strangers in Court take her for the Queene ; 
 She beares a Dukes whole revennewes on her backe. 
 
 Ibid., 4to, 16 19. 
 
 Not all these lords do vex me half so much 
 As that proud dame, the lord protector's wife. 
 She sweeps it through the court with troops of ladies, 
 More like an empress than Duke Humphrey's wife : 
 Strangers in the court do take her for the queen : 
 She bears a duke's revennues upon her back, etc. 
 
 II Henry VI, folio, 1623. 
 (4.) I have seduste a headstrong Kentishman, 
 John Cade of Ashford, 
 Under the title of Sir John Mortemer, 
 To raise commotion, etc. 
 
 The First Part of the Contention, 4to, 1594. 
 
 I have seduste a headstrong Kentish man, 
 
 John Cade of Ashford, 
 
 Under the title of Sir John Mortimer, 
 
 (For he is like him every kinde of way) 
 
 To raise commotion, etc. Ibid., 4to, 16 19. 
 
46 Shakespeare : the Alan. 
 
 I have seduced a headstrong Kentish man, 
 John Cade of Ashford, 
 To make commotion, as full well he can, 
 Under the title of John Mortimer. 
 
 II Henry VI, folio, 1623. 
 
 (5.) Clarence beware, thou keptst me from the light, 
 But I will sort a pitchie daie for thee. 
 For I will buz abroad such prophesies, 
 As Edward shall be fearefull of his life, 
 And then to purge his feare, He be thy death. 
 Henry and his sonne are gone, thou Clarence next, 
 And one by one I will dispatch the rest, 
 Counting my selfe but bad, till I be best. 
 He drag thy bodie in another roome, 
 And triumph Henry in thy daie of doome. 
 
 The True Tragedie, 1595. 
 
 Clarence beware, thou keptst me from the light, 
 But I will sort a pitchie daie for thee. 
 For I will buz abroad such prophesies, 
 Under pretence of outward seeming ill, 
 As Edward shall be fearefull of his life, 
 And then to purge his feare, He be thy death. 
 King Henry, and the Prince his sonne are gone, 
 And Clarence thou art next to follow them, 
 So by one and one dispatching all the rest, 
 Counting my selfe but bad, till I be best. 
 He drag thy bodie in another roome, 
 And triumph Henry in thy daie of doom. 
 
 Ibid., 1 6 19. 
 
 Clarence, beware; thou keep'st me from the light: 
 But I will sort a pitchy day for thee ; 
 For I will buz abroad such prophecies 
 That Edward shall be fearfull of his life, 
 And then, to purge his feare, I'll be his death. 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 47 
 
 King Henry and the prince his son are gone : 
 Clarence thy turn is next, and then the rest, 
 Counting myself but bad till I be best. 
 I'll throw thy body in another room 
 And triumph, Henry, in thy day of doom. 
 
 Ill Henry VI, folio, 1623. 
 
 If Shakespeare had no hand in these two old plays, it is 
 demonstrable that more than four-sevenths of those plays were 
 borrowed, and appropriated verbatim, by Shakespeare, in the 
 composition of the Second and Third Paris of King Henry VI 
 Mr. Halliwell, however, thinks it not unlikely that they are 
 both rifacimenti by Shakespeare of older plays {The First 
 Sketches of II and III Henry VI, edited by Halliwell for the 
 Shakespeare Society, 1843, introd., p. 19), a conjecture which 
 is unhappily unsupported by evidence, or it would relieve 
 Shakespeare from the charge of appropriation. But we need 
 not, I think, be very nice on that score, when we consider the 
 large levies he made on contemporary prose literature.* I 
 ought to add that we know of no old play corresponding to 
 The First Part of King Henry VI This default, considered 
 in conjunction with the poverty of that performance, might 
 incline one to think that it owes as little to the genius of 
 
 * Compare, for example, Shakespeare's Roman plays with North's 
 Plutarch: take Coriolanns as a sample: or, better still, perhaps, consult 
 Florio's Montaigne, and see how Shakespeare could appropriate a long and 
 curious passage. In all such cases he made no attempt to stamp his own 
 originality on what he borrowed; he simply touched it up, so as to make it 
 serviceable to his needs, and fall into fair blank verse. In this art he 
 certainly did not surpass Byron or Coleridge. 
 
48 Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 Shakespeare as do The First Part of the Contention and The 
 True Tragedie* 
 
 These four (or five) plays form a class by themselves. Into 
 another class fall four other plays, which are almost universally 
 received and always cited as first sketches by Shakespeare : 
 these are as follows : An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo 
 and Juliet, 4to, 1597; The Chronicle Historie of Henry the 
 Fifth, 4to, 1600, 1602, and 1608; A most pleasaunt and excel- 
 lent conceited Comedie of Syr John Falstajfe, and the Merry 
 Wives of Windsor, 4to, 1602, and 1619; and The Tragicall 
 Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 4to, 1603. 
 
 These respectively correspond to Romeo and Juliet, The 
 Life of King Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and 
 Hamlet, of the folio collections. But though I have, for con- 
 venience, assigned these four sketches to one class, no two of 
 them can be said to possess common characteristics. In the 
 first place, I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare had the 
 lion's share in the composition of the old Romeo and Juliet, 
 and the old Hamlet bears abundant internal evidence of having 
 been printed from a manuscript copy which had been fabricated 
 out of the odds and ends furnished by an unskilled reporter. 
 This play was entered on the books of the Stationers' Com- 
 pany in 1602, and so may have been acted some years before. 
 It seems, however, not improbable that it was a rifacimento of 
 
 * Readers may consult with advantage the Harness Prize Essay for 
 1874, by Mr. G. L. Rives, which deals exclusively with the authorship of 
 the three parts of Henry VI. His statements, however, contain some inac- 
 curacies which endanger the soundness of his conclusions. 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 49 
 
 an older play; that it was the older Hamlet which was played 
 at Henslow's theatre on June 9th, 1594, and that this was the 
 play alluded to by Nash in his ' Epistle to the Gentlemen 
 Students of the two Universities,' prefixed to Robert Greene's 
 Alenaphon, 1589, and also by Lodge in that eccentric brochure, 
 entitled Wifs Miserie, or the World's Madnesse, 1596.* But 
 these are questions which it is impossible to discuss in the 
 compass of this paper, f 
 
 Into another class I must place the remaining four plays 
 of those above cited, on which I will bestow but a passing 
 remark. It is almost certain that John Fletcher wrote the 
 greater part of The Life of King Henry VIII. The author of 
 Titus Andronieus it is now impossible to determine. As far 
 as I know it has never been satisfactorily made out that 
 Shakespeare wrote any part of it. It must be admitted that all 
 the external evidences give him the sole authorship, as indeed 
 they do in the case of several plays universally allowed to be 
 
 * Oxberry, the player, in his acting edition of Marl W 's Dramatic }Vorks, 
 1818, asserts that in Richard II, Shakespeare has borrowed largely, 'and, 
 to speak with candour, rather too largely,' from Marlow's Edward II. In 
 support of this he cites from Edward II the scene in which Edward is 
 required by Leicester and others to give up his crown ; and ' the looking- 
 glass scene' from Richard II, viz., that in which Richard is required by 
 Bolingbroke and Northumberland to do the like. The passages are too 
 long for quotation here, and, in my opinion, do not support Oxberry's 
 charge. Nevertheless, Mr. A. C. Swinburne may be right in his view that 
 Marlow's Edward II ' must undoubtedly be regarded as the immediate 
 model of Shakespeare's Richard II.' ( Fortnightly Review, May, 1875, P- 629). 
 
 t I cannot but believe that the allusion to Hamlet in Sir Thomas 
 Smithes Voiage and Entertainment in Rushia, 1605; in Dekker's Belman's 
 Vight Walks, 1612; and in Rowlands' Night Raven, 1620, are also to the 
 pre- Shakespearian drama. 
 
 H 
 
50 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 spurious; but in this (as in those) the internal evidences wholly 
 negative his claim. Tinwn of Athens is a joint composition, 
 of which it is quite easy to determine the parts which were 
 written by Shakespeare, and those which were written by 
 another dramatist. As an example of this, take the two 
 following speeches of Apemantus : 
 
 Iloyday, 
 What a sweepe of vanitie comes this way. 
 They daunce ! They are madwomen, 
 Like madnesse is the glory of this life, 
 As this pompe shewes to a little oyle and roote. 
 We make our selves fooles, to disport our selves, 
 And spend our flatteries, to drinke those men, 
 Upon whose age we voyde it up agen 
 With poysonous spight and envy. 
 Who lives, that's not depraved, or depraves ? 
 Who dyes, that beares not one spurne to their graves 
 Of their friends guift ? 
 
 I should feare, those that dance before me now, 
 Would one day stampe upon me : 't has bene done, 
 Men shut their doores against a setting sunne. 
 
 We may be quite sure that this is the older work. It has 
 not the ring of Shakespeare in any of his moods : nay more, 
 it has not a single feature, turn, or style which suggests him, 
 and might, for aught I see to the contrary, have been written 
 by one who bombasted it when Kyd and Marlow were in 
 their swaddling clothes.* When Shakespeare condescends to 
 
 * Mr. Fleay is confident that this (Knight's) view is untenable. He 
 
 writes, 'The un-Shaksperian parts were certainly the latest written.' Tr. 
 
 N. S.S., 1874, P. I, p. 139. I am unconvinced. Some speeches in the 
 play seem to me to be not only inferior but older work. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 51 
 
 repair the old rubbish, see what sterling work he makes of it. 
 Here is Shakespeare's Apemantus: 
 
 what, think'st 
 That the bleake ayre, thy boysterous chamberlaine, 
 Will put thy shirt on warme ? Will these moss'd trees,* 
 That have out-liv'd the eagle, page thy heeles 
 And skip when thou point'st out ? Will the cold brooke 
 Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste 
 To cure thy o're-nights surfet ? Call the creatures, 
 Whose naked natures live in all the spight 
 Of wrekefull Heaven, whose bare unhoused trunkes, 
 To the conflicting elements expos'd, 
 Answer meere nature : bid them flatter thee. 
 O thou shalt finde thou flatter'st misery. 
 
 Do you not here catch the rare old tones of him who sang 
 the outcast king in the storm, and the banished duke in the 
 forest of Ardenne 1 f The study of Pericles leads us to a 
 similar conclusion, but the dissection is not so easy. J 
 
 To these remarks I should add, that in The Life and Death 
 of King Richard II, Shakespeare may have utilized an older 
 play. Anyhow, there was at least one old play on this subject. 
 Such a play was acted in 1601, and again in 1611. 
 
 In using up old materials, and grafting one play upon 
 
 * ' Moss'd trees' is Hanmer's reading. The folios have moist trees. 
 
 f After making this selection, I observed that Mr. Knight, in his Studies 
 of Shakespeare, 185 1, p. 72, had selected the same speeches for comparison; 
 to which he adds two speeches of Flavius, the just steward, viz., that 
 beginning, 'What will this come to?' and that beginning, 'If you suspect 
 my husbandry.' These exhibit the double authorship almost as well as the 
 former pair; but, of course, the grander is the character, the more striking 
 is the contrast. 
 
 % Mr. Fleay takes the opposite view. 
 
 
52 Shakespeare: tJte Man. 
 
 another, Shakespeare was merely conforming to an established 
 usage. We can hardly regret that he did so, even though the 
 practice is to be reprehended, as likely to give currency to 
 falsehood. Be that as it may, we cannot but marvel at that 
 magic skill, which at the first touch endows the grub with 
 wings, and then transmutes it into a lovely butterfly. The 
 material he used up seems mostly to have been the livelier 
 portions of the old play-house stock, which, like the bones in a 
 dust-heap, become the property of the first person who takes 
 the trouble to turn them to account. Verily the poet must 
 have wrought /// magus, who made those dry bones live.* 
 
 Justifiable or not, the practice was eminently advantageous; 
 it not only effected a great economy in the playwright's mental 
 resources and ' midnight oil,' but ensured for the audience the 
 maintenance of their old interest in the story represented. 
 T have elsewhere pointed out and established the low social 
 status of the dramatist at this time.f Play-writing and acting 
 were neither trades nor professions. When the Professor in 
 The Water Babies caught Tom in his net, he called him an 
 eft, but observing that he had no tail (so that he could not be 
 an eft) and was to all appearance a land-baby (and therefore 
 could not live under water), he let him go, and struck him 
 out of the book of life. Like Tom, the Elizabethan players and 
 
 : Ut magus; two words from Horace ( Ep. i., lib. ii. 1. 213) which 
 surmount the noble portrait of Shakespeare, attributed to Cornelius Jansen, 
 the property of the Duke of Somerset. 
 
 t See Was Tliomas Lodge a player? An exposition touching the social 
 status of the Dramatist in the reign of Elizabeth, imp. 8vo, 1868 ; and 
 Shakspere Allusion-Rooks, Part I, 'General Introduction,' p. iii. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 53 
 
 dramatists ' fell between two stools.' Their patrons regarded 
 them as persons sans aveu, and therefore statutable vagrants. 
 Accordingly, it came to pass that where all was disreputable, 
 no particular scandal arose from one dramatist annexing the 
 lucubration or inspiration of another, unless, indeed, the pre- 
 serve of one theatre were poached upon by the playwright of 
 another. In that event fired out the smouldering jealousy 
 which maintained the standing quarrels of rival theatres. To 
 this wretched jealousy we are indebted for a most curious 
 piece of evidence, that Shakespeare did some poaching at the 
 Globe, whatever he may have done at Charlecote or Fulbrooke. 
 I refer to the famous passage in Greens Groatsworth of Wit 
 bought with a Million of Repentance, 1592, to which I shall 
 shortly revert. A propos of that, Mr. Halliwell quotes from a 
 quarto tract, dated 1594, called Greene's Funeralls, by R. B., 
 Gent., 1594, the last couplet of the following stanza: 
 
 Greene is the pleasing object of an eye, 
 
 Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him, 
 
 Greene is the ground of every painter's dye, 
 
 Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him. 
 
 Nay more, the men that so eclipst his fame 
 
 Purloin'd his plumes, can they deny the same ? * 
 
 Shakespeare was certainly one of the men censured here. 
 
 * I have never seen a copy of this scarce book. For the complete 
 stanza I am indebted to Mr. Rives' Harness-Prize Essay. The fourth line 
 is misquoted by Mr. S. Neil in his Biography of Shakespeare, 4to, 1869, 
 p. 22; and by myself in the Shakspere Allusion -Books, Part I, 1874, 
 'General Introduction,' p. xi. I copied from Mr. Neil. From whom 
 did he copy? 
 
54 Shakespeare: tJie Man. 
 
 I have called the more ancient Elizabethan plays, waifs 
 from the general wreck of the older drama. In the coming 
 days of Macaulay's New Zealander, the grander works of 
 Shakespeare will remain to our posterity, not like waifs that 
 have drifted down by reason of their lightness, but like the 
 boulders which, by reason of their solidity and weight, have 
 escaped the general denudation. Perhaps, too, in time to 
 come, the Apollyon power of criticism may reveal Shakespeare's 
 method of composition, by some subtle process of disintegration 
 of which we now know nothing. I have marked, on the sea 
 beach at Filey, the work of destruction which the tide is 
 ceaselessly waging among the Oolitic rocks. The primeval 
 sand had been amassed by the ancient sea in the usual rippled 
 form, and thus became stratified. The sea is now silting out 
 the less solid particles from the rock, and breaking it up into 
 slabs, whose cleavage shows the old ripple-mark. ' Nature,' 
 says Emerson, 'can never keep a secret;' she never wholly 
 erases her footprints, and we may be sure that the genius of 
 Shakespeare was not more subtle or cunning than nature. 
 
 Putting aside the questions suggested by the plays, it is 
 necessary, for the completion of our inquiry, to ascertain 
 what contemporary testimony is extant, which by identifying 
 William Shakespeare, the player, with the author of the plays, 
 may prevent or rebut all rational doubt on the subject. Any 
 difficulty which we may meet with here more or less infects all 
 the poetic literature of that day. For instance, the beautiful 
 epigram on ' Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother,' which is 
 No. 15 in Ben Jonson's Underwoods, is also in a collection 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 55 
 
 of poems by Jonson's friend, William Browne {Lansdowne 
 Manuscripts, 777, first printed by Sir Egerton Brydges), with 
 an additional verse. I suspect the second verse is all that 
 belongs to Browne. The pastoral, ' Come live with me and 
 be my love,' is assigned to Marlow in England's Helicon, 1600, 
 and the nymph's reply, ' If love and all the world were young,' 
 is there given to Raleigh, under the pseudonym Ignoto : yet 
 the first of these, and the first verse of the second, constitute 
 No. 20 in the collection of short pieces attributed to Shake- 
 speare, printed in 1599, and senselessly called The Passionate 
 Pilgrim. No. 1 1 in the same collection, ' Venus with young 
 Adonis sitting by her,' occurs in a volume called Fidessa, a 
 collection of Sonnets, by B. Griffin, 1596, and Nos. 8. and 21, 
 'If Music and sweet Poetry agree,' and 'As it fell upon a 
 day,' are included in a collection called Poems in Divers Humors, 
 1598, attributed to Richard Barnefeild. Who has sufficient 
 knowledge to solve these questions of authorship 1 and those 
 which relate to the drama are (for various reasons inapplicable 
 to minor poetry) infinitely more intricate and perplexing. 
 
 There is a growing school which affects to disbelieve in 
 Shakespeare's authorship of the works attributed to him. 
 There were probably sceptics of this sort before 1852 ; but the 
 earliest attempt to impugn the prevalent belief, so far as I know, 
 was made in the number of Chambers'' Edinburgh Journal for 
 August 7 th in that year. The spirit of the article is healthy 
 enough. The scantiness of our evidence is fairly pointed out ; 
 at the same time, the two dedications to Lord Southampton, 
 and the testimony of Jonson, both prose and verse, are 
 
$6 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 admitted to weigh heavily against the doubters. On the other 
 hand, the omission of all mention of Shakespeare from the 
 works of Raleigh and Bacon is noticed, without the sug- 
 gestion of their possible authorship of the works attributed to 
 Shakespeare. The game thus started was hunted, by Miss 
 Delia Bacon, in Putnditfs Monthly for January, 1856 (vol. 
 vii, p. 1). It is here that the claims of Lord Bacon to the 
 authorship of those works were first advanced. In 1856, an 
 original inquirer, Mr. William Henry Smith ( then of Brompton, 
 now or late of Highgate), published a letter to the first Lord 
 Ellesmere, with the interrogative title, Was Lord Bacon the 
 Author of Shakespeare's plays ? This he followed up, in 1857, 
 with a small volume on the same subject, entitled Bacon and 
 Shakespeare. In the same year was published the enormous 
 volume (the composition of which cost Miss Delia Bacon her 
 reason and her life) called The Philosophy of the Plays of 
 Shakespeare unfolded. In this book the joint claims of Raleigh 
 and Bacon are advocated with the faith and earnestness of a 
 martyr. Lastly, in 1866 was published in America a large 
 volume entitled, The Authorship of the Plays attributed to 
 Shakespeare, by Nathaniel Holmes, one of the Judges of the 
 Supreme Court of the State of Missouri. This work is entirely 
 devoted to the advocacy of Lord Bacon's authorship. Mr. 
 Holmes having presented Mr. James Spedding, the editor of 
 Bacon's works, with a copy of this book, and solicited his 
 opinion thereupon, was so fortunate as to elicit an admirable 
 criticism on the general question. This, together with other 
 private letters which have passed between Messrs. W. H. 
 
Shakespeare : the Alan. 57 
 
 Smith, Spedding, and Holmes, I have been permitted to read, 
 
 but I am not at liberty to make known their very curious 
 
 contents.* 
 
 This remarkable controversy is not without its uses. It 
 
 serves to call particular attention to the existence of a class 
 
 of minds which, like Macadam's sieves, retain only those 
 
 ingredients that are unsuited to the end in view. Mix up a 
 
 quantity of matters relevant and irrelevant, and those minds 
 
 will eliminate from the instrument of reasoning every point 
 
 on which the reasoning ought to turn, and then proceed to 
 
 exercise their constitutional perversity on the residue. This 
 
 is the class of minds to which Bishop Warburton belonged ; 
 
 so that what Thomas De Quincey ( Works, A. & C. Black, 
 
 vol. vi, p. 259) writes of that prelate will serve for a generic 
 
 description : 
 
 The natural vegetation of his intellect tended to that kind of fungus 
 which is called ' crochet ; ' so much so that if he had a just and powerful 
 thought (as sometimes in germ he had), or a wise and beautiful thought, 
 yet by the mere perversity of his tortuous brain, it was soon digested into 
 a crochet. 
 
 The profession of the law (which at first was Warburton's) 
 has (as De Quincey perceived) the inevitable effect of fostering 
 the native tendency of such minds. For a fresh field of 
 
 * This correspondence has been since published as an appendix to the 
 third edition of Judge Holmes' work, issued in 1876. Other works on this 
 curious controversy are — William Shakspere not an Impostor, 1857; Who 
 wrote Shakspere? by J. V. P. {Eraser's Magazine, August, 1874); Bacon 
 versus Shakespeare, a Plea/or the Defendant, by J. D. King, 1875 ; and The 
 Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy, by E. O. Vaile, 1875 (Scr/bner's Monthly, 
 April, 1875). 
 
58 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 studying their idiosyncrasy we are indebted to this contro- 
 versy. It has also another use. It incites us to look up our 
 evidences for Shakespeare's authorship ; and we are reminded 
 how few and meagre they are. 
 
 The critic has the same interest in the works of Miss Delia 
 Bacon, Mr. W. H. Smith, and Judge Holmes, as the physician 
 has in morbid anatomy. He reads them, not so much for the 
 light which they throw on the question of authorship, as for 
 their interest as examples of wrong-headedness. It is not at 
 all a matter of moment whether Bacon, Raleigh, or another 
 be the favourite on whom the works are fathered ; but it is 
 instructive to discover by what plausible process the positive 
 evidences of Shakespeare's authorship (scanty as they are) are 
 put out of court. As to Bacon as first favourite, I suppose anyone 
 conversant with the life and authentic works of that powerful 
 but unamiable character, must agree with Mr. Spedding's 
 judgment, that, unless he be the author of "Shakespeare," 
 neither his life nor his writings give us any assurance that 
 he could excel as a dramatic poet. Of all men who have left 
 their impress on the reign of the first maiden Queen, not 
 one can be found who was so deficient in human sympathies 
 as Lord Bacon. As for such a man portraying a woman 
 in all her natural simplicity, purity, and grace; as to his 
 imagining and bodying forth in natural speech and action such 
 exquisite creations as Miranda, Perdita, Cordelia, Desdemona, 
 Marina — the supposition is the height of absurdity. What, as 
 it seems to me, has led astray the few writers who have set 
 up a claim for Lord Bacon, is his admirable gift of language, 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 59 
 
 scarcely inferior to that of Shakespeare himself* This almost 
 unique endowment caused Bacon to manifest a kind of like- 
 ness to Shakespeare in matters into which the sympathies of 
 the man and the training of the dramatic poet do not enter. 
 Hence it is easy to cull from the works of these two great 
 masters a considerable number of curious parallels. I have 
 looked over the collections of Messrs. W. H. Smith and 
 Holmes, and I must confess I am astonished; but my astonish- 
 ment has not been provoked by the quantity or closeness of 
 the resemblances adduced, but by the spectacle of educated 
 men attempting to found such an edifice on such a foundation. 
 I could from my own reading add to their collections some 
 remarkable parallelisms which they have overlooked. t But 
 what of that % Is there anything singular in the case 1 Not 
 at all. For if parallelisms can prove identity of authorship, 
 what an array of anonymous plays ought to be put to 
 Shakespeare's credit ! For instance, the old play of Lust's 
 Dominion has no owner: in the course of its perusal, I observed 
 some very remarkable parallels between its text and that of 
 
 * Unquestionably Mr. Tennyson is the most richly endowed, in this 
 respect, of all the poets of our day; a fact which was adroitly turned to 
 his disadvantage by the late Lord Lytton, who sneeringly said, ' Tennyson 
 is a poet with a great vocabulary.' 
 
 f For instance, compare the following: 
 
 'And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it 
 
 comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand,' etc. — Essay 
 
 lxvi. 
 
 O, it came o'er my ear, like the sweet sound 
 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets; 
 
 Stealing and giving odour. — Twelfth Night, i, 1. 
 
60 SJiakcspearc : the Man. 
 
 Shakespeare. I will mention two by way of illustration. In 
 act i, scene i, the Moor, speaking of the multitude, asks the 
 Queen-mother, 
 
 Who arms this many-headed beast, but you ? 
 
 Compare this with Corio/anus, act iv, scene i — 
 
 The beast 
 With many heads butts me away. 
 
 and with the Induction to II Henry IV, 
 
 the blunt monster with uncounted heads, 
 
 The still-discordant waving multitude. 
 
 Again, the Queen-mother, at the end of the play (act v, 
 
 scene 3), when all her troubles are consummated, says, 
 
 I'll now repose myself in peaceful rest, 
 And fly into some solitary residence, 
 Where I'll spin out the remnant of my life, 
 In true contrition for my past offences: 
 
 a passage which reminds us of Paulina's last speech in 
 A Winter's Tale, somewhat as a flowered tea-tray reminds us 
 of a garden. 
 
 How many of such resemblances think you between lust's 
 Dominion and Shakespeare would prove the right of that play 
 to a place in the received collection 1 My answer is that a 
 large number of such cases would assuredly dispose of that 
 claim, and a small number would go no way to prove it. It 
 requires no minute acquaintance with Shakespeare's text for 
 a reader to be struck with that inexhaustible pregnancy of 
 language which rarely repeats an image once expressed, 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 61 
 
 without expressing it anew. In fact it is one argument against 
 Shakespeare's authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which 
 has his name, along with Fletcher's, on the title, that so many 
 Shakespearianisms occur in its text. 
 
 And I 
 
 Doe here present this Machine, or this frame. 
 
 Two Noble Kinsmen, iii, 6. 
 
 Thou mighty one, that with thy power has turn'd 
 
 Green Neptune into purple. 
 
 Ibid., v, I. 
 
 Palamon (addressing Mars). 
 
 Thou great decider 
 
 Of dusty and old titles, that heal'st with blood 
 
 The earth when it is sick, and cur'st the world 
 
 O' the pluresie of people. 
 
 Ibid., v, I. 
 
 And yet we are asked to believe that, because Bacon writes, 
 'All was inned at last unto the King's barn,' and 'the cold 
 becometh more eager, 1 therefore he was the author of AlPs 
 Well that Ends Well and Hamlet. 
 
 Summarily disallowing, then, the claims set up on behalf 
 of Bacon, I proceed to consider, with the utmost brevity, 
 those evidences on which we are justified in attributing to 
 Shakespeare the chief authorship of the dramas which have the 
 passport of his name. I own at the outset that those evidences 
 are scanty : not so scanty as Mr. W. H. Smith would have us 
 believe, for he cites but four witnesses whose testimony was 
 given in or close upon Shakespeare's lifetime, viz., Francis 
 Meres (1598)3 William Basse (1622 eirea); the anonymous 
 author of The Return from Pernassus (1606, said to have been 
 
62 Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 acted in 1602), and Ben Jonson. In fact, there are at least 
 eleven besides; two of whom are among our chief witnesses.* 
 
 But so little weight do I attach to contemporary rumour 
 as an evidence of authorship, that I shall trouble you with 
 seven witnesses only. Of these, there are but four who directly 
 identify the man, or the actor, with the writer of the plays 
 and poems. 
 
 The first witness I shall call is John Harrison, the publisher; 
 though it is but little that he can tell us. It was for him that 
 Venus and Adonis w T as printed in 1593, and Lticrece in 1594. 
 No author's name is on the title-page of either. But fortunately 
 he prefixed to each a dedication to Lord Southampton, sub- 
 scribed ' William Shakespeare.' It is to me quite incredible 
 that Harrison would have done this, unless Shakespeare had 
 
 # I do not count Spenser, for the oft-quoted line from his Teares of 
 
 the Muses, 
 
 'Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late,' 
 
 unquestionably referred to Sir Philip Sydney, who (like some other 
 poets) was alluded to under the pastoral name of Willy. Thus, in an 
 eclogue signed A. W., in the Poetical Rhapsody quoted by Mr. Collier, 
 in his Introduction to Seven English Poetical Miscellanies, 1867, occurs 
 the following, in reference to Sydney's recent death : 
 
 We deem'd our Willy aye should live, 
 So sweet a sound his pipe could give ; 
 
 But cruell death 
 
 Hath stopt his breath : 
 Dumb lies his pipe that wont so sweet to sound ! 
 
 Besides, as Mr. Halliwell argues, Spenser's allusion could not be to 
 Shakespeare; for the Peares of the Muses was probably written about 15S0, 
 though it was not published till ten years later. Shakespeare was but 
 sixteen years old in 1580, and was not known in London as a poet till 
 eight or nine years afterwards. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 63 
 
 written the dedications, or at least had been a party to them. 
 Now in dedicating the first poem, the undersigned speaks of 
 it as ' my unpolisht lines,' and ' the first heir of my invention,' 
 and he promises to honour his patron ' with some graver 
 labour : ' in dedicating the second poem he speaks of it as 
 ' my untutored lines,' and adds, ' what I have done is yours, 
 what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted 
 yours.' 
 
 So far, then, we have a tittle of evidence to prove that 
 one William Shakespeare was the author of both these poems. 
 Three or four years later a well-known man of letters, 
 named Francis Meres, speaks of Shakespeare as the author 
 of Venus and Adonis, Luereee, sundry sonnets, and ten speci- 
 fied plays. Of these plays nine are known to us and received 
 as Shakespeare's. Meres' testimony is given in seven pages 
 of his book, called Palladis Tamia, Wit's Commonwealth, 
 1598; but I have never seen quoted any of his remarks 
 on Shakespeare's works, except the stock passages on folios 
 281 and 282, which one writer evidently borrows from another, 
 to save himself the trouble of consulting the original. It 
 is especially noteworthy that on the first page of folio 280, 
 Meres selects Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, 
 Warner, Shakespeare, Marlow and Chapman, as the poets 
 by whom the English tongue was ' mightily enriched, and 
 gorgeouslie invested in rare ornaments and resplendent 
 abiliments ; ' and it is evident from subsequent remarks that 
 he awarded the palm to the authors of the Faerie Queen 
 and the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. 
 
64 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 Robert Greene (the abler and better known of the two 
 Elizabethan poets of that surname) wrote a number of plays 
 in conjunction with Marlow, Lodge, Nash and others, which 
 had great popularity before the advent of Shakespeare. In 
 his last publication, called A Groatsworth of Wit Bought 
 with a Million of Repentance, 1592, he addresses an admonition 
 to three of his associates, exhorting them to abandon play- 
 writing. These we may readily identify as Marlow, Nash and 
 Peele. Then follow the words, so often quoted, which are 
 for us the important testimony : 
 
 Base minded men al three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned : 
 for unto none of you (like me) sought those buries to cleave : those 
 Puppits (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht 
 in our colours. . . . Yes, trust them not : for there is an upstart 
 Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in 
 a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke 
 verse as the best of you : — 
 
 so far it might be conjectured that Shakespeare is the man 
 alluded to : providentially Greene adds these words, which 
 almost convert that conjecture into a certainty : 
 
 and being an absolute Johannes fac totnm, is in his owne conceit the 
 onely Shake-scene in a countrie. 
 
 Burs, puppets, antics, crows in [peacocks] feathers — such are 
 the hard words he gives the players ; and these he follows 
 up with a second instalment of abusive epithets — apes, rude 
 grooms, buckram gentlemen, peasants, and painted monsters ! * 
 
 * These were but conventional terms : so John Davies of Hereford has 
 apish actors, men more base, &c. ; Thomas Hey wood, puppets, painted images, 
 &c. ; Robert Burton, butterflies, baboons, apes, and antics ; and so forth. 
 
Shakespeare; the Man. 65 
 
 Now in turning this extract to account, we must be more 
 cautious than dramatic critics usually are to avoid reasoning in 
 a circle. If we are fully satisfied that ' Shake-scene ' contains a 
 pun upon Shakespeare (and that independently of the verse), 
 we may infer, perhaps, that Greene, or one of the dramatists 
 admonished by him, wrote the whole or a part of The True 
 Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, and that Shakespeare 
 pillaged his predecessor's work to ' beautifie,' or rather to 
 fabricate, his Third Part of Henry VI. Anyhow, the line 
 travestied occurs in both The True Tragedy and The Third 
 Part of Henry VI. 
 
 The conclusion being reached that Shakespeare is the 
 player assailed by Greene, the testimony of Henry Chettle, 
 the editor of Greene's Groatsworih of Wit, is invested with 
 a curious and special interest. Immediately after the appear- 
 ance of that book, Chettle published a work of fiction called 
 Kind-Harts Dreame. In the preface to this he refers to the 
 preceding work, and confesses to having expunged from the 
 manuscript some of Greene's hard words : but he protests that 
 he added nothing to it. After remarking on the admonition 
 to the three dramatists he adds this splutter of solecisms : 
 
 The other, whome at that time I did not so much spare, as since I 
 wish I had, for that as I have moderated the heate of living writers, 
 and might have usde my owne discretion (especially in such a case), 
 the Author beeing dead, that I did not, I am as sory as if the originall 
 fault had beene my fault, because my selfe have seene his demeanor 
 no lesse civill, than he exelcnt in the qualitie he professes : Besides, 
 divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues 
 his honesty, and his facetious grace in wriltmg, that aprooves his Art. 
 
 K 
 
65 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 This is indeed a singular apology. We may picture to 
 
 our mind's eye the shadowless man, the tinker of old plays, 
 
 the second rate actor, who had already, like one of his 
 
 heroes, 
 
 bought 
 Golden opinions from all sorts of people, 
 
 but who as yet had not become a man of worship, and an 
 armiger in right of gentle blood, by the mere force of his 
 unpretending frankness, modesty and gentleness, disarming 
 his jealous and contemptuous traducers ; insomuch that the 
 respectable Henry Chettle, who had never been a motley and 
 a vagrant, is prompted to give the author of Hamlet an ac- 
 ceptable testimonial. For my part, I honour Chettle for this 
 tardy act of justice. 
 
 I suppose I must, in the next place, cite the ostensible 
 editors of the first collection of Shakespeare's works; for 
 they were none other than Heminge and Condell, two of 
 the company who at the accession of James the First played 
 under the joint management of Lawrence Fletcher and William 
 Shakespeare. But, unfortunately for their credit and our satis- 
 faction, their prefatory statement contains, or at least suggests, 
 what they must have known to be false. They would lead 
 us to believe that their edition was printed from Shakespeare's 
 manuscripts : 
 
 Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser 
 of it. His mind and hand went together : And what he thought, he 
 uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot 
 in his papers. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 67 
 
 Now we have positive knowledge of a fact inconsistent with 
 this excerpt. We know that the texts of eight of the plays 
 in that edition were printed from the early quarto editions,* 
 which they denounce as stolen and surreptitious, 'maimed, 
 and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious im- 
 postors,' and which plays they now offer ' cur'd and perfect 
 of their limbes.' But notwithstanding this, the testimony of 
 Shakespeare's fellows must be allowed to have some weight 
 in the question of authorship. It is to me incredible that 
 they should in that matter have attempted a fraud which must 
 have been transparent to the noble brothers who lent their 
 patronage to the volume, and which must sooner or later 
 have been exposed in the face of all England. 
 
 Our last and principal witness is Ben Jonson, though he 
 is less communicative than might have been expected con- 
 sidering the closeness of his friendship with Shakespeare. In 
 what he writes of the man he seems to take it for granted that 
 we know all about him already, and the things he tells us 
 are not those we most want to know. There are the verses 
 prefixed to the first folio of Shakespeare, and the remarks 
 entitled, De Shakespeare nostrati, in his posthumous work called 
 Timber ; or Discoveries made upon Men and Jl/atter. These 
 remarks must be read in connection with Heminge and 
 Condell's preface to the first folio, and with the Induction to 
 Ben Jonson's play, entitled The Staple of News. In the latter, 
 
 * Viz., Richard II, The First Part of King Henry IV, Love's Labour' 1 s 
 Lost, Much Ado about Nothing, Romeo and jfuliet, Titus Andro/iicus, A 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice. 
 
68 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 Expectation says to Prologue, ' Sir, I can expect much.' 
 Prologue answers, 'I fear too much, lady; and teach others 
 to do the like.' Expectation rejoins, ' I can do that, too, if 
 I have cause.' Upon which Prologue says, 'Cry you mercy, 
 you never did wrong, but with just cause.' Truly one would 
 never have found any evidence for Shakespeare in that, but 
 for the explanation which Ben vouchsafes in his Timber. 
 He writes : 
 
 I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to 
 Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) he never blotted 
 out [? one] line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand. 
 Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, 
 but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their 
 friend by, wherein he most faulted : and to Justine mine owne candor, (for 
 I lov'd the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as 
 much as any). Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature : 
 had an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions : wherein 
 hee flow'd with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be 
 stop'd : Sufflaminandus erat ; as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was 
 in his owne power ; would the rule of it had beene so too. Many times 
 hee fell into those things, could not escape laughter : As when he said in 
 the person of Casar, one speaking to him ; Ccesar thou dost me wrong. Hee 
 replyed : Ciesar did never wrong, but with just cause: and such like ; which 
 Mere ridiculous. But hee redeemed his vices, with his virtues. There was 
 ever more in him to be praysed then to be pardoned. 
 
 This is direct testimony, not merely to the fact that 
 Shakespeare wrote the play of Julius Ccesar, but that Caesar's 
 reply to Metellus Cimber was — 
 
 Caesar did never wrong but with just cause, 
 Nor without cause will he be satisfied. 
 
Shakespeare: the Alan. 69 
 
 But of course the editors will not have it. It is proverbial 
 that office is a strong perverter of the judgment. It would 
 seem as if a critic became blear-eyed so soon as he turned 
 editor. 
 
 We may, I think, unreservedly accept the whole of Ben's 
 testimony in this matter. Probably, the five couplets, which 
 he wrote on Droeshout's engraved portrait of Shakespeare 
 prefixed to the early folios, are merely complimentary, for they 
 convey but a trite and common sentiment. * I do not, however, 
 rely on them as an evidence of authorship, but on the forty 
 couplets which follow the preface to the Folio 1623, addressed 
 by Ben 'To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William 
 Shakespeare : and what he hath left us.' These verses are a 
 precious testimony, both to the authorship of the plays and 
 to Ben's friendly estimate of the author's genius. But foras- 
 much as they do not deal in specialities I have no occasion to 
 quote them at length. It is curious that one of the phrases 
 of eulogy here employed is repeated by Ben almost toiidem 
 verbis in a note entitled ' Scriptorum Catalogus,' in his Timber; 
 but it is there applied to Lord Bacon. To Shakespeare he 
 says — 
 
 O, when thy socks were on, 
 Leave thee alone, for the comparison 
 Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome 
 Sent forth, etc. 
 
 Of Bacon he writes — 
 
 * On this matter see Shakespeare s Centurie of Prayse, 1874, p. 169. 
 
yo Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 he who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue 
 which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece, or haughty 
 Rome. 
 
 Of course the heretics have not been slow to avail themselves 
 of this resemblance. They are welcome to what it is worth. 
 
 The conclusion which I think we may safely draw from 
 the evidences adduced is, that no other known name is en- 
 titled to the credit awarded by common consent to 'William 
 Shakespeare,' unless we go back to the playwrights who pre- 
 ceded him, and are able to identify the authors of those plays 
 on which Shakespeare founded so many of his. In this case 
 a residual problem is presented to us of so great difficulty, 
 that at present no approximation has been made to its solu- 
 tion, and though it is one which has a special interest for me 
 and comes within the scope of my subject its treatment would 
 require the monopoly of a separate paper. * 
 
 Certain it is that in a considerable number of the plays (I 
 think more than one-half) Shakespeare's all-assimilating genius 
 derives its pabulum from the clumsy productions of earlier 
 writers. To get an adequate notion of Shakespeare's art in 
 this sort of work, I commend to your attention the play of 
 King John, in comparison with The Troublesome Reign, and 
 I shall be much surprised if you do not acquire an entirely 
 new notion of Shakespeare's dramatic talent. 
 
 * Since this was written an 'approximation' has been arrived at in 
 the case of, at least, six plays. The 'separate paper,' which was then 
 a vague possibility, is now an actuality, and will be found in the second 
 part of this work. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 7 1 
 
 If I might venture to express my own opinion on this 
 difficult inquiry, I should say, that in all probability, several 
 of the comedies (strictly so called), and of the tragedies, 
 Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Julius Ccesar, are not indebted to 
 any older plays on the same subject ; * and that Antony and 
 Cleopatra, and the Tempest, are, in the profoundest sense, 
 original compositions, the entire structure, as well as the 
 architecture of each play, being wholly due to Shakespeare's 
 incomparable art. Looking at those three plays only, unless, 
 indeed, my judgment has been warped by force of habit, I 
 there discern the figure of a poet who was of a more 'select 
 and generous chief than any of the imaginative writers of 
 Elizabeth's reign. Hazlitt, who proclaimed Shakespeare's in- 
 tellectual and aesthetic superiority to the men of that day, 
 qualified his verdict by saying that ' it was a common and 
 a noble brood.' With Mr. Alexander Dyce, let me say that 
 ' falser remark was never made by critic' That the times were 
 curiously favourable to genius may be allowed ; and we may 
 agree with Goethe's opinion, that much of what the giants of 
 those days became and achieved was due to the ' stimulating 
 atmosphere' in which they lived. f None can say to what forest 
 trees the garden flowers of our day, such as Tennyson and 
 Browning, might have waxed, had they been planted in an 
 
 * Since this was written the Rev. F. G. Fleay has made an unfortunate 
 attempt to fix on both Macbeth and Julius Ccesar the brand of double 
 authorship. Nevertheless I think very highly of his labours in the cases 
 of Timon of Athens and Pericles. 
 
 t I observe a similar remark in Emerson's Essay on Eloquence, in his 
 Letters and Social Aims, 1876, p. 117. 
 
J2 SJuikcspcarc : the Man. 
 
 Elizabethan soil. But if so much be due to a man's surround- 
 ings, we must also admit with sorrow, that the direction into 
 which the energies of Englishmen have been diverted is not 
 only unfavourable but fatal to artis'tic life, and that an artist 
 of Shakespeare's stamp will never more be possible among 
 us: — 
 
 'We ne'er shall look upon his like again.' 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 win 
 
 THE PORTRAITURE OF SHAKESPEARE.* 
 
 HE title of my paper may well provoke this question — 
 'Seeing that Shakespeare has been dead and buried 
 257 years, what can be known of his personal appear- 
 ance beyond what may be gathered from the few accredited 
 portraits, for which he is believed to have sat 1 and granting 
 that all those are unsatisfactory and imperfect representations 
 of the man, how is it possible to add to their verisimilitude, 
 except by the discovery of another authentic portrait 1 ' Of 
 course I do not pretend that this is possible ; nor am I able to 
 announce to you any discovery of the sort since 1849, when 
 the Becker Mask was deposited at the British Museum. Never- 
 theless I have somewhat to communicate, which may be both 
 new and interesting, touching certain recent attempts to recover 
 the lost lineaments of Shakespeare, 
 
 And steal dead seeming of his living hue. f 
 
 * Read at a Meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, Jan. 21, 1874, 
 and reported (in brief) in the Presidential Address of 1874, p. 50. 
 t From Shakespeare's sixty-seventh Sonnet. 
 
74 Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 Doubtless the chances are against the success of such 
 attempts : but it is not difficult to see that in one respect at 
 least they may be helpful and instructive. If we only consider 
 what a bust or a portrait must be in order to express the 'form 
 and favour' of a man at his best, we shall readily arrive at a 
 principle, which, while it serves to explain that diversity of 
 expression which is found in different copies from the same 
 picture, to some extent justifies the attempt to recover a lost 
 likeness. 
 
 1 have frequently observed that the ' portrait of a gentleman,' 
 painted by an indifferent artist, bears a certain resemblance to 
 the artist himself. In the Epistle of St. James it is asserted 
 that a man ' beholding his natural face in a glass, goeth his 
 way and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.' 
 I am not sure that this is strictly true ; but, if it be so, I 
 am none the less convinced that every man has a latent im- 
 pression of his own countenance, which he is more apt to 
 delineate than any other. Moreover, I have observed that in 
 portraits, executed by the best artists and possessing all the 
 attributes of a faithful likeness, there is always an expression 
 which it is impossible to attribute to anything seen in the 
 face of the sitter. The truth seems to be, that the artist who 
 has studied his subject, so as to seize the expression of the face 
 at its best, is dependent upon his own powers of imagination 
 and memory: and on these he draws largely to supplement the 
 expression of the blank and wearied face which periodically 
 confronts him in his studio. It thus happens that in repre- 
 senting his subject he imparts something of himself, and the 
 
Shakespeare: tlic Ulan. 75 
 
 most life-like portraits are those which represent the very heart 
 of the painter. 
 
 On this principle we can clearly understand how it comes 
 to pass that of all the known engravings of Jansen's portrait 
 of Shakespeare, in the collection of the Duke of Somerset, 
 there are not two that have the same expression. But the 
 Chandos portrait, which is the property of the nation, from 
 its damaged condition and obscurity offers a still better field 
 for experiment. It has been engraved and copied in oils 
 times without number, and so different are the expressions 
 of the resulting prints and paintings that it is difficult to believe 
 that they are all from the same exemplar. I can certify as 
 a fact that Cousins' engraving is a remarkably faithful copy 
 of the original. Now compare it with Scriven's print of 
 Ozias Humphry's drawing, and it is difficult to resist the con- 
 clusion that the fire and severity of this last are wholly due 
 to the temperament of the copyist. It is well known that 
 William Blake could conjure up before him the visible forms 
 of the dead, and retain them long enough to paint their 
 likenesses. From some of these we may conclude that the 
 latent memory of ancient portraits was at least a factor in 
 this singular phenomenon ; but the portraits of ' the Man who 
 built the Pyramids' and 'the Ghost of a Flea' do not so 
 readily yield to this explanation. You will perhaps call to 
 mind an incident related by the elder Varley respecting the 
 portraiture of 'the Ghost of a Flea.' The old man was 
 present during the 'sitting,' and he relates that, the Flea 
 having opened his mouth, Blake was unable at once to com- 
 
y6 Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 plete the drawing, but drew on a separate piece of paper a 
 sketch of the open mouth. The apparition having once 
 more closed his mouth, Blake resumed the first sketch, and 
 finished the portrait. This seems a veritable case of portrait- 
 painting from the inmost consciousness: and what is most 
 curious about Blake's portrait of ' the Ghost of a Flea ' is that 
 it is a caricature of the well-known features of the late Lord 
 Lytton. 
 
 However ridiculous may appear the notion that Blake could 
 summon into his presence the forms and faces of persons no 
 longer existing, or those whose existence is impossible, and 
 could draw from them, as from real flesh and blood, I am 
 convinced from my own experience that Blake gave a truthful 
 account of the matter, and that he was wholly unconscious 
 of the process by which such appearances were produced. 
 That process, which is a sort of concurrence of imagination 
 with certain states of the brain and the optic nerve, probably 
 affecting the retina in as perfect a manner as the light from 
 natural objects, is unconsciously performed by all persons who 
 have the experience of optical illusions. 
 
 Now that very constructive power, which in the case of 
 Blake was at times monopolised by the nerves of vision, may 
 just as well act through the hand, and, instead of presenting an 
 illusory object which the artist may delineate or depict may 
 guide him unconsciously in the production of an ideal portrait. 
 Such things are called ' spirit drawings,' which I regard as a 
 most misleading title. But without entering upon that allied, 
 if not strictly relevant, inquiry, I may state generally that every 
 

 Shakespeare : the Man. yj 
 
 genial portrait owes perhaps as much to the ideal of the artist 
 as to his faculty of faithful representation ; and that he works 
 from within as well as from without. Herein lies the justi- 
 fication of the attempts that are made from time to time to 
 produce a thoroughly satisfactory portrait of Shakespeare. In 
 this pursuit we have little to guide us beyond a few portraits of 
 somewhat doubtful authenticity and of very short pedigrees, 
 the bust in the Chancel of Stratford Church and Droeshout's 
 engraving prefixed to the First Folio Edition of Shakespeare. 
 Beyond the suggestion of these generally inadequate and 
 discrepant representations we have no guidance from without. 
 Unfortunately for our inquiry Shakespeare does not stand 
 on the same footing as other great men of his time. He is 
 sui generis, that is, of a class by himself in every respect. 
 There is scarcely a poet above mediocrity who has not written 
 commendatory verses on his fellows. We do not know of a 
 single copy of such verses by Shakespeare. Allusions to his 
 contemporaries are to be found in the writings of every other 
 poet and dramatist of that day; some poems and plays are 
 obtrusively crowded with such personal allusions. In the whole 
 thirty-seven dramas credited to Shakespeare there is one obscure 
 allusion to Spenser and one distinct allusion to Marlow. The 
 prose works published in the later part of the sixteenth, and 
 the earlier part of the seventeenth centuries contain abundant 
 notices of every poet of mark save Shakespeare, whose name 
 and works are rarely and only slightly mentioned : and when 
 he is named or alluded to he is praised as an amatory poet or 
 as an actor, rarely as a dramatist. The works of Lord Brooke, 
 
yS Shakespeare: the Alan. 
 
 Sir John Davies, Lord Bacon, Selden, Sir John Beaumont, 
 Henry Vaughan (Silurist), Lord Clarendon, &c, &c, show 
 no consciousness of Shakespeare's existence. Can it be that 
 the poor player was evidently despised \ that he was too 
 humble to be selected as the subject of much eulogy in those 
 early times, or to be invited to become the eulogist of another 1 
 For the same reason, whatever it was, hardly anyone cared to 
 possess his portrait; and until John Aubrey records in 1680, 
 i. c, sixty-four years after Shakespeare's death, that he was 
 reputed to have been ' a handsome, well-shaped man,' no writer 
 ever said a word as to his personal appearance. It is but fair 
 to add, that as to portraits, Edmund Spenser stands in precisely 
 the same position as Shakespeare. The portraits claimed for 
 him are hopelessly discrepant ; and it is hard to say which 
 should be accepted and which rejected. If we reckon up all 
 the painted portraits (excluding known forgeries) said to re- 
 present Shakespeare, we shall find that their number is about 
 twenty-two. Some of these, at most two or three, may have 
 been taken from life ; and certainly one is of the requisite 
 antiquity. Not a few, however, are probably genuine portraits 
 of other gentlemen of the time ; and some are idealised 
 portraits of Shakespeare. To these must be added two busts, 
 one plaster cast and one engraving on brass; and we have 
 reckoned up our whole capital. A very few words on some 
 of these relics. 
 
 Foremost in authenticity is the Bust in the Chancel of 
 Stratford Church. We know quite enough about this to make 
 it our most important possession. Apart from what we know, 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 79 
 
 it is a priori most improbable that the family and friends of 
 Shakespeare should soon after his death have placed in the most 
 conspicuous place in the church of his native town, where 
 almost every one was as familiar with his personal appearance 
 as with that of their most intimate friends, a life-sized bust of 
 the Bard which would not be recognised by his fellow-townsmen. 
 We might, in the absence of any relative knowledge, presume 
 that the bust is a likeness. But we know from Sir William 
 Dugdale that it was the work of a Dutch sculptor named Gerard 
 Johnson; and we know enough of this sculptor to believe that 
 he was not a common mason, though certainly quite a second- 
 rate artist. We all know wherein such an one fails, and wherein 
 he succeeds : he can usually make an obtrusively striking 
 likeness, though always an unpleasant one. Here is just such 
 a work. How awkward is the ensemble of the face ! What a 
 painful stare, with its goggle eyes and gaping mouth ! The 
 expression of this face has been credited with humour, bon- 
 hommie, hilarity and jollity. To me it is decidedly clownish ; 
 and is suggestive of a man crunching a sour apple, or struck with 
 amazement at some unpleasant spectacle. Yet there is force 
 in the lineaments of this muscular face. One can hardly doubt 
 that it is an unintentional caricature ; but for that very reason 
 it should be an unmistakeable likeness. In the plaster casts 
 taken from Bullock's copy, and in those separately prepared 
 from the original by Warner and Michele, that peculiar ex- 
 pression is toned down to insipidity, and one catches some 
 touch of dignity and refinement with utter loss of force. But 
 the casts do not give a truthful representation of the bust. 
 
So Shakespeare; the Man. 
 
 We obtain some important facts from this rude work. As 
 it is at present coloured the eyes are light-hazel, the hair and 
 beard auburn. Such were the colours put on in 1748 by 
 Mr. John Hall, the limner of Stratford, and which reappeared 
 on the removal, by Mr. Collins, of Malone's white paint. We 
 have no reason to doubt that when the bust was renovated in 
 1748, the very colours it had received by order of Dr. John 
 Hall, Shakespeare's son-in-law, were repeated by his namesake. 
 
 The extraordinary depth of the upper lip, which measures 
 an inch and a quarter, has been accounted for by the conjecture 
 that the sculptor may have had an accident with the nose. I 
 have remarked that it is very dangerous to frame hypotheses 
 respecting Shakespeare, for they are apt to get converted into 
 ' obscure traditions,' and may come at last to be regarded as 
 historical facts, the evidence of which has been lost. This 
 happened to the conjecture of Capell and Waldron that 
 Shakespeare was lame, in order to explain two lines in the 
 sonnets, the meaning of which he had wholly misapprehended. 
 In the next century Mr. Harness revised the conjecture, with- 
 out any mention of Capell ; Mr. Thorns accounted for the 
 supposed defect by making Shakespeare a soldier : and finally 
 the late Mr. Richard Simpson published a note in which he 
 referred the circumstance of Shakespeare's lameness to ' an 
 obscure tradition,' and proceeded to employ it as a fact to 
 elucidate some expressions in Jonson's Poetaster. Just so, in 
 the matter of Shakespeare's nose; Mr. J. Hain Friswell remarks 
 (Life Portraits, p. 8): 'the nose of the bust of Shakespeare, 
 like that of Tristram Shandy, it is said, has met with an 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 81 
 
 accident, the former from the instrument of Dr. Slop, the latter 
 from the chisel of the sculptor.' 'It is said,' is the magical 
 formula, which becomes the germ of the myth. I cannot 
 find that it ever was said, except as a hypothesis to explain 
 the disproportionate depth of the upper lip : and on measure- 
 ment, it was found that the depth of Sir Walter Scott's upper 
 lip exceeded that of Shakespeare's bust. 
 
 I am afraid we must take our stand on the fidelity of this 
 bust — at least with some allowable qualifications. When we 
 find a sculptor dismissing his work in this rough fashion, so 
 that, as Mr. Fairholt says, 'the eyes are untrue to nature, &c, 
 the ciliary cartilages are straight, hard and unmeaning, and 
 the glands at the corners next the nose entirely omitted,' we 
 may be sure the fidelity of the face must be received with 
 something more than the proverbial grain of salt. 
 
 Next in authenticity to the bust is Droeshout's engraving, 
 prefixed to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's Works. It 
 must have been executed after Shakespeare's death; and 
 therefore we may be sure it was taken from some sketch or 
 painting, probably in the possession of Mrs. Shakespeare or 
 Dr. John Hall. No such exemplar has come down to us or is 
 known to have existed, unless the Felton Portrait be the one 
 that was so employed; and this is, on the whole, unlikely, for 
 reasons to be stated when I come to speak of that portrait. But 
 allowing the probability that such an exemplar did exist (and 
 apart from it, no reliance could be placed on the engraving), 
 it may have perished along with Shakespeare's papers. It has 
 been surmised that these papers fell a victim to some pious 
 
 M 
 
82 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 soul's puritanical ardour. Unhappily the suspicion, if it be to fall 
 anywhere, involves Shakespeare's wife or Shakespeare's daughter. 
 The sorry Latin elegiacs engraved in brass on Mrs. Shakespeare's 
 gravestone contain no allusion to her immortal husband, being 
 concerned only with the good lady's immortality. She must 
 not be held responsible for them; at least no further than 
 she justified their encomium. The English verses on Mrs. 
 Elizabeth Hall's tablet are enigmatical. 
 
 Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, 
 Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall : 
 Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this 
 Wholy of him with whom she's now in blisse. 
 
 The things compared are Mrs. Hall's supersexual wit, and 
 her wisdom to salvation. Which is ' that,' and which is ' this ] ' 
 In strictness % hie plerumque ad posterius, ille ad prius refertur: ' 
 so that the lines seem to say, she owed her wit partly to 
 Shakespeare; her piety wholly to him, with whom she is in 
 bliss. Meanwhile where is her mother 1 It has been suggested 
 that the lines mean the reverse, ' this ' and ' that ' being trans- 
 posed for the sake of the rhyme : viz., that she owed her piety 
 in some degree to Shakespeare; her wit wholly to him: but 
 that would seem to make the wit her claim to salvation. 
 Another suggestion is, that him refers to the Saviour; and I 
 incline to that view myself: at the same time I am afraid we 
 are inquiring too curiously in putting these old epitaphs to the 
 question ; and I do not think they tell at all against Mrs. 
 Shakespeare. Probably both Mrs. Shakespeare and Mrs. Hall 
 were good religious souls, but one does not see why either of 
 
Shakespeare:, the Man. 83 
 
 them should be ashamed of the Bard, so as to disown his 
 works and destroy his manuscripts. There is one curious fact, 
 however, which is quite enough to beget a myth, like those of 
 Shakespeare's lameness and his bust's broken nose. Heminge 
 and Condell had the plays printed from the quartos and play- 
 house copies; they even had a title-page printed with the date 
 1622. They may have hoped to be able to correct the press 
 from manuscripts left by Shakespeare at New Place, in the 
 custody of his widow. Now the facts are, that Mrs. Shakespeare 
 died on August 8, 1623, and that the editors had a new title 
 printed, with the date 1623. Did they wait till she was dead 
 before venturing to issue the volume'? 
 
 Be that as it may, the folio appeared with the Droeshout 
 engraving. Even in its best state it is such a monstrosity, that 
 I, for one, do not believe it had any trustworthy exemplar. 
 Those who have, as I have, examined the engraved portraits 
 prefixed to the various collective editions of the time, will not 
 be greatly astonished at the pretence of attaching such an 
 abomination as the Droeshout head to the folio editions of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Next in order we must place the splendid portrait, said to 
 be by Cornelius Jansen, which passes for Shakespeare in the 
 collection of the Duke of Somerset. Unfortunately its pedigree 
 does not extend farther back than 1761; but Woodbum, who 
 published in 181 1 the first print from it, stated that it had 
 belonged to Prince Rupert, who left it to his natural daughter, 
 Mrs. Emmanuel Scroopes Howes: whence it must have come 
 into the hands of Spackman the picture-dealer: and thence to 
 
84 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 Mr. Jennens in 1761. The picture is of undoubted antiquity, 
 and bears in the right hand corner, ^Et. 46, 16 10; which corres- 
 ponds with Shakespeare's age in that year. As Jansen is 
 known to have painted the daughter of Henry Wriothesley, 
 Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's friend and patron, it is not 
 improbable that he should have painted for the earl's collection 
 the bard himself. Then we take the Lumley, the Chandos, the 
 Felton, the Ashbourne and the Challis portraits. 
 
 Such was our stock of the more important representations 
 of the Bard up to about the middle of this century. Since 
 then it has received two acquisitions, both of which were at 
 different times in the possession of Professor Owen, at the 
 British Museum : viz., the Duke's Theatre Bust, now in the 
 vestibule of the Garrick Club, and the cast discovered by 
 Ludwig Becker, now belonging to Dr. Ernest Becker, of 
 ] )armstadt. The latter professes to have been cast from a 
 wax-mould taken from Shakespeare's face very soon after 
 death; and I must candidly say I am not able to spot a 
 single suspicious fact in the brief history of this most curious 
 relic. Along with it is a miniature in oils, painted in 1637 
 from the cast, representing Shakespeare lying in state, his head 
 crowned with bays. 
 
 The comparison of these various works reveals the fact 
 that the Somerset Portrait, the Ashbourne Portrait, the Challis 
 Portrait, and the Becker Cast, despite numberless petty dis- 
 crepancies, present a substantial agreement. One can hardly 
 doubt that they all represent one man, and that man AVilliam 
 Shakespeare. But unfortunately for the trustworthiness of our 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 85 
 
 most authentic representations there is no resemblance between 
 any of these and either the Stratford Bust or the Droeshout 
 engraving ! In fact the former is countenanced only by the 
 Chandos and Lumley Portraits ; while the latter may have had 
 the same original as the Felton Portrait, or the Felton may be 
 an idealised portrait from the Droeshout. 
 
 We thus see that we have three classes of portraits : the 
 first being led by the Stratford Bust and followed by the 
 Lumley and the Chandos Portraits ; the second led by the 
 Droeshout engraving and followed by the Felton Portrait ; 
 or vice versa; while the third and by far the most interesting 
 class is led by the Somerset Portrait and followed by the 
 Ashbourne and the Challis Portraits, and most remarkably 
 corroborated by the Becker Cast. How any two of these 
 classes are to be identified I must confess myself unable to 
 suggest. As far as I am aware no adequate experiments have 
 been made. For one thing, I would have a plaster bust 
 modelled after the Becker Cast ; I would restore this, then 
 vulgarise it, till I had got a poor insipid thing, such as is 
 the Stratford Bust ; I would then break off the end of the 
 nose, and elongate the upperdip : and I should then see 
 whether the outcome was anything like that Bust. A great 
 many different experiments of the sort might be suggested ; 
 but the fact that most of these relics are in private collections, 
 and some hardly accessible, renders the task of tentative 
 experiment both costly and difficult. 
 
 I have now to mention the various attempts that have 
 been made in recent times to construct a trustworthy and 
 
86 Shakespeare: tJic Man. 
 
 satisfactory portrait or bust of Shakespeare. The more im- 
 portant of the earlier idealised portraits are the Becker 
 Miniature, Sir Godfrey Kneller's Portrait after the Chandos, 
 presented by that artist to Dryden, Sir Joshua Reynolds' 
 Portrait after the same, painted for Bishop Newton, and the 
 Hunt Portrait, now in the ante-room of Shakespeare's birth- 
 room at Stratford. The last is believed to have been taken 
 from the Stratford Bust, probably for something connected 
 with the Stratford Jubilee. If so, it is singular that the nose 
 of the bust, which is fairly arched, is not reproduced in the 
 painting. It is, however, a very pleasing portrait ; and its 
 benignity and intelligence are very poorly represented in any 
 of the photographic prints taken from it that I have seen. 
 The one in Mr. J. Hain Friswell's Life Portraits has most 
 unfortunately curtailed the magnificent forehead of the original. 
 To these we must add Schemaker's Statue in Westminster 
 Abbey and Roubiliac's Statuette, modelled for Garrick. The 
 last furnishes the bust of our image-makers. 
 
 It is remarkable, but a fact, that the Tercentenary of 
 Shakespeare's birth produced no work of art, either portrait 
 or bust, which deserves mention here : nor since that time 
 has anything of the kind been attempted in England, save 
 Mr. Armistead's relievo of Shakespeare on the east side of 
 the Albert Memorial.* America, however, is favourably con- 
 trasted with England in this particular. The Americans had 
 many years ago testified to their enthusiasm for Shakespeare 
 
 * Another statue has since been placed in Leicester Square. It appears 
 to be taken from Schemaker's. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 87 
 
 by producing a fine bust of him, modelled by Mr. Greenough 
 after the Caen Portrait, which had been discovered by one 
 Mr. Joy, and brought by him to Boston. Since that time their 
 appreciation of Shakespeare's genius, and their interest in all 
 that concerns him, have been continually on the increase. 
 In April, 1872, a bronze statue, executed by Mr. J. Q. A. 
 Ward, an eminent American sculptor, was placed in Central 
 Park, New York, and inaugurated with the usual ceremonies 
 of unveiling and speech-making. From that time to the 
 present this work has been a constant subject of controversy. 
 On receiving a photograph of it from a friend in Philadelphia 
 I was at once struck with its feebleness and untruth. It 
 suggested to me a stern philosophic student, and certainly 
 not a man of acute observation, ready wit and hilarious 
 temperament. Its faults are so admirably summed up by a 
 writer in Lippincotf s Magazine that I offer no apology for 
 making the following extract from his article. Mr. William 
 R. O'Donovan writes > 
 
 The ideal in art, simply stated, means the portrayal of certain things 
 in nature, giving due prominence to the characteristics in the order of 
 their importance. Applying this proposition to Sculpture, a portrait- 
 statue of Shakespeare should be a just expression of his individuality, 
 based upon such portraits of him as exist. * * * Beginning 
 with the head of the statue, the first thing that strikes one is the facial 
 angle, which instead of approximating to the perpendicular line which 
 distinguishes the highest Caucasian type, slopes backward, giving the angle 
 of the lower races. A line drawn from the tube of the ear to the point of 
 the chin will be found longer than one drawn from the same point to the 
 prominence of the frontal bone, thus giving undue importance to the 
 masticating apparatus, the teeth and jaws, which not only detracts from 
 
88 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 the dignity of the head, but at once precludes all possibility of its expressing 
 intellectuality. * * Again, the head of the statue, as 
 
 viewed from the front, * * is a compressed head, somewhat 
 less than the usual width, and from the angle of the lower jaw to the 
 parietal bone the line is almost straight, giving an insipidity of expression. 
 * The artist has modeled one side of the face from the other, 
 making them as near alike as he could, thus [violating a great principle 
 of nature and) departing from a most noticeable feature in the mask, &c. 
 
 and the writer shows how utterly untrue to the principal guides 
 (the Stratford Bust, the Becker Mask, &c.) is Mr. Ward's work. 
 He then attacks the poise of the figure, the trunk and the legs; 
 and after some columns of very trenchant but just criticism, 
 he closes with this peroration : 
 
 Shakespeare divined alike the motives of the boor and the king, the 
 tenderest emotions of the most fragrant womanhood and the profoundest 
 depths of sensuousness. As he was the greatest of poets, we may well 
 believe him to have been the manliest of men, serene and gentle in 
 conscious power, and thoroughly human, with inclinations as deep and 
 varied as his thoughts. Let the reader filled with such impressions turn 
 to this poor image and seek for one responsive thought. The opposite 
 of every quality of .Shakespeare will be suggested — first effort, the Philoso- 
 pher, not the Poet, reason, not song ; then self-assertion, rather than 
 conscious power. The head is bowed in contemplation, as if the mind 
 were digesting something just read ; the mouth is compressed and the eyes 
 are distended ; in every part of the figure there is exaggeration and effort 
 without definite purpose. 
 
 Such is Mr. O'Donovan's judgment on the first statue of 
 Shakespeare attempted in America : and so far as the photo- 
 graph enables me to appreciate the various points he discusses, 
 it seems to me a dispassionate and objective judgment. 
 
 The last contribution to the portraiture of Shakespeare 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 89 
 
 which I shall bring before you is also American : this is the 
 so-called American Mask, being an integration of the Becker 
 Mask, by Mr. William Page of New York. I subjoin an 
 account of it which was published in The New York Herald 
 and several other American journals of the time. 
 
 Over two years ago a distinguished gentleman called upon Mr. William 
 Page, the artist, to ask him to paint a picture of Shakespeare. Upon 
 consenting to perforin such a task, Mr. Page had only in mind such 
 materials as the Droeshout print, the Chandos portrait and the Stratford 
 bust afforded for the composition of the work. 
 
 Finding, afterwards, that Messrs. J. Q. A. Ward and Launt Thompson, 
 the sculptors, had each a photograph of a certain mask of Shakespeare, 
 which was an object of some speculation to them just then, on account of 
 their joint competition in furnishing a model for the statue of Shakespeare 
 to be erected in the Central Park, he visited their studios and examined 
 what was indeed to him a revelation. Both his brother artists asserted 
 they had not sufficient data to settle the authenticity of the mask. Mr. 
 Ward had availed himself of his photograph to a certain extent in the 
 beginning, but later, feeling uncertain respecting it, he laid it aside, long 
 before his model was perfected. 
 
 Finishing his picture for the gentleman mentioned, which the latter 
 wished to have approximated in the general character to the Chandos 
 portrait, Mr. Page commenced the magnum opus of his life. He soon 
 obtained from England some twelve or thirteen different views of the 
 Mask, a photograph of the Chandos as made by the Arundel Society, and 
 the information concerning Becker's discovery, &c, which has already been 
 set forth. When he had fairly entered upon his work, the whole matter 
 seemed more and more plausible — the authenticity of the mask, its 
 resemblance to the Droeshout, the Chandos and the Stratford bust. It was 
 no easy process to properly fill up cavity after cavity from which the original 
 pieces were wanting in the Becker Mask and still preserve or rather revive 
 them in his own. Had Becker's Mask happily occupied his studio then, 
 much of this trouble mic;ht have been obviated and the opportunity of 
 
 N 
 
90 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 terminating His labor at an earlier day been given him. It was left for 
 him to overcome these difficulties. 
 
 The American Mask is about two feet long, and were a figure of 
 proportionate size made for it the whole would stand seventeen feet high. 
 Never was there so wonderfully expressive and majestic a face as this. In 
 it nothing is omitted ; nothing is made out by negation. The veins, the 
 wrinkles in the skin, the indications of the muscles under the skin, the 
 smallest part recognizable to the naked eye, are given there with the same 
 ease and exactness, with the same prominence and the same subordination, 
 as they would be cast from nature — i. e., in nature itself. Alternate action 
 and repose are admirably displayed in it. Now the lids seem about to 
 open, the shadow of a smile appears to linger on the lips ; now again the 
 face is grave and meditative. There is a harmony, a unity of spirit, diffused 
 throughout the wondrous mass and every part of it, which is the glory of 
 it. It has the freedom, the variety, the stamp of nature. There is no 
 ostentation, no stiffness, no over-labored finish. Every part is in its place 
 and degree and put to its proper use. 
 
 It is said, that a side view recals the profile of Julius Csesar ; 
 the front view, the countenance of Napoleon I. 
 
 As the American Mask reproduces with scrupulous nicety 
 every detail in the original, save such as Mr. Page refers to the 
 decomposition of the face or to accidental injury to the plaster, 
 it exhibits, of course, the long scar on the forehead over the 
 right eye. It has been half seriously suggested that this is the 
 matter to which Shakespeare refers in the 112th Sonnet : 
 
 Your love and pity doth th' impression fill 
 Which vulgar scandal stampt upon my brow ; 
 
 as if the blemish had been attributed to a discreditable source, 
 as a tavern brawl, and the bard had been thought in danger 
 of ' gliding almost imperceptibly from the world,' like the late 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 91 
 
 Mr. Bardell in Picktvick. Mr. Thorns will, I doubt not, hail 
 this discovery as fresh evidence that Shakespeare had been 
 a soldier; and Mr. Gerald Massey will find in the Becker 
 Mask and the 112th Sonnet the needed confirmation of his 
 view that some lines in John Davies' Paper's Complaint refer to 
 to Shakespeare. I give the lines in extenso, because Mr. Massey 
 imposed on his readers a garbled version of them. ( The Secret 
 Drama of Shakespeare 's Sonnets, &c, 1872, Familiar Epistle &c.) 
 
 But, Fame reports, ther's one (forthcomming, yet) 
 That's comming forth with A r o tes of better Sett ; 
 And of this Nature ; Who, both can, and will 
 With descant, more in tune, me fairely fill. 
 And if a senselesse creature (as I am ; 
 And, so am made, by those whome thus I blame) 
 May judgment give, from those that know it well, 
 His Notes for Arte and Judgement do excell. 
 Well fare thee man of Arte, and World of Witt, 
 That by supremest Mercy livest yet ; 
 Vet, dost but live; yet, livst thou to the end: 
 But, so thou paist for Time, which thou dost spend, 
 That the deere Treasure of thy precious Skills 
 The World with pleasure and with profitl fills. 
 Thy long-wing'd, active and ingenious Sprigkt 
 Is ever Tinvring to the highest height 
 Of Witt, and Arte ; to beautifie my face : 
 So, deerely gracest life for lifes deere Grace. * 
 
 * I quote from The Scourge of Folly, 1620, pp. 231 & 232. The allusion 
 is thought by Dr. Brinsley Nicholson to be to Raleigh, who was in the Tower 
 from 1603 to 1615. The poem was first printed in 4to in 161 1, and therefore 
 too early for Cartwiight. All that Mr. Massey says of it is wide of the mark. 
 Besides omitting, without notice, some lines from the heart of his quotation, 
 he fancies that Davies, as Paper, is speaking in his own proper person. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 MATTERS PERSONAL TO SHAKESPEARE.* 
 
 
 O all true lovers of Shakespeare the most glorious thing 
 about ' the man ' is that his feet of clay are hidden 
 from us by the impenetrable cloud of ages, while his 
 Jovine head shines for us by its own light in his deathless 
 works. + After the lapse of two centuries and a half of gropings 
 into the vulgar life and outward seeming of the man, it is 
 happily quite hopeless to 'draw his frailties from their dread 
 abode.' It is very little indeed we may be said to know of him : 
 and the very scantiness of our knowledge becomes the occasion 
 of a doubt, whether the man who was in real truth the author 
 of those works could have passed away from his surroundings 
 without leaving some traces to shew that such a genius had 
 
 * Part of this chapter was published in Notes &> Queries, 5 tli S. i. 81. 
 
 -f- A most accomplished lady, who went to her longed-for rest eleven 
 years ago, wrote me several letters on Lewes' Life of Goethe. In one she 
 thus remarks on Shakespeare : ' I have oftentimes grieved that so little was 
 known of the inner life, the daily surroundings, of our own Shakespeare : 
 now I thank Heaven devoutly for all that is untold. We have the golden 
 head of our idol ; if the feet were of clay, let none dare to uncover them. 
 But he could never have been like Goethe.' 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 93 
 
 lived amongst us. Chambers, in the article to which reference 
 has been already made (p. 55), gave this doubt a better ex- 
 pression than it has since received from the pen of any other 
 writer. He says : 
 
 On the one hand, research has traced his life from the cradle to the 
 grave, and by means of tradition, legal documents, records, and inscrip- 
 tions, [has] formed a very accurate skeleton biography; while, on the other 
 hand, with the single exception of Ben Jonson, records and [with the ex- 
 ception of a few anecdotes noted by Manningham and Aubrey, and later 
 by Oldys] even traditions are silent upon his walk and conversation ; 
 and though his signature has been several times disinterred, his whole 
 correspondence, if he ever wrote a letter, has sunk like lead beneath the 
 dark waters of oblivion, [leaving not so much as a] sentence that might 
 give a faint echo of Hamlet. Now this, to say the least, is singular to the 
 very last degree. The unsurpassed brilliancy of the writer throws not one 
 si>igle spark to make noticeable the quiet uniform mediocrity of the man. Is 
 it more difficult to suppose that Shakespeare was not the author of the poetry 
 ascribed to him, than to account for the fact that there is nothing in the 
 recorded or traditionary life of Shakespeare which in any way connects the 
 poet with the man ? 
 
 To this sort of argument Professor Hiram Corson thus 
 replies in The Cornell Review (May, 1875): 
 
 Such testimony is more abundant in the case of Shakespeare than is 
 any similar contemporary and immediately subsequent testimony, in the 
 case of almost any other author of the time, either in English or in 
 European Literature, who was not connected 7uith state affairs. The per- 
 sonal history of a mere author, with no influence at court, was not considered 
 of sufficient importance to be recorded, in those days when the court was 
 everything, and the individual man without adventitious recommendations 
 nothing. 
 
 We are certainly bound to give due weight to this con- 
 sideration ; and if it can be shewn that Jonson, as Poet 
 
94 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 Laureate, or as reversionary (and virtual) Master of the Revels, 
 was (however indirectly) 'connected with public affairs,' we 
 need not be surprised to find the main facts of his life as well 
 known as those of Raleigh's; while the trail of the greater 
 meteor has almost entirely faded out. But I cannot discern 
 in Ben's status an adequate reason for this enormous difference. 
 It is true that we owe some of the traces of his career to his 
 relations with the powerful and great. One of his extant 
 autographs is a letter of two folio pages addressed by him to 
 the Earl of Salisbury; and its preservation is unquestionably 
 due to the rank and eminence of its recipient. But Ben's 
 situation as a suppliant from prison was not exceptional ; nor 
 did Shakespeare enjoy an immunity from those dangers which 
 attended upon all theatrical performances. Every dramatist in 
 those days was wont to use old examples for the representation 
 of modern instances, and, as it were, teach a lesson in current 
 politics by pointing the moral of an ancient story. In doing 
 this he could not be always sure that neither the sock nor the 
 buskin would tread upon the corns of some influential states- 
 man or courtier. In fact, we know that Shakespeare did thus 
 put contemporary politics on his stage ; but we have not a 
 scrap in his handwriting soliciting a favour, or suing for an 
 indulgence. The nearest thing to a letter from Shakespeare 
 which remains to us is a letter addressed to him by his son-in- 
 law's father. 
 
 But in the case of Ben Jonson, there are not only many 
 extant letters written and signed by himself, but autograph 
 manuscripts of The Tares of the Hoivers (The Tivelvth Nights 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 95 
 
 JRevells), 1604, signed at the end by Ben Jonson : The Masque of 
 Queenes, 1609, with his name on the title-page: The Masque 
 of the Mctamorphosd Gipsies, and several of his poems, are in 
 the British Museum Old Royal Collection, 17 B. xxxi, and 
 18 A xlv; and Harleian Collection, 4955. Perhaps there is a 
 reason why the original manuscript of a Masque was more 
 likely to be preserved than that of a Play : viz., that the 
 manager or prompter might use the latter, the actors using 
 plats:* while that of the Masque would probably remain in 
 the possession of the author, who would himself conduct the 
 private or semi-private performance. But we should still have 
 to answer these questions: Why should not Shakespeare have 
 written Masques % Why should not the original of a poem by 
 Shakespeare be preserved as we know some of Ben Jonson's 
 were 1 Evidently, the discrepancy is not yet explained. 
 
 It must be observed that, in the matter of Plays, Jonson's 
 
 * When a play was rough-drafted it was submitted to the Master of 
 the Revels for his censorship. He cancelled what he did not approve 
 and wrote his directions in the margin. In compliance with these the 
 author wrote insertions which were attached to the draft, and the whole was 
 submitted to the censor. There is one manuscript drama extant which 
 has been so served: viz., Sir Thomas More (Harleian Collection, No. 7368). 
 The play was then copied on pasteboards for the players. These were 
 called flats, or cards. In Hamlet v, 1, 'to speak by the card' (an 
 expression misunderstood by the Johnsonian critics) means just 'to speak 
 no more than is set down' (iii, 2). Not more than half-a-dozen original 
 plats are extant. Three of these were fac-similied for Mr. Halliwell in 
 i860: viz., The Battle of Alcazar (attributed to Peele), Frederick and 
 Basilea, and The Dead Mail's Fortune. The last two of these plays are 
 lost. The plat of the third contains the earliest notice of Burbage as an 
 actor, and that of the first gives the names of some of Alleyn's company. 
 
gG Shakespeare; the Man. 
 
 manuscripts have shared the same fate as Shakespeare's: but 
 we know more about the former than the latter. We know that 
 'they were carefully guarded by their author with a view to 
 publication, and that they were destroyed by fire in the year in 
 which Shakespeare died.* I do not know whether the suggestion 
 has ever been made before, but it is surely worth consideration 
 whether Ben had not the custody of Shakespeare's manuscripts 
 for the same purpose as his own. Whom could Shakespeare 
 have found so fit as Jon son to be his literary executor and 
 editor, both as the chief friend of the author and as the chief 
 scholar of his day in dramatic literature 1 I am strongly per- 
 suaded of this, that, if our bard did not carry his manuscripts 
 to New Place, he left them in London to the care of his one 
 faithful friend. Shakespeare died April 23, 16 16, O. S. : Ward, 
 the Stratford vicar, says that he died of a fever consequent on a 
 merry meeting and hard drinking in company with Michael 
 Drayton and Ben Jonson : (Diary, arranged by Dr. Severn, 
 1839, p. 183). Ben was not improbably still at New Place 
 when Shakespeare died. Now, if Shakespeare's manuscripts 
 were then at New Place, it seems to me not unlikely that Ben 
 took them with him to London. We have then two contin- 
 gencies, in both of which he would have the custody of 
 Shakespeare's manuscripts for editing and printing, and, if so, 
 they were all destroyed in the fire at Ben's house. This is, in 
 my judgment, a far more probable supposition than that of 
 Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, that Shakespeare's granddaughter took 
 
 * I state this on Clifford's authority. 
 
Shakespeare : the Man. 97 
 
 them with her to the seat of her second husband, Abingdon 
 Hall, now the property of Lord Overstone, and that they are 
 now mouldering away behind one of the ancient oaken panels 
 of that mansion. I do not wonder that the noble owner 
 regards the proposed search as a wild-goose-chase comparable 
 to that of the lamented Delia Bacon.* 
 
 Nor yet — either in manuscript or in print — do we find 
 any mention of Shakespeare's personal appearance till we have 
 passed out of the period of testimony into that of tradition ; 
 and in this we have but one, and that a very indefinite, note on 
 the subject. Aubrey, to whose painstaking research we owe so 
 much, (though he lived too late by more than half a century 
 to have direct knowledge of any fact about Shakespeare), 
 mentions the tradition that 'he was a handsome well-shapt 
 man.' In the absence of any evidence whatever rebutting this 
 tradition, we are bound to accept it. Yet, so far from doing so, 
 the commentators have been busy at the discreditable task of 
 manufacturing what they call ' obscure traditions,' in order to 
 prove that Shakespeare was ill-shaped, if not ugly : and worse, 
 they have done their utmost to detract from his fair fame, 
 partly by reliance on unauthenticated stories of gallantry, and 
 partly by conclusions extorted, without the least judgment or 
 fairness, from his Sonnets. 
 
 To shew how easy it is to manufacture such pseudo-bio- 
 graphy, take the so-called ' obscure traditions ' of Shakespeare's 
 lameness. In a long and elaborate article on ' Ben Jonson's 
 Quarrel with Shakespeare,' which was published in the North 
 
 * Illustrations of the Life of Shakespeare, parti., 1874, pp. 79-80. 
 
 O 
 
98 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 BritisJi Review, July, 1870, and which appears to have been 
 claimed by the late Mr. Richard Simpson (Notes &> Queries, 
 4th S. viii. 3, col. 1), it is stated, in a foot-note to p. 411, that : 
 
 There is some obscure tradition of a defect in Shakespeare's legs, to 
 which he is supposed to allude in the sonnet [s] ; 
 
 — and the writer finds an allusion to this defect in Jonson's 
 Poetaster, where Chloe asks Crispinus, 'Are you a gentleman 
 born 1 ' and expresses satisfaction at sight of his little legs. At 
 least, if that be not the writer's meaning, I am unable to assign 
 a reason for the foot-note. 
 
 Now there never was any tradition on the subject. The 
 first writer who makes mention of Shakspeare's lameness was 
 Capell. He, however, takes credit to himself for the hypothesis, 
 that when Shakspeare wrote, in Sonnet 37 : 
 
 So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite, &c. 
 and in Sonnet 89 : 
 
 Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt, &c. 
 
 he was signalizing his own personal defect. Waldron enter- 
 tained the same opinion, and ventilated the subject in the 
 Introduction to his Edition of Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd. 
 A correspondent of Notes 6^ Queries (5th S. iii. 134), who 
 mentions this fact, adds : 
 
 Waldron's opinions were extensively taken up and circulated by the 
 reviews and magazines of the period : and it was this circumstance, 
 probably, that gave rise to the so-called 'tradition.' Waldron backed 
 his argument by referring to the commonly received opinion that Shakspeare, 
 as an actor, played no leading characters, confining his representations to 
 parts requiring no activity, as the ghost in Hamlet, Adam in As You Like It, 
 
Shakespeare; the Ulan. 99 
 
 and kings in general. Upon the tradition that Shakspeare played Adam 
 he laid great stress, since Adam (he says) was manifestly lame : 
 
 ' There is a poor old man 
 Who after me hath many a weary step 
 Limp'd in pure love.' 
 
 After Waldron the hypothesis met with little notice and 
 no entertainment. Malone, however, speaks of it thus : 
 
 A late editor, Mr. Capell, &c, conjectured that Shakspeare was literally 
 lame ; but the expression appears only to have been figurative. So again 
 in Coriolanus : 
 
 I cannot help it now, 
 
 Unless by using means I lame the foot 
 Of our design. 
 
 Again in As You Like' It : 
 
 Which I did store to be my foster-nurse, 
 When service should in my old limbs lie lame. 
 
 In the 89th Sonnet the poet speaks of his friends imputing a fault to him 
 of which he was not guilty, and yet he says, he would acknowledge it ; so 
 (he adds) were he to be described as lame, however untruly, yet rather than 
 his friend should appear in the wrong, he would immediately halt. If 
 Shakspeare was in truth lame, he had it not in his power to halt occasionally 
 for this or any other purpose. The defect must have been fixed and 
 permanent. 
 
 So far Malone. From the time when Malone's common- 
 sense note appeared in the variorum edition of 182 1, (vol. xx. 
 p. 261), Capell's ridiculous fancy met with no countenance. 
 Some fifteen years later, however, my late friend, the Rev. Wm. 
 Harness, the Editor of Shakespeare, took up the neglected 
 crotchet, and gave it careful nursing. In his Life of Shakespeare 
 he re-states the hypothesis as a fact, but without any mention 
 of its author ! Mr. Harness's remarks consist mainly of an 
 
ioo Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 answer to Malone. 'It appears,' he writes, 'from two places 
 in his Sonnets that he was lamed by accident.' He then quotes 
 the two lines from the Sonnets, and thus proceeds: 
 
 This imperfection would necessarily have rendered him unfit to appear 
 as the representative of any characters of youthful ardour in which rapidity 
 of movement or violence of exertion was demanded ; and would oblige him 
 to apply his powers to such parts as were compatible with his measured and 
 impeded action. Malone has most inefficiently attempted to explain away 
 
 the palpable meaning of the above lines Surely many an 
 
 infirmity of the kind may be skilfully concealed ; or only become visible in 
 the moments of hurried movement. Either Sir Walter Scott or Lord 
 Byron might, without any impropriety, have written the verses in question. 
 They would have been applicable to either of them. Indeed the lameness 
 of Lord Byron was exactly such as Shakespeare's might have been ; and I 
 remember as a boy that he selected those speeches for declamation which 
 would not constrain him to the use of such exertions as might obtrude the 
 defect of his person into notice. 
 
 Curiously enough, the biographer himself was, during the 
 years of my acquaintance with him, too lame for the dis- 
 simulation which he imagined to have afforded Shakspeare 
 a valuable resource. Mr. Harness having thus converted the 
 foolish conjecture into a fact, it became a current remark, that 
 our three greatest poets were afflicted with lameness ! 
 
 In 1859, Mr. W. J. Thorns added his little quota to float 
 the tradition. In Notes &> Queries (2nd S. vii. 333) he suggested 
 that Shakspeare's lameness might have been occasioned by his 
 soldiering : 
 
 The accident may well have happened to him while sharing in some of 
 those encounters from witnessing which, as I believe, he acquired that 
 knowledge of military matters of which his writings contain such abundant 
 evidence. 
 
Shakespeare: the Man. 101 
 
 By this time the myth had germinated, and was ready for use 
 by any forger of Shakspeare-biography ; and thus it became 
 'an obscure tradition.' After all, the 'obscure tradition' turns 
 out to be so obscure as never to have existed ; the whole truth 
 being that the notion of Shakspeare's lameness was a conjecture 
 of the eighth editor of his works, based upon a most absurd 
 and improbable interpretation of the 37th and 89th Sonnets. 
 
 I am aware that critics of our own day are not at one as to 
 the meaning of ' lame ' and ' lameness ' in these Sonnets. In 
 any interpretation we ought to bear in mind that ' lame ' had 
 then a much wider sense than the word has now. In Jonson's 
 New Inn, iv. 3, we read : 
 
 So pure, so perfect ; as the frame 
 Of all the universe was lame : 
 
 where ' lame ' seems to mean simply out of gear. For one 
 thing ; it would have been much easier for Shakespeare, if he 
 were not lame, to simulate lameness than, if he were lame, to 
 ' skilfully conceal ' it. For my own part, I have not a shadow 
 of doubt that 'lame ' is used metaphorically in Sonnet 37 : and 
 everyone ought to see that ' lameness ' in Sonnet 89 cannot be 
 taken literally without making nonsense of the line in which it 
 occurs. 
 
 It has been reserved for me to inform the world that 
 Shakspeare was crook-backed, for has he not written, in Sonnet 
 90, the line : 
 
 Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow? 
 
 By Fortune's spite, then, he was a hunch-back, and by Fortune's 
 dearest spite, he was a limper ! It has been recently discovered 
 
102 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 in America that Shakspeare had a scar over the left eye, to 
 which he alludes in the same Sonnet : and his ghost appeared 
 thrice to a Stratford gentleman, exhibiting the newly-made gash 
 on the forehead ! * So it is plain we shall have to construct a 
 new Shakspeare, who shall be halt, hunch-backed, and scarred, 
 like his own Richard III. 
 
 * Birmingham Daily Mail, Jan. 9, 1874. 
 
Sntmalarp |>otcg. 
 
 P. 8. — With this list of sixty- four forms of our bard's surname may be 
 compared the following fifty-seven modes in which our Scandinavian friends 
 spell Ipswich. They are taken from the envelopes of letters addressed to 
 Mr. C. T. Townsend, the Danish and Norwegian Consul there. 
 
 Elsfleth, Epshoics, Epshvidts, Epsids, Epsig, Epsvet, Epsvidts, 
 Epwich, Evswig, Ex-wig, Hoispis, Hvisspys, Ibsvi, Ibsvig, Ibsvithse, 
 Ibwich, Ibwigth, Iepsich, Ie yis Wich, Igswield, Igswig, Igswjigh, 
 Ipesvivk, Ipis Wug, Ips Witis, Ipsiwisch, Ipsovich, Ipsveten, Ipsvick, 
 Ipsvics, Ipsvids, Ipsvidts, Ipsvig, Ipsvikh, Ipsvits, Ipsvitx, Ipsvoigh, 
 Ipswch, Ipsweich, Ipswgs, Ipswiche, Ipswick, Ipswict, Ipswiech, Ipswig, 
 Ipswigh, Ipswight, Ipswish, Ipswith, Ipswitz, Ispich, Ispovich, Ispwich, 
 Ixvig, Iysuich, Uibsvich, and Vittspits. 
 
 P. ii. The orthography Shakespeare does, in fact, represent (in the 
 spelling of the time) the received etymology. Dr. R. G. Latham retrenches 
 the e final in his admirable Dictionary ; for which he gave me his reason, 
 viz., that we do not write spear with the e final : he having no more doubt 
 as to the etymology shake (vibro) and spear (hasta) than other philologers 
 — always saving Drs. Charnock and Mackay, and a few other paradoxers. 
 The Georgian editors and commentators adopted the same spelling on the 
 same ground ; most, however, omitting the first e as well as the last. 
 Godwin, who omits the latter e only, thus justifies the procedure : 
 
 A frivolous dispute has been raised respecting the proper way of spelling 
 the name of our great dramatic poet. His own orthography in this 
 point seems to have been unsettled. Perhaps, when the etymology of a 
 proper name is obvious, it becomes right in us to supersede the fancy of 
 the individual, and to follow a less capricious and more infallible guide. 
 
 Preface (p. iii) to Godwin's Life of Chancer, 1804 (second edition). 
 
 P. 14. Shakeshaft is the name of a publican at Latchford near War- 
 rington, and Wagstaffe was the name of several well-known writers of the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the south side of Broad Street, 
 Birmingham, we find both Wagstaff and Breakspear. There are many 
 
[04 Shakespeare : the Man. 
 
 Longstaffs and Shakespeares. The most distinguished of the latter name 
 is Mr. William Shakespeare, an eminent musician and contrapuntist. 
 Since writing my second chapter I have observed some pertinent remarks 
 by Professor J. R. Lowell {lily Study Windows, Sampson Low, 1871, 
 p. 262). He writes : 
 
 " Fautre (sometimes faltre or feutre) means in old French the rest of a 
 lance. Thus in the Roman dit Renart (26517) : 
 
 Et mist sa lance sor le fautre. 
 
 But it also meant a peculiar kind of rest. In .Sir F. Madden' s edition of 
 Gawayne we read : 
 
 Theyjeutred their lances, these knyghtes good ; 
 
 and in the same editor's William and the Werwolf: 
 
 With sper fastened va/euter, him for to spille. 
 
 In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, ' There seems no 
 reason, however, why it [/enter] should not mean the rest attached to the 
 armour.' But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a 'garniture d'une 
 selle pour tenir la lance.' A spear fastened to the saddle gave more deadly 
 weight to the blow. The ' Aim for to spille' implies this. So in Merlin 
 (E. E. Text Soc, p. 488) : 'Than thei toke speres grete and rude, and 
 putte hem in fewtre, and that is the grettest crewel te that oon may do, ffor 
 turnement oweth to be with-oute felonye, and they meved to smyte hem as 
 in mortall werre.' The context shows that the fewtre turned sport into 
 earnest. A citation in Raynouard's Lexique Roman (though wrongly ex- 
 plained by him) directed us to a passage which proves that this particular 
 kind of rest for the lance was attached to the saddle, in order to render the 
 
 blow heavier : — 
 
 Lances a [lege as] arfotis afeutrees 
 Pour plus de dures cottes rendre. 
 
 Branche des Royaux Lignages, 4514-15." 
 
 P. 30, foot-note. This discussion was reported in the Birmingham 
 Daily Press of Tuesday, March 3, 1856. 
 
 P. 48, foot-note. Since this chapter was printed I have received the 
 proof-sheets of Miss Jane Lee's paper "On the Authorship of the Second 
 and Third Parts of Henry VI, and their originals ; " read at a meeting of 
 the New Shakspere Society, October 13, 1876. It does not add much to 
 what we already know, but is a useful summary of what has been written 
 on the subject. 
 
Shakespeare : the Alan. 105 
 
 P. 55, line 22. ' There were probably sceptics of this sort before 1852.' 
 Singer refers to a paper in the Monthly Review, vol. lxxxix, p. 361, 
 &c, and vol. xciii, p. 61, &c, in which an attempt is made to show 
 that Marlow and Shakspeare may have been one and the same person. 
 'This paradox is sustained,' he says, 'by some very specious arguments.' 
 
 Preface to Singer's Edition Hero and Leander, 1821, p. xiii. 
 
 I note also (in respect to p. 63, line 21) that in this Preface Singer 
 does quote from p. 280 of Meres' Palladis Ta?nia. 
 
 P. 60. Chapman employs the same image in his Monsieur Z>' Olive, 
 
 IV. I : 
 
 What is the opinion of the many-headed Be[a]st touching my new 
 adition of Honour? 
 
 The many-headed beast is, of course, Hydra. 
 
 The common sort, the Hydra multitude. — Ariosto's Seven Planets 
 Governing Italie, 4to, 1611. 
 
 Hydra is similarly used by Shakespeare in Henry V, i. 1, and in 
 Coriolanus, iii. I. 
 
 P. 69, foot-note. The reader is referred to some notes on the subject 
 of 'the Inadequate Powers of Portraiture' in Notes 6° Queries, 5th S. iv. 
 363, 416, 496; v. 238, 497 ; vi. 276. The samples there cited thoroughly 
 establish the position, that Ben Jonson's five couplets prefixed to the 
 Droeshout print of Shakespeare were purely conventional, and ought not 
 to be taken as conveying Ben's approbation of the portrait. 
 
 P. 73, 1. 1. The original title of this paper was 'On some recent 
 contributions to the Portraiture of Shakespeare.' Hence the force of the 
 opening sentence. 
 
 P. 93. Since this paper was read to the Royal Society of Literature, Mr. 
 Page has executed a bust of Shakespeare from the Becker Mask. If I may 
 judge from the two photographs of it that I have seen, I must candidly own 
 I do not think it worthy of either poet or sculptor. 
 
 There is also a plaster bust after the Becker Mask by Hermann Linde, 
 which, to judge from a photograph, seems a work of merit. 
 
 P. 100, 1. 23. Lameness has been imputed to Marlow also, and on 
 utterly untrustworthy evidence. 
 
 I' 
 
io6 Shakespeare: the Man. 
 
 I take this opportunity of notifying the following corrections of the 
 text : 
 
 P. I, 1. 5, for "), p. 281," read ", p. 281)." 
 
 P. 7, I. 16, dele "(?)" and add " Shakspire," and "Shakespeare." 
 
 P. 15, 1. 3, for "fewtar's" read "fewtars." 
 
 P- 39) !• f S> f° r "Garrick's" read " Townley's." 
 
 F. 52, second foot-note, for "a player" read "an Actor." 
 
 P. 57, penult. 1. of foot-note, dele the first "1875." 
 
 P. 64, foot-note, for "more" read "most." 
 
 P. 76, 1. 20, prefix "such" to "optical." 
 
 P. 8o, 1. 18, for "he" read "they." 
 
 P. 86, 11. 16 and 28, for " Schemaker's " read " Scheemakers'." 
 
 P. S7, 1. 7, for "was" read "has been." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.* 
 
 SipX®*)®', oiaig aiKiaunv 
 5iaKvai6/.tEvoc rbv /xvpierrj 
 Xpovov aO\Evaw 
 
 Prometheus Vinctus, 93 — 95. 
 
 VEN the few who care for both the integrity and the 
 preservation of Shakespeare's works will form but a 
 very faint notion of the subject of this preliminary! 
 essay from the motto. What can be the outrage which 
 threatens either the one or the other 1 Are not his works, 
 like ' the lexicons of ancient tongues,' ' comprised in a few 
 volumes,' of which millions of copies exist? Yes, indeed; 
 but are they ' immutably fixed 1 ' Nay, more, is it at all likely 
 that they will be immutably fixed 1 That is the doubt which 
 suggested the following remarks. The works of Shakespeare 
 were manifestly written to serve his own personal ends, or at 
 
 * Prefixed as a 'Justification of the Motto,' to The Still Lion. 
 
 t The essay was originally printed in The Birmingham Gazette, June, 
 1867, and subsequently prefixed to the first separate edition of The Still 
 Lion, 1874. In its present place it is preliminary to the essays which 
 constitute Shakespeare the Pooh. 
 
ioS Shakespeare : tlie Book. 
 
 most to serve the narrow ends of his own generation; and, 
 yet, in a higher sense, they were written for all time — to 
 subserve the pleasure and profit of ages to come. Ben Jonson 
 summed this up in the famous line — much staled, and generally 
 misquoted — 
 
 He was not of an age, but for all time. 
 
 Now Jonson meant to say of Shakespeare, that he was 
 both for an age and for all time, which the line as it is often 
 misquoted is made to contradict,* but also that he was not of 
 an age; meaning thereby that, unlike his compeers, he was 
 unconventional and catholic. We have a proverbial saying, 
 1 He is a nice man for a small tea-party' — exquisite expansion 
 of the petit maitre! A man may be that without being of the 
 tea-party; he may likewise be of the tea-party without being 
 that. The early Christians were exhorted to be in the world, 
 not of the world. St. Paul, for example, was not of the world ; 
 yet he was for the world; and many a man of the world lives 
 for himself and not for the world. Things more distinct than 
 of and for it were hard to find. Shakespeare was in the world 
 of his own day; but he was not of it: he lived in an intel- 
 lectual sphere above it, and so lived and wrote for it and for 
 all time. 
 
 Even we of the nineteenth century, or fourth A.S., know 
 very little what will be. We have great faith in the destiny of 
 
 * The most inexcusable case is that of Mr. John Leighton's ' Official 
 Seal for the National Shakespeare Committee of 1864,' the scroll at the 
 base of which bears the misquotation — 
 
 Not for an age, but for all time: 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 109 
 
 Shakespeare's works, and believe that, if they are preserved 
 entire, they will be a most important element among those 
 forces which go to mould the English of the future ; and that 
 what iEschylus is to us Shakespeare will be to those who speak 
 a tongue as yet unknown, when the English of Shakespeare is 
 bound in death. 
 
 A living language is like the mythic Proteus. It is a 
 fluxion : no photography is swift and sharp enough to catch 
 and arrest any one of its infinite and infinitesimal phases. But 
 as in the old fable Proteus caught basking on the sea-shore 
 became oracular, so when at last a language dies it not only 
 becomes a dry logical instrument, but an oracle revealing the 
 history of a people long after every material trace of their 
 existence has vanished from the earth. {Englishman 's Maga- 
 zine, vol. i., p. 49 ; January, 1865.) 
 
 The language we speak and write is not perfectly identical 
 with that employed by Shakespeare. English speech has moved 
 on, and is still moving on towards the goal; and in a period 
 which is incalculable, not for its length, but for want of exact 
 data, it will be as dead as Zend, Sanscrit, Greek, or Latin. It 
 is of no use lamenting this destiny, for it is inevitable. By no 
 other course can a language attain to the rank of a classic 
 tongue. Happily, when a language is dead its literature may 
 survive. How many literatures have been swallowed up already 
 is only known to the Creator of their creators. To deal with 
 two only of those languages, we have reason to be thankful that 
 the sentence executed on Hebrew and Greek spared so large 
 and so grand a fraction of their literatures as Job, David, Isaiah, 
 
no Shakespeare : the Book. 
 
 Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Homer, yEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 
 Aristophanes ! 
 
 ^Eschylus had a narrow escape. He was judged an immortal 
 before his death. The late Mr. Charles Knight thought 
 Shakespeare was judged so too; but we doubt if all the evi- 
 dences that can be gathered from the literatures of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries would prove that he was thought 
 essentially superior to Marlow, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont 
 or Fletcher — all men of the age. Even the most illiterate 
 Greeks who were privileged to live and move in the Athens of 
 Pericles knew that they had a demi-god among them. Every 
 soul in that mighty auditory knew that his ^Eschylus ' was not 
 of an age, but for all time.' Nay, more; ^Eschylus was twice as 
 industrious a writer as Shakespeare. He created, and published 
 in that vast arena, where from twenty to thirty thousand per- 
 sons were always found to enjoy a foretaste of immortality, 
 twice as many tragedies as Shakespeare wrote plays. Above 
 seventy dramas were the pledges of their writer's earthly im- 
 mortality : yet only seven survive. When the first Alexandrine 
 Library was burnt it is said that nearly seventy single exemplars 
 of his tragedies perished. Happily for us the immortality of 
 ^Eschylus was guaranteed by the fact that imperfect copies 
 of seven dramas existed in other libraries. Had they been 
 perfect our Greek scholarship would have been more imper- 
 fect; for nothing short of imperfection in such works could 
 have called into healthy activity the powers of our best 
 Grecians. But only think what a narrow escape this great 
 writer had ! But for the extant seven, we could have known 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. ill 
 
 nothing of him at first hand. At most we might have known 
 that the great Sophocles had a contemporary greater than 
 himself; but we could have had no sufficient evidence to 
 estimate the majesty and sublimity of him whose works had 
 fallen a victim to the ambition of Csesar. 
 
 Now, against such a catastrophe as that, Shakespeare is 
 amply secured. Thank God, there are no single exemplars of 
 any work of his. Compared with the great Greek his works 
 are not so vast — thirty-seven plays, two long poems, a noble 
 collection of sonnets, and a small volume of ' Remains,' con- 
 stitute our whole stock-in-trade. But of the existing exemplars 
 of each work the name is Legion ! At any price from is. up 
 to £100 the book-fancier may appropriate a complete copy of 
 Shakespeare's works. The fount is open to all : come, all ye 
 thirsty souls — be ye prince, poet, gentleman, artisan, labourer, 
 tramp, or what not, here's the work for your money. Here are 
 Warne's Chandos edition, 8vo, in boards, for is, ; Dicks's 
 edition, 8vo, stitched, for is., and in boards for 2s. ; Lenny's 
 edition, 121110, for 2s. 6d, or, if you can afford another 6d., 
 here is Keightley's smaller edition, 12 mo and the Blackfriars 
 edition, 8vo. You had better pay 3^. 6d., and then you may 
 have a better choice : the Globe edition, 8vo, Mrs. Cowden 
 Clarke's edition, 8vo or Lenny's selected edition, 121110. 
 Besides these there is Gray Bell's edition, 8vo, $s. iod., which 
 is now reduced ; and when you get up to 4s. or 5X. you may 
 have the pick of a score of one-volume editions, and so 
 forth, till we mount up to those costly monuments of human 
 enterprise, Boydell's illustrated edition and Mr. Halliwell's 
 
112 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 folio edition, and lastly the original First Folio edition, ac- 
 cessible only to princes and merchant-princes. A thousand 
 Alexandrine conflagrations would not at this present time burn 
 up Shakespeare. 
 
 No ! It is from no such danger that we have to rescue 
 Shakespeare ; it is from a destruction now in progress, and the 
 cause is latent, insidious, slow and sure. The mere destruc- 
 tion of copies is more than compensated by new impressions; 
 but it is precisely because there is this succession, this constant 
 and unstaying process of supplantation and substitution, that 
 the immortality of Shakespeare is in jeopardy. If this cause 
 shall continue, it is demonstrable that Shakespeare's immor- 
 tality can be guaranteed by only one event — the continued 
 practice of reprinting verbatim the First Folio edition. It makes 
 one tremble to think that but for photography there was a bare 
 possibility (perhaps a very small one) of Shakespeare faring 
 like ^Eschylus. It is almost certain that after the lapse of 
 ages every copy which was in existence in the sixteenth, seven- 
 teenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and all which are 
 now extant, will be utterly destroyed. We say Shakespeare's 
 immortality is only guaranteed by the multiplication of copies. 
 Now, from what exemplars are they made 1 ? There is a cause 
 of corruption, constantly in operation, which must sooner or 
 later revolutionize the whole text, viz., the practice of modern- 
 izing the old language, so as to bring it down to the standard 
 of the English of three hundred years later. Where is this to 
 stop? Clearly, nowhere. Language finds no arrest; it must 
 grow or die. The innocent-looking little modifications which 
 
Shakespeare: the Book. 113 
 
 we now introduce into Shakespeare on the plea of textual 
 misprinting will sooner or later themselves require modernizing. 
 No part of the text is safe against these well-intentioned per- 
 versions; and in the meanwhile what becomes of Shakespeare? 
 The one fact which bids fair to secure him against this fate is 
 the multiplication of copies by photography from the folio of 
 1623. There is no one deed in the history of Shakespeare- 
 literature which deserves more thanks than the recent fac-simile 
 reprint of the first folio edition by the photolithographic pro- 
 cess. Few know (as the writer of this volume does) the 
 stupendous difficulties under which the first promoter of that 
 great undertaking laboured. It would be easy to name several 
 gentlemen who were employed in the various departments of 
 that reproduction, to all of whom the greatest credit is due for 
 the conscientious discharge of their several tasks ; but when the 
 history of that reprint shall be written, as written it will be, 
 who will stand out as the originator and the finisher of the 
 work 1 One there was who, at first with little aid and no 
 sympathy, originated that reprint, and after infinite labour, 
 miscarriage, vexation and loss, as well of health as of capital, 
 succeeded in carrying it to a successful issue ; and his name 
 is Howard Staunton. 
 
 To his indefatigable and persistent exertions is it mainly due 
 that Shakespeare is delivered from one source of destruction. 
 One shoal is weathered : another is imminent; but it is one 
 that can only acquire importance in the event of Mr. Staunton 
 suffering a final check-mate in this new chess-game, i. e., in 
 the event of all verbatim reprints of the first folio being 
 
 Q 
 
ii4 Shakespeare: the Hook. 
 
 destroyed.* This source of destruction is contingent only ; but 
 whatever it is let us diagnose it. It is here that Shakespeare 
 appears in the character of the modern Prometheus. He has 
 committed the heinous offence of endowing men with the 
 irvpbQ ai-Xag of heaven, the blaze of the fire of genius. For 
 this the Olympian Sire, who seems to represent Persistent 
 Conventionality, is angry, and he sends down on the Bard two 
 ministers of vengeance. The destinies of Literature are com- 
 mitted to certain publishing coteries; these rule the Reviews; 
 and the Reviews forge the thunderbolts of criticism, which at 
 one time wound a Byron or a Shelley, and at another kill a 
 Keats; or pour the vials of vengeance on an offending party; 
 as once on the so-called Lake Poets. The mischief is, that 
 Freedom and Power, the attributes of Zeus, belong (for a time) 
 to those who have not the genius to appreciate the philosophy 
 of mind and language, and thus to integrate the fluxion of 
 written speech. Accordingly these Procrustean censors have 
 determined, and seem determined to determine to all eternity, 
 that the text of Shakespeare shall be measured by a standard 
 which is hardly adequate to the criticism of Tennyson or 
 Robert Browning. The English of Shakespeare in ten thou- 
 sand places is not what now passes for good English ; therefore, 
 say the censors, it must be made good English. In a small 
 
 * Our friend suffered another kind of 'final check-mate' during the 
 printing of this work. He died on June 22nd, 1874. Against the other 
 Messrs. Chatto and Windus have guaranteed us by the issue of a reduced 
 reproduction of Mr. Staunton's Folio : 1876, price Ss. 6c/. Prefixed to it is 
 a very accurate and lucid account of the First Folio, from the pen of Mr. 
 ]. O. Halliwell Phillipps. But why is Mr. Staunton not mentioned? 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 1 1 5 
 
 percentage of cases they allow the possibility of an obsolete 
 phraseology; but not at all as to the mass. Where they do 
 not and cannot understand him he is assumed to have fallen 
 a prey to his own impetuosity or carelessness, or to the blun- 
 dering of a compositor, and it is their task to set him right. 
 The sluice is thus opened, and Shakespeare's language is 
 inundated with words and phrases, some of which, indeed, 
 he might have used ; but, so far as we know, did not use : 
 the poetry and special sense are concurrently eliminated in 
 every spot where the critic sets his mark; and instead of 'the 
 text of Shakespeare,' England prints and publishes ' the text 
 of Shakespeare restored.'' Restored! The very word suggests 
 a similar process applied to architecture : indeed, the modern 
 mode of restoring Shakespeare cannot be better illustrated than 
 by comparing him to such an edifice as Beverley Minster: 
 where not only is something put in the place of what has fallen 
 a victim to time and chance, but much of what remains of the 
 old work is ruthlessly removed to make room for an imitation 
 of the old work by some village stonemason, who has no 
 knowledge of or feeling for his business. 
 
 But the parallel between Shakespeare and Prometheus may 
 be worked out in greater detail. One motive to the persecu- 
 tion of greatness is the jealousy of excellence, a sentiment 
 which is begot between the Sense of Inferiority and the Love 
 of Power. To be confronted with an author whose works have 
 stimulated in his admirers for eight or nine generations a 
 passion of gratitude and worship, and to find his works strange 
 and uncouth, his phrases unusual (if not unintelligible) and his 
 
1 1 6 Shakespeare : the Book. 
 
 allusions obscure, is to suffer humiliation. The critic of con- 
 scious intellect and learning is offended that Shakespeare should 
 have won a world of worshippers by works which he finds but 
 imperfectly intelligible. He naturally seeks to disabuse those 
 worshippers, to convict them of Fetish-worship and to bring 
 down their idol to their own level. He will at least show them 
 •who is a power in the world ; he will explain and correct this 
 writer and banish to the limbo of oblivion whatever he cannot 
 understand. As to the unfathomable, which some believe to 
 be in Shakespeare, he says, 'Away with it to the unfathomable 
 abyss — like to like!' All the while the critic is getting by 
 a side wind a considerable reputation for his disinterested, 
 courageous, and sensible conduct. This battered idol is all 
 very well for Buddha; but he is very ugly, and (by your leave) 
 the artist shall mend his nose and transport him to the back 
 garden. Or the Olympian plan shall be tried, which is preferable 
 on the whole, seeing that (as Oceanus says to Prometheus) it is 
 not profitable to kick against the pricks,* for in the world of 
 letters the press is exposed to the goad of public opinion, and 
 that Shakespeare is a demi-god and was an inspired poet, is 
 a part of its creed. It is to be acknowledged, then, that this 
 Promethean Shakespeare is a god; he had, it is allowed, great 
 genius and power; he did give you fire from heaven and teach 
 
 * This expression, which occurs in the account of the Conversion of 
 St. Paul {Acts ix, 5), is nearly akin to those in the Prometheus Vinctus and 
 the Agamemnon. It sounds strangely out of place in sequence with our 
 Lord's declaration : for it is evident that both our Lord and the Apostle could 
 not be at once the driver and the driven. If St. Paul were the persecutor 
 — the 'pursuer' — it would not be in his power to 'kick against the pricks.' 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 1 1 7 
 
 you all arts. But look you, he is ungrammatical and profane, 
 he had no knowledge of the classics, and his geography was 
 very shaky. However, we think that much of this may have 
 been caused by the blunders of reporters, copyists and printers. 
 So the god is taken captive by Zeus, the public press, and 
 handed over to the tender mercies of two emissaries, not as of 
 old Strength and Force, but Duiness and Ignorance ; and these 
 have it in charge to manacle him hand and foot to the rock of 
 Pedantry. But these gentlemen, though very able in their way, 
 are not blacksmiths, so Hephaestus (Vulcan), the Philologer, is 
 called in to help. A very unwilling and altogether unsympa- 
 thizing agent is he. He tells them plainly, ' I really have not 
 the heart to bind my fellow-god to this weather-beaten cliff. 
 Yet I must on every account take heart for this business, for it 
 is no trifle to disobey the orders of the Sire.' The prejudices 
 of the Press infect him, and we find him clenching manacle 
 after manacle on the suffering god ; like Home Tooke teaching 
 us that Frenchmen are (according to Shakespeare) brayed in a 
 mortar, or at least that Bertram was : {Diversions of Parley, 
 1805, ii. 50); or like Mr. F. J. Furnivall asserting that Timon's 
 'wappen'd widow' was merely wrapt or shrouded in her widow's 
 weeds: {Alhenceum, May, 1873) :f with many other things quite 
 as absurd. Philology perverted and degraded does the work 
 of Conventionality, Duiness and Ignorance, till at last Duiness 
 gives Prometheus a left-handed compliment to his greatness — 
 
 f We are glad to learn that our friend has withdrawn that explanation. 
 Dr. Stratmann, however, gives the same explanation of Shakespeare's 
 ' wappen'd widow.' 
 
1 1 8 Shakespeare: the /look. 
 
 ' How can mortals ever lighten thine agonies'? By no true title 
 do the divinities call thee Prometheus;^;- thou thyself wilt need 
 a Prometheus to help thee to escape this work of craft* How 
 true that is ! None but the man of genius can really help 
 Shakespeare. It is only the hero who discerns, and has power 
 to enfranchise, the hero. 
 
 The truth is, that the Sire, as the Choragus says, is adminis- 
 tering new conventions, vsoxpolc vopoiQ Kparvvet and wiping out 
 those things which men used to think great, rd irplv wiXibpia (Yi<jT6i 
 Here is, indeed, the gist of the crime against Shakespeare. The 
 continual ebb and flow of language, in its growth from the 
 conventional to the classic, is the cause of all the evil that has 
 befallen him. It is to the strong-armed and gentle-hearted 
 Hephaestus that we must look for help. At present he is but 
 lame — we know who has lamed him — but sooner or later 
 those rivets will be undone ; that transfixing bolt will be with- 
 drawn ; the idiom, idiotisms and, above all, the idiasms of 
 Shakespeare will be thoroughly understood, and so much that 
 now goes by the board in all modern editions will be restored 
 with intelligent reverence. This is the great work that is com- 
 mitted to all who have discernment or faith in the great and 
 suffering bard. 
 
 In this case, the cause of Prometheus is the cause of our 
 Mother Tongue. It is impossible to doubt that a great future 
 is in store for the English language. A time must come when 
 that language will be the language of half the world. Future 
 literatures are bound up in its fate. Now, without exception, 
 Shakespeare, of all who have expressed their thoughts in it, 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 119 
 
 knew best how to use it. It is not from a county, a parish or 
 a household that a language becomes enriched and defined. 
 It is rather from the works of great popular writers. Hence it 
 is that language acquires healthy growth and development. We 
 can readily see, then, how large a factor in the future of English 
 will be the works of Shakespeare, and it is now a question for 
 us whether that factor shall be of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries, having Shakespeare's proper impress and power, or 
 whether it shall be a stunted and modernised Shakespeare that 
 is to have that influence. It is now a question for us, whether 
 we shall take side with ' the Sire ' (the public critic or the 
 press) or with Vulcan, freed from the tyranny of Zeus — whether 
 the Promethean Bard, who has endowed us with so many 
 heavenly gifts, shall be bound and impaled on the rock of 
 pedantry or of conventionalism, or whether he shall be free 
 and powerful, as he is god-like and benevolent. 
 
 I say that question is for us. But who are we % It is little 
 we can do against the tyranny of 'the Sire.' We may at least 
 do our little without fearing his censure or coveting his praise. 
 Others may cast in their lot with him ; may exalt Marlow or 
 even Addison, and depress Shakespeare ; may sneer at the 
 Promethean fire as George III did, calling it 'poor stuff,' or 
 scoff at Prometheus himself, as a late noble lord did, calling 
 him ' Silly Billy.' We, for our parts, will take our stand with 
 him against the criticasters and the detractors, and will not 
 relax in our exertions to enfranchise Shakespeare ; though it 
 will not be our fortune to proclaim 'Prometheus Unbound:' 
 'for he that shall deliver is not yet.' 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE IDIOSYNCRASY OF HAMLET. 
 
 N the Tragedy of Hamlet we are presented with a 
 psychological study, which has afforded delight to 
 many an English and many a German philosopher, 
 and which has taxed their critical powers to the utmost. The 
 outcome of such study has been so various, and the proposed 
 solutions of the Hamlet-problem are so discrepant, that one 
 can only conclude that it is indeterminate, i. e., admitting of 
 more than one solution. In this chapter I do not propose to 
 grapple with the problem' as a whole, but merely to discuss 
 one of the elements of a complete solution : viz., the peculiar 
 idiosyncrasy of the moody Prince of Denmark. 
 
 Hamlet is introduced to us, after he has been exposed to 
 the first disturbing influence of his life. The death of his 
 father and the consequent marriage of his mother with his uncle 
 have demoralised the Danish court, and Hamlet is called upon 
 to sustain the shock of those sudden and disastrous events. 
 We do not know what manner of man he was before calamity 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 1 2 1 
 
 had marred the freshness of his youth, and driven him prema- 
 turely to take refuge in contemplation. But we do meet with 
 him in two scenes before he is subjected to the more violent 
 shock of the Ghost's communication ; and these are for us the 
 most important evidences of his unspoiled character. 
 
 In act i, sc. 2 and 4, we are witnesses to his conversation 
 with the King and Queen; we hear his frsf soliloquy on suicide; 
 and we have his first and second conversations with Horatio 
 and the watch. On the entry of the Ghost all is changed for 
 Hamlet : all is changed with him. Up to this point we have 
 to gather the first data of the problem. With the King the 
 prince is grimly jocular: to the Queen he is solemnly senten- 
 tious : and left to himself he is the personification of melan- 
 choly. In all this we discern his dislike towards his uncle, 
 springing from that monarch's usurpation (legal in both respects, 
 however,) of his late brother's marital and monarchical rights. 
 He is generous and hearty to his old schoolfellow, Horatio; he 
 is courteous to the watch ; to all — even to the despised monarch 
 — he is the perfect gentleman. Though to himself he censures 
 his mother for her ' wicked speed,' he is dutiful in his bearing 
 towards her. Though to Horatio he censures his uncle for his 
 drunkenness and his incestuous marriage, he is guarded and 
 ceremonious in the few words (sarcastic as they are) which he 
 addresses to the King. Beyond his kindly feeling towards all 
 (save the usurper), and his gentlemanly demeanour, we so far 
 see nothing especially admirable in Hamlet's character. His 
 evident envy and his dominant melancholy are weaknesses, 
 which, however natural to a young prince whose hopes and 
 
 R 
 
1 2 2 Shakt 's/>t are : the Hook. 
 
 affections had been so early blighted, are no trustworthy guides 
 to any of the secrets of his character. They are merely vulgar 
 attributes. His irony and humour, which up to this point are 
 manifested in only three brief utterances, are something more. 
 They belong to a higher class of mind, and give the promise of 
 genius. But, so far as we can see, there is nothing extraordinary 
 in this young prince but his premature melancholy ; and that 
 only argues a highly sensitive organisation. So far then, we 
 see in Hamlet a man of imagination and affection, to which 
 early sorrow and disappointment have imparted a morbid bias. 
 We see him first on the unfavourable side — moody, satirical, 
 complaining, desponding ; but the worst features of that side: his 
 selfishness and cunning: his procrastination and self-deception: 
 his ribaldry and rant: are not yet manifest: they all slumber 
 there, awaiting the invocation of circumstance. It is the second 
 shock, consequent on his first interview with his father's spirit, 
 that brings out both his strength and his weakness.* Much in 
 his conduct that is to us eccentric and wayward is only an 
 incident of the nationality and period to which he belongs. 
 
 * Ophelia's estimate of Hamlet, before the advent of his troubles, 
 must, of course, be taken cum grano. We must allow for the extravagance 
 of partiality and wonderment. Her unfathomable grief was not for the loss 
 of his love merely, but for the loss of himself: it was not so much that the 
 Hamlet she loved had ceased to love her, but that he had been transmuted 
 into a new person towards whom she now felt more pity than love : that 
 a greater passion than love had cast love into the shade, and transported 
 her lover into a new sphere. She now measured the change in him by the 
 force of contrast impressed upon her while reeling from the shock. Ac- 
 cordingly, the change seemed to her immeasurable, and she portrayed his 
 lost self in colours that were exaggerated by that force of contrast. 
 
Shakespeare: the Book. 123 
 
 Apart from these, Hamlet's is just the sort of idiosyncrasy 
 which we nowadays find so difficult to square with our con- 
 ventional views of sanity. Accordingly the ' mad-doctors ' find 
 it a congenial study, and experience no difficulty in proving 
 him to be insane. Let them once get hold of Hamlet, and 
 there would be small fear of his troubling any king of Denmark's 
 peace. But they overlook the differentia of this peculiar case, 
 which is this : there is no eccentricity in the Prince but what 
 is naturally provoked by the force of circumstances. It is not 
 this makes a man mad, whom it does not find so. The 
 madman forges his circumstances, or (to profit by Shakespeare's 
 unrivalled power of expression) imagines, or bodies forth as 
 objects, his own incertain thought, and then takes the false objects 
 so imagined for real objects evoking his mental and emotional 
 disturbance. . Hamlet's case is just the reverse. A real ghostly 
 visitation disturbs him, but does not unsettle or derange him. 
 His demeanour consequent upon that visitation is only so far 
 eccentric as the stimulus is eccentric: his eccentricity is healthy; 
 and not to have manifested strange passion, after experiencing 
 so strange and awful an event, would not have proved his 
 sanity, but would have argued an insensibility and dulness 
 comparable to that of the fat Lethean weed. Once go with 
 the ' mad-doctors,' and assume as a datum of interpretation 
 Hamlet's insanity, and his conduct becomes inexplicable, and 
 his character more perplexing than the phenomena of storms. 
 
 But it has seemed to the critics the maddest of mad freaks 
 for Hamlet to have assumed madness. Well, there is much to 
 be said in excuse for this, if excuse were needed : but it is 
 
124 Shakespeare: tJie Book. 
 
 Shakespeare, and not Hamlet, that would need the excuse, 
 which would be found in the old romance from which the plot 
 was derived. If further excuse be needed, I can only say 
 I find it in the exquisite skill with which Shakespeare has 
 grafted this incident upon a new character. An anonymous 
 writer of 1736 thus comments on the point in question. 
 
 To conform to the groundwork of his plot Shakespeare makes the young 
 prince feign himself mad. I cannot but think this to be injudicious ; for 
 so far from securing himself from any violence which he feared from the 
 usurper, it seems to have been the most likely way of getting himself 
 confined, and consequently debarred from an opportunity of revenging his 
 father's death, &c. 
 
 Now the King being an elected monarch could not be an 
 usurper, and so far he could have no temptation to meddle with 
 Hamlet. Moreover, the King was assured that Hamlet could 
 not by any natural means know the fact or circumstances of his 
 father's ' taking off.' The King, then, had no cause of fear, 
 save on account of ' the general gender,' with whom Hamlet 
 was a favourite, and the prince could have had no thought of 
 'securing himself from [his uncle's] violence.' Hamlet's motive 
 is no secret ; perhaps it is a wild enough motive : but certain it 
 is that it was to give himself a plausible excuse for uncivil 
 demeanour and illegal acts. It is on this score, viz., temporary 
 derangement, that he excuses himself to Guildenstern for in- 
 civility : ' I cannot make you a wholesome answer : my wit's 
 diseased : ' and for the death of Polonius to Laertes. Some- 
 what after the manner of St. Paul, who argues 'So then it is 
 
Shakespeare: the Book. 125 
 
 no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me,' Hamlet 
 addresses Laertes thus: 
 
 If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, 
 And, when he's not himself, does wrong Laertes, 
 Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. 
 Who does it then ? His madness : if't be so, 
 Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd ; 
 
 an argument which is quite worthy of the clown in the fifth act. 
 As I read the play, this is given by Shakespeare as an example 
 of the self-justification to which Hamlet intended, in the event 
 of indiscretion, to put in his claim. But things turned out 
 very different from what he expected. The error of taking 
 Polonius for his betters and killing him like vermin frustrated 
 all his plans, and the madness which was to have saved him 
 harmless becomes a good reason for his removal. He learned 
 too late the danger of deep plotting. We must, however, 
 bear in mind that the madness assumed by Hamlet was a mere 
 ' antic disposition,' occasionally resorted to, and least of all 
 dreamed of when he is carried away by that passion to which 
 the idiosyncrasy of the Dansker as well as the Norseman was 
 peculiarly liable. It is to this Hamlet refers when he says to 
 Laertes, at Ophelia's grave, 
 
 I pr'ythee take thy hand from off my throat ; 
 For, though I am not splenetive and rash, 
 Yet have I in me something dangerous, 
 Which let thy wisdom fear. 
 
 This passion, in its more awful and destructive phases, con- 
 stituted what was called the Berserkir Rage; which is well 
 
126 Shakespeare : the Book. 
 
 described by Sir Walter Scott in the following lines in Harold 
 the Dauntless. 
 
 Profane not youth — it is not thine, 
 
 To judge the spirit of our line — 
 
 The bold Berserker's rage divine, 
 
 Through whose inspiring, deeds are wrought 
 
 Past human strength and human thought. 
 
 When full upon his gloomy soul 
 
 The champion feels the influence roll, 
 
 He swims the lake, he leaps the wall — 
 
 Heeds not the depth, nor plumbs the fall; 
 
 Unshielded, mailless, on he goes 
 
 Singly against a host of foes; 
 
 Their spears he holds like withered reeds, 
 
 Their mail like maidens' silken weeds; 
 
 One 'gainst a hundred will he strive, 
 
 Take countless wounds, and yet survive. 
 
 Then rush the eagles to his cry 
 
 Of slaughter and of victory ; 
 
 And blood he quaffs like Odin's bowl, 
 
 Deep drinks his sword — deep drinks his soul, 
 
 And all that meet him in his ire 
 
 He gives to ruin, rout, and fire ; 
 
 Then, like gorged lion, seeks some den, 
 
 And couches till he's man agen. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle, in his Early Kings of Norway, thus describes 
 the rage of the same Harold at Stamford Bridge. 
 
 Enraged at that breaking loose of his steel ring of infantry, Norse 
 Harald [Hardrade, this time] blazed up into true Norse fury, all the old 
 Vseringer and Berserkir rage awakening in him ; sprang forth into the front 
 of the fight, and mauled., and cut, and smashed down, on both sides of 
 him, everything he met, irresistible by any horse or man, till an arrow cut 
 him through the windpipe, and laid him low for ever. That was the end 
 of King Harald and of his workings in this world. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 127 
 
 Hamlet's rage, as exhibited first, after the armed Ghost's 
 disappearance, and last at the grave of Ophelia, is but a child's 
 pet compared with the Berserkir Rage ; and in the same propor- 
 tion is the soul of Hamlet to that of a knightly Norseman. 
 But for the visit of the Ghost, which is the instrument to try 
 the stuff the prince is made of, he might have passed for a 
 strong-hearted and doughty youth, in whom the hereditary rage 
 had been subdued by knightly training. What such a true 
 knight was, both before and after the rage had been brought 
 into subjection, we may learn from La Motte Fouque. In his 
 Theodolf we have the Hamlet-like humour, kindliness, coolness, 
 and energy of character, exquisitely balanced, and coexisting 
 with the purest ethic grandeur. Here, too, the emergency arises 
 which intensifies one pole of his character, and the current of 
 motive is completed.* At length the one weakness in the 
 
 * Theodolf's Berserker rage had awoke. Once again he asked, with 
 flashing eyes, ' Wilt thou give her to me? Is she ready to depart?' And 
 the delay of the answer was the signal for the most fearful outbreak. 
 
 Knives and other sharp instruments, caught up at the moment by the 
 furious Icelander, flew on all sides of the room like a shower; and many 
 fell senseless or dead to the ground, on whose lips a bold smile yet rested. 
 As the rest rushed in anger and terror against the raging youth, a mighty 
 stroke of the battle-axe struck the breast of the foremost ; and then the 
 good sword Throng-piercer began its fearful meal. 
 
 It was less a fight than the annihilating wrath of nature's strength let 
 loose against man's weakness. Soon there were only bloody corpses lying 
 about in the hall just before so gay; and a few wounded men, with every 
 sign of terror, were tottering down the stairs. The fearful Theodolf stood 
 alone in the deserted blood-stained hall. #####* 
 
 and he sank down among the dead in heavy exhaustion, more overcome by 
 the weight of grief [for the loss of Isolde] than by his wounds. — Theodolf 
 the Icelander. [London: Edward Lumley. 1865. P. 153.] 
 
128 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 character of Theodolf, viz., the hereditary Berserkir Rage, is 
 over-matched by that ethic sovereignty which wins him over 
 to ' the White Christ.' In the case of Hamlet, as in that of 
 Theodolf, it is the emergency that tries his mettle, and from 
 his conduct in it may we infallibly infer his character. For 
 another example, Fouque"s hero, Count Wildeck, is introduced 
 to us as a worthy knight before his character is put to proof. 
 But his courage, truth and fealty — in a word, his virtue or 
 manly worth — cannot be duly estimated till his encounter with 
 the terrible maniac in the castle of Rosaura's kinsman. Had 
 he resorted to selfish lying or stratagem, had he been carried 
 away by any pathological influence whatever, or, as our old 
 writers say, ' forsaken himself,' we should have felt that his was 
 a weak character deserving our pity if not our contempt : and 
 that is the only alternative offered us in the case of Hamlet. 
 
 But we are not driven to have recourse to fiction to illustrate 
 the peculiarities of Hamlet's idiosyncrasy. We are sure to find 
 among imaginative men many examples in point: and especially 
 among philosophic poets. Coleridge was a very different being 
 from Hamlet : and yet he manifested in a remarkable degree 
 the disposition to dissolve action in meditation. In fact, he 
 himself was struck with the resemblance.* He lacked, like 
 Hamlet, the stimulus of a healthy narrowness. Had his roots 
 been confined to a flower-pot, his stem would have been forced 
 
 * ' I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so ' ( Tabic Talk, 
 1 85 1, p. 40). This modest assertion becomes in Mr. Minto's hands a 'notion 
 that Hamlet's character was exceedingly like his own.' —Characteristics of 
 E)tglish Poets, 1874, p. 279. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 1 29 
 
 into flower and fruit.* As it was, his intellectual vagrancy was 
 fatal to sustained exertion ; so that much of what he attempted 
 was but inchoate, if not abortive ; and much more that he 
 intended to accomplish never got one step beyond the inten- 
 tion. He whose task is coextensive with the world will hardly 
 attempt its performance; while the restricted task which a man 
 does achieve must be the whole world to him. 
 
 * ' As the air we breathe is not all air, and true courage has an ingre- 
 dient of fear in it, the intellect should part with something of its own nature 
 to qualify itself as proper human intellect. It should yoke itself contentedly 
 with a wholesome narrowness, in a compound practical and intellectual 
 being. Its largeness tends, without such check, to feebleness. The mind 
 of Hamlet lies all abroad, like the sea — an universal reflector, but wanting 
 the self-moving principle. Musing, reflection, and irony upon all the world, 
 supersede action, and a task evaporates in philosophy.' — Prof. J. B. Mozley's 
 article in the Christian Remembrancer (art. vii, vol. xvii, January, 1849). 
 On this Mr. C. J. Monro writes to me as follows : — 
 ' I do not feel satisfied of the truth of this doctrine at all, at least as 
 stated. Is not unhealthy width simply inadequate will ? I do not mean 
 will below the average strength, but below the strength adequate to 
 intellect. I suppose a comprehensive intellect requires a corresponding 
 strength of will : and the chances are that a man of extraordinary com- 
 prehensiveness would not also have an extraordinary force of will. I am 
 supposing the two gifts to be tolerably independent, so that we are not 
 obliged to suppose them antagonistic in order to account for the rarity of 
 adequate force of will in men of extraordinary comprehensiveness : and 
 surely the combination is only rare, not unknown. As to Hamlet's 
 idiosyncrasy, there is a point which may have been often noticed, for 
 certainly it is obvious, real or not ; namely, that if thought outweighs will, 
 speech outweighs everything else in him. In two places he shows some 
 consciousness of being more in word than matter; as, when he checks his 
 own protestations to Horatio with ' something too much of this,' and when 
 he reproaches himself, at the end of a soliloquy, with unpacking his heart 
 with words. But he shows it unconsciously and with exquisite simplicity 
 when he admires the poor player so highly in comparison with himself, 
 because he can give tongue so powerfully and all for Hecuba.' 
 
130 Shakespeare; the Book. 
 
 Hamlet's generalization, which he calls ' thinking too pre- 
 cisely on the event,' is the inner correspondent to that analytical 
 irony which Horatio (good, common-sense man) calls 'con- 
 sidering too curiously.' One might summarize the matter thus, 
 that the irony is Hamlet's revenge for having allowed his reso- 
 lution to evaporate in meditation.* He takes it out in vivi- 
 section. In this there is no little spite, and a good deal ot 
 foolishness. Hamlet is humorous, and humour is commonly a 
 sign of intellect. The lack of humour in Milton and Tennyson 
 is a psychological fact deserving study. But even humour is 
 in morbid excess, if it degenerate into wanton mischief or 
 cowardly malice. Such was the humour of Dean Swift; and in 
 that he was much worse than Hamlet, whose malice usually 
 stops short of malignity and evaporates in banter or mockery. 
 It is thus that he makes his father's ghost a 'mole' and a 
 ' pioneer,' as if he were a bodily substance, burrowing his way 
 through the earth from place to place in suite of the watch. 
 It is thus that he shows 'how a king may go a progress through 
 the guts of a beggar,' viz., by the mediation of a fish that has 
 eaten a maggot bred in the king's carcase. It is thus that he 
 traces 'the dust of Alexander till he finds it stopping a beer- 
 barrel ' or staunching a hole in the roof. Akin to this perverse 
 analysis is the irreverence with which he habitually treats those 
 whose condition entitles them to the respect or the pity of their 
 
 * ' The lofty ruminator within exhibits himself as a jester and an oddity 
 without; and, not content with levity, he assumes madness, as if to enable 
 himself to enjoy a fantastic isolation from the world and human society 
 altogether, and to live alone within himself.'— Prof. Mozley's article in the 
 Christian Remembrancer. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 1 3 1 
 
 fellows : Ophelia, a simple, trustful, fragile young creature, who 
 had loved him and in filial duty had rejected him, is a fair mark 
 alike for his heartless mockery and his ribald gallantry; and the 
 superannuated old chamberlain, her father, is mocked behind 
 his back, and twitted to his face with the infirmities of age. I 
 am far from denying that the horrible web of crime and vice 
 in which Hamlet found himself thus early entangled should be 
 allowed to extenuate, if not palliate, the guilt of such conduct 
 in a man with such predispositions: but that is because the 
 predispositions are there. 
 
 The poet Shelley had all Hamlet's faculty of subtil analysis 
 and more than all his poetical furor, but with little of the 
 humour that characterizes the Dane. Accordingly we find in 
 Shelley the same proclivity to associate objects with disgusting 
 if not irrelevant details: e. g., 
 
 Yet not the meanest worm 
 That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead 
 Less shares thy eternal breath, 
 Spirit of Nature! — Queen Mob, i. 
 
 and on that arm [the King's] 
 The worm has made his meal. — Ibid., iii. 
 
 And thou did'st laugh to hear the mother's shriek 
 Of maniac gladness, as the sacred steel 
 Felt cold in her torn entrails. — Ibid., vi. * 
 
 * I once heard the reply of an accomplished man of the world to the 
 question — 'Why not call a spade a spade ? ' He answered — ' By all means, 
 except in cases where the common sense of the world has covered its naked- 
 ness with the garb of decency. In those cases what is to be gained by 
 stripping it off? Why should we be ever reminded of our weaknesses and 
 impurities ? No : the advantage is all the other way.' 
 
132 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 Lord Byron had more than all Hamlet's selfishness, mood- 
 iness, ribaldry and heartless mockery. Lord Lindsay {The 
 Times, Oct, 1 8, 1869) thus describes him : he might have been 
 describing Hamlet: — 
 
 There was a waywardness in Byron's mind, a tinge, not merely of that 
 'madness' which is so nearly allied to 'great wit,' but of 'hereditary 
 melancholy,' which ran, like a subtil poison, through all its mazes, and 
 broke out alternately in self-accusation, enhanced (as in many such cases) 
 by the pleasure of producing a sensation, and in a grim, if not ferocious, 
 and (so to say) freakish merriment, the very reverse of romance and enthu- 
 siasm while it lasted, that may well have amazed, terrified, and disenchanted 
 a young and inexperienced, although noble-spirited, woman like Lady Byron. 
 This last consideration, the morbid tinge which, not amounting to insanity 
 proper, renders such men liable to abnormal conditions of temper and con- 
 duct, subjecting them to unmerited constructions, * * * may 
 seriously modify any conclusion come to from Lady Anne [Barnardj's 
 narrative. 
 
 Lady Anne Barnard thus writes of the marriage of Lord and 
 
 Lady Byron. 
 
 They had not been an hour in the carriage which conveyed them from 
 the church when, breaking into a malignant sneer, ' Oh ! what a dupe you 
 have been to your imagination. How is it possible a woman of your sense 
 could form the wild hope of reforming me? Many are the tears you will 
 have to shed ere that plan is accomplished. It is enough for me that you 
 are my wife for me to hate you ; if you were the wife of any other man I 
 own you might have charms,' * &c. 
 
 Many were the sallies he made on her in that spirit, some of 
 which seemed to have vacillated between jest and earnest, and 
 
 * This admirative reflection strongly recals Lamia's reply to Titus, 
 who had been advising him to take a second wife, Domitian having 
 appropriated the first : /j?) ko'i av yajAtjaat Qf\uQ ; — as if the Prince himself 
 were looking out for an eligible partner. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 133 
 
 some were mere admirable acting, what he called 'philosophical 
 experiments,' which were intended to serve no other end than 
 to make her understand that he had mastered her, or seen 
 through her, and despised her for her simplicity. His assumed 
 insanity, too, is curiously illustrative of Hamlet's. 'He would 
 then,' writes Lady Anne Barnard, ' accuse himself of being 
 mad, and throw himself on the ground in a frenzy.' Again, 
 ' he has wished to be thought partially deranged, or on the 
 brink of it, to perplex observers and prevent them from tracing 
 effects to their real causes through all the intricacies of his 
 conduct.' In all this he over-acted the part of Hamlet, and 
 shewed himself more selfish and malignant than the Dane; yet 
 the two characters have many points of contact. The man of 
 knightly breeding, while he shows no mercy to the meannesses 
 and vices of human nature, habitually and delightedly treats its 
 infirmities with gentleness and compassion. The pretty follies 
 and naive mischief of the child, the weaknesses of the woman 
 and the foibles of the old are alike the objects of his affectionate 
 consideration. To recur once more to fiction for the illustration 
 of this point : we may note how in De Quincey's Avenger it 
 is said, that Margaret's filial tenderness for her old grandfather 
 was not only on her dead mother's account, but that he was 
 himself ' continually making more claims on her pity, as the 
 decay of his memory and a childish fretfulness growing upon 
 him from day to day marked his increasing imbecility.' Again 
 we may call to mind that exquisite touch of knightly breeding 
 which Mrs. Gaskell imparts to her poor farmer-lad, Will Leigh, 
 who seeing a half-drunken old man, who was being mocked by 
 
134 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 a crowd of juvenile Hamlets for the unsteadiness of his gait, 
 took care of him and escorted him home. ' For his £own] 
 father's sake Will regarded old age with tenderness, even when 
 most degraded and removed from the stern virtues which digni- 
 fied that father.' {Lizzie Leigh, p. 10.) To such a feeling as 
 that Hamlet is an utter stranger. As it seems to me a selfish 
 conceit infests his every thought and action. To him an old 
 man who had run to belly was known by the familiar sobriquet 
 of 'guts,' and his shrunken, feeble legs and rheumy eyes were 
 to him nothing but the fruits of intemperance and unchastity. 
 For my part, I know not how any man of right feeling can 
 find sufficient excuses for Hamlet's perverse humour, in the 
 disappointment of his young ambition and the sensitiveness 
 of his organisation. His temperament and his surroundings 
 may help us to explain his eccentricities, but hardly to excuse 
 them. 
 
 Allowing, as I do, that the excess of reflection in Hamlet 
 was a factor in his irresolution and procrastination, there 
 is still another factor, and one that is a special motive to 
 that particular line of conduct which he pursued; viz., his own 
 selfish interest. The disappointment and humiliation which 
 he suffers in consequence of his uncle's election provoke a 
 sentiment which has two poles: hatred of the supplanter and 
 desire of redress. So far forth any promptings he might have 
 to remove by violence the obstacle in the path of his ambition 
 are neutralized by the fear of damaging his own chance of 
 succession. Then comes the Ghost's injunction in corrobora- 
 tion of the former pole; and in the first passion of indignation 
 
Shakespeare: the Book. 135 
 
 and grief Hamlet is capable enough to execute the vengeance 
 to which he is thus doubly incited. But, unlike the preceding 
 motives, this added motive is liable to diminution by lapse 
 of time. All such impressions wear away, unless renewed, as 
 Coleridge well remarks of the terrors of a popular revolution.* 
 The lesson, however startling, is soon forgotten. In Hamlet's 
 case, the first impression of the Ghost's visit is strong and deep ; 
 but it soon begins to wane. Finding this to be the case, and 
 seeking to blind himself to the fact, that his newly formed 
 purpose is being blunted, the Prince pretends that he may be 
 the dupe of an evil spirit : his uncle may be innocent : the 
 Ghost may have been a messenger from hell or an infernal 
 hallucination. ' I'll have proof more relative than this,' he 
 exclaims. The device of the play removes the scruple, and 
 then Hamlet tries to make himself believe that he is as hot 
 for revenge as when the Ghost left him. ' Now could I drink 
 hot blood.' But it is all poor acting. The second visit of the 
 Ghost deepens the impression, which, however, is destined 
 again to fade into insignificance. The prince's self-interest 
 has still the ascendancy, and remains the dominant motive 
 to the end of the play. He kills Polonius, hastily judging him 
 to be the King, and thinking that if it were any other eaves- 
 dropper it would not much matter. Whoever it was, ' the 
 situation would excuse the act ; but he will not do it when the 
 King is at prayers, because he fears the consequences of such 
 an open murder.' f We may be sure he would now, without 
 
 * Coleridge's Friend, 1844, vol. i, p. 244. 
 
 t These are the words of Mr. A. E. Brae, in a letter to myself, dated 
 28th November, 1853. 
 
136 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 any additional motive, have killed the King, if he could have 
 done so without danger to his succession. Whatever is a bar 
 to his self-interest or promotion is doomed to be destroyed 
 • with safest haste.' He knew, for instance, that Rosencrantz 
 and Guildenstern were wholly innocent of participating in the 
 design against his life : but he had the opportunity of silencing 
 them without compromising himself, and he was not the man 
 to let it slip: and having accomplished their destruction he 
 does not find them near his conscience, because 'they made 
 love to their employment.' * 
 
 * This fragment was the only written part of a dissertation originally 
 designed for a volume of Shakespeare Essays, by various authors, which 
 never saw the light. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 SOME PASSAGES REPRIEVED. 
 
 INCE the publication of Shakespeare Hermmeutics in 
 1875, several isolated criticisms have been brought 
 under my notice which might well have been included 
 in that volume. Most of these relate to passages in A Winter's 
 Tale and Cymbeline, a pair of plays which having been written 
 about the same time, probably in 161 1, present many features 
 in common, and aptly illustrate what we may call the meta- 
 dimax of Shakespeare's genius. At this time he had written 
 his greatest comedy, Measure for Measure, and his five greatest 
 tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and 
 Coriolanus ; and probably also The Tempest, in which the signs 
 of decadence, both in grammatical construction and in metre, 
 are most strongly marked. The other criticisms deal with 
 passages in As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra. These 
 we will dispose of first. 
 
 T 
 
138 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 I. — As You Like It, act ii, sc. 1. 
 
 Duke Sen. Now my coe-mates, and brothers in exile : 
 Hath not old custome made this life more sweete 
 Then that of painted pompe ? Are not these woods 
 More free from perill then the envious Court ? 
 Here feele we not the penaltie of Adam, 
 The seasons difference, as the Icie phange 
 And churlish chiding of the winter's wind, 
 Which when it bites and blowes upon my body 
 Even till I shrinke with cold, I smile, and say 
 This is no flattery : these are counsellors 
 That feelingly persuade me what I am : 
 
 On the assumption that there is no misprint in this text, three 
 interpretations have been suggested. 
 
 1. That of Boswell (the continuator of M alone), who 
 proposed to take feel in the sense of feel injuriously or suffer 
 from : as to which it is sufficient to refer to the last line, where 
 to 'feelingly persuade' is obviously to persuade by means so 
 painful as to be comparable to the bite of a venomous creature : 
 so that the Duke could not consistently say 
 
 Here feele we not [injuriously] the penaltie of Adam 
 
 if that penalty was the vicissitudes of the seasons. 
 
 2. It has been proposed to understand by ' the penaltie of 
 Adam,' bodily labour, but this makes nonsense of the after- 
 passage commencing with ' the seasons difference : ' besides 
 which a passage in Paradise Lost, book x, line 651, and Bp. 
 Newton's note on lines 668 et seq., attest the prevalence of the 
 old scholastic doctrine that the changes of the seasons was 
 the immediate consequence of Adam's fall. 
 
SJiakcspcarc : the Book. 139 
 
 3. The last and most rational of the attempts which have 
 been made to interpret the unaltered text is that of Mr. C. J. 
 Monro, who wrote to me, under date November 17, 1874, as 
 follows : 
 
 All I can say is that, as it seems to me, the directest sense is got by 
 retaining not and making the sentence interrogative. Interrogative — because 
 the Duke cannot wish to affirm that they feel not, etc. : and retaining not — 
 because but would only fit in if he wished to minimize what they feel, 
 whereas that is not his intention in the relative words. But this only 
 shows that you thus get the directest sense : for I cannot reconcile myself to 
 the interrogation, because it makes the sentence an enigma for the last five 
 lines. So if it is really true that not and but are often interchanged (at 
 least, if not is often put for but), I should incline to Theobald's emendation. 
 Reading but, I suppose the Duke to mean 
 
 'Now that we are away from the Court, we do not feel ourselves among 
 the perils of envy and hatred [and flattery]: we only feel the weakness 
 entailed, by Adam's transgression, upon humanity, and it does one good to 
 be made to feel this.'' 
 
 But there seems to me something too jaunty in setting out with a but 
 with the sense of only ; so I am not quite satisfied any way. 
 
 However we may regulate and interpret the passage, there 
 is certainly a hitch; but it is to me very questionable whether 
 the hitch be sufficiently great to justify verbal emendation. 
 Assuredly if emendation be resorted to Theobald's conjecture 
 is very plausible. But probably sufficient justification might 
 be found for now in the place of ' not ' : now referring to the 
 present time of winter, after which the ' penaltie ' would be no 
 longer felt 1 
 
140 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 II. — //v./, act ii, sc. 6. 
 
 Jaques. ■ . O that I were a foole, 
 
 I am ambitious for a motley coat. 
 
 Duke Sea. Thou shalt have one. 
 
 Jaques. It is my only suite, 
 Provided that you weed your better judgements 
 Of all opinion that growes ranke in them, 
 That I am wise. I must have liberty 
 Withall, as large a Charter as the winde, 
 To blow on whom I please, for so fooles have : 
 And they that are most gauled with my folly, 
 They most must laugh : And why sir must they so ? 
 The why is plaine as way to Parish Church : * 
 Hee, that a Foole doth very wisely hit, 
 Doth, very foolishly, although he smart 
 Seeme senselesse of the bob. If not, 
 The Wise-man's folly is anathomiz'd 
 Even by the squandering glances of the foole. 
 Invest me in my motley : Give me leave 
 To speake my minde, and I will through and through 
 Cleanse the foule bodie of th' infected world, 
 If they will patiently receive my medicine. 
 
 I here give the disputed passage with as much of the 
 immediate context as will serve to explain it. When I gave 
 my brief interpretation in Shakespeare Hermeneutics, pp. 81, 82, 
 I was hopeful, too hopeful as the event showed, of carrying 
 every reader with me. I must own to no little regret that 
 such an able exponent of Shakespeare as Mr. W. Aldis Wright 
 should find my interpretation inadmissible. (See the Clarendon 
 
 * Unfortunately Shakespeare's commentators have not found it so. 
 Theobald missed the way ; and all but a certain worthy named Whiter 
 followed Theobald, and went astray. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 141 
 
 Press Edition of As You Like Lt, pp. 115-116.) Were I 
 engaged in the restoration of a corrupt text, I should regard 
 the prolonged discussion of a verbal emendation as too sug- 
 gestive of ' the mountain in labour.' But the defence and 
 exposition of a passage in the Folio text stand on a very 
 different footing; and I shall make no apology for restating 
 the argument on which I rely for the interpretation of Jaques' 
 speech. 
 
 The wind is the symbol of lawlessness. It blows where it 
 listeth, and upon whom it listeth, not seldom inflicting pain 
 with its 'icy fang and churlish chiding.' The moral of As You 
 Like It is, the lesson conveyed in so many verbal forms, that 
 such evils are but ' the penalty of Adam,' ' that feelingly 
 persuade us what we are.' 
 
 In Henry V, i, 1, we read, 
 
 When he speaks, 
 The air, a chartered libertine, is still. 
 
 So Jaques asks for 
 
 ' as large a charter as the wind, 
 To blow on whom I please.' 
 
 He demands the fool's privilege of taking random shots, of 
 uttering indiscriminate and general censure. Mr. Staunton 
 had this passage in mind when he proposed tax as a substitute 
 for wax in Timon of Athens, i, 1, 
 
 My free drift 
 Halts not particularly, but moves itself 
 In a wide sea of tax. No level'd malice 
 Infects one comma of the course I hold. 
 
142 SJiakcspcarc : tJtc Book. 
 
 So Jaques, in his diatribe on pride of dress and the love of 
 bravery (which follows the passage under consideration), says : 
 
 if it [my tongue] do him right, 
 Then he hath wrong' d himself: if he be free, 
 Why then my taxing like a wild-goose flies, 
 Unclaim'd of any man. 
 
 The advantage of this course is, that no one can take offence 
 without admitting the applicability of the hit to himself. 
 
 And they that are most galled with my folly, 
 
 They most must laugh : And why, Sir, must they so ? 
 
 Then Jaques proceeds to show ' the why.' He follows Euclid's 
 method, in first restating the proposition in another form, and 
 then proving it by reduciio ad absurdum. The following is the 
 enunciation of the proposition to be proved : 
 
 He, that a fool doth very wisely hit, 
 Doth* . . (although he smart) 
 Seem senseless of the bob. 
 
 This is proved as follows : 
 
 If not, 
 The . man's folly is anatomiz'd 
 Even by the squandering glances of the fool. 
 
 Which I may paraphrase in these words : 
 
 If you deny it, let us suppose that, because he smarts, he does not seem 
 senseless of the bob, but winces under it : now he thereby shows that he 
 
 * This ' doth ' is merely auxiliary : cf. 
 
 'Doth very foolishly seem senseless' &c, 
 and ' Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.' 
 
 Hamlet, i, 2. 
 
Shakespeare: the Book. 143 
 
 is a 'galled jade,' that one of the fool's blows has wrung him; and 
 accordingly he is anatomized,* i. e., his faults are shown up, even by the 
 random hits of the fool. But no man in his senses would do this. There- 
 fore etc., Q.E.D. 
 
 It will be observed that I have omitted some words in the 
 foregoing quotations. I am sensible that I laid too great an 
 emphasis upon 'very foolishly' and 'wise' in the brief exposition 
 I gave in Shakespeare Hermenentics, p. 81. I now see plainly 
 that neither qualification is essential to the sense. The assailant 
 being ' a fool,' the assailed is considered as ' wise.' The fool is 
 said to hit 'very wisely' when he hits a blot,t and therefore by 
 similar contrast the sufferer is said to act 'very foolishly.' This 
 is perhaps all the weight we should lay on these qualifications. 
 At the same time, it should be recognised that they will carry 
 more. The assailed may well be called wise if he does not 
 betray his folly by wincing under the lash. Yet, for all that, he 
 cannot help feeling very foolish in dissembling his mortification. 
 He is thus made to feel foolish in acting wisely, and the fool 
 makes him act wisely by making him conscious of his folly. 
 
 * Cf. Oliver's speech to Charles in act i, sc. I. 
 
 I speake but brotherly of him, but should I anathomize him to thee, as 
 hee is, I must blush and weep, and thou must looke pale and wonder. 
 
 Also the following lines in Dryden's prologue to "Julius Caesar : 
 
 Cf. Johnson with skill dissected human kind, 
 
 And shew'd their faults, that they their faults might find ; 
 
 But then, as all anatomists must do, 
 
 He to the meanest of mankind did go, 
 
 And took from gibbets such as he would show. 
 
 t The more the pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men 
 do foolishly. — As You Like It, i, 2. 
 
144 Shakespeare: the Hook. 
 
 Mr. Aldis Wright records three objections to my inter- 
 pretation of this passage. 
 
 First. — ' It is not said that the fool doth wisely in hitting a 
 wise man.' I allow this and take the consequences. 
 
 Secondly. — ' Dr. Ingleby's explanation would seem to require 
 'because he smarts' instead of 'although he smarts,' as showing 
 how it is that the wise man's dissimulation is foolish or awkward.' 
 Mr. Aldis Wright here mistakes my reading of the passage. 
 He supposes me to take 'although he smart' (not 'smarts') as 
 qualifying ' very foolishly,' whereas I take it as qualifying ' doth 
 seem senseless of the bob.' The wise man dissembles the smart 
 although he feels it ; and this, notwithstanding that he does it 
 foolishly because he feels it. 
 
 Thirdly. — The reading I stand by is (in Mr. Aldis Wright's 
 view) a mere repetition of what Jaques has just said — 
 
 And he that is most galled with my folly 
 He most must laugh. 
 
 If this objection were of the least validity it would be a 
 ground for the emendation of every proposition in Euclid 
 which is proved by reductio ad absurdum : his method being to 
 state the proposition in its generality showing the thing to be 
 proved ; then to restate it in its application to the method of 
 proof, and lastly, to trace the consequences of denying it. The 
 only difference, in fact, between Euclid and Jaques lies in this, 
 that Jaques proves the general proposition in order to sub- 
 stantiate a particular application of it : a difference which gives 
 the repetition the fullest justification. In point of fact, Jaques' 
 proof beginning ' If not ' is inconsequent unless it follows the 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 145 
 
 particular affirmative statement ; and Theobald's emendation, 
 which Mr. Aldis Wright accepts, viz. — 
 
 Doth very foolishly although he smart, 
 
 Not to seem senseless of the bob. If not, &c. 
 
 saddles the passage with a glaring solecism which we have no 
 right to impute to Shakespeare : who, to convey the sense 
 required by Theobald, would have written (but for the metre) 
 
 Would do very foolishly, although he smart, 
 Not to seem senseless of the bob. If so, &c. 
 
 III. — In Antony and Cleopatra, ii, 2, Caesar brings a series of 
 charges against Antony, the first of which is on this wise : 
 
 Your wife and brother 
 Made wars upon me ; and their contestation 
 Was theme for you, you were the word of war. 
 
 This Antony denies, and adds — 
 
 If you'll patch a quarrel, 
 As matter whole you have to make it with, 
 It must not be with this. 
 
 Ctzs. You praise yourself 
 
 By laying defects of judgment to me; but 
 You patch'd up your excuses. 
 
 Rowe introduced the word not after ' you have;' and in this lie 
 was supported by Dr. Johnson, Malone and nearly all the 
 editors: and all modern editions read 
 
 As matter whole you have not to make it with. 
 
 The words, as they stand in the Folio, 
 
 As matter whole you have to make it with, 
 U 
 
1 46 Sha kt 'spi 'are : the Bo< <k . 
 
 admit of grammatical analysis in two ways : either ' matter 
 whole' is the objective governed by 'you have,' as all the 
 editors would read it; or ' matter whole' is governed by 'with,' 
 and ' you have ' is not the verb of possession, but the verb of 
 obligation. If Shakespeare meant, as I believe, to employ the 
 verb have in the latter sense, he could not have arranged the 
 words in any other way than that in which they have come 
 down to us, without either misleading construction or faulty 
 prosody. 
 
 As you have matter whole to make it with 
 
 would be misleading; for every one would make 'matter whole' 
 the objective to ' you have : ' and 
 
 As you have to make it with whole matter 
 
 would not be metrical. I observe that the use of the verb have 
 in the sense of obligation is not uncommon with Shakespeare, 
 
 Wishing Adonis had his team to guide. ( Venus and Adonis, 1. 179.) 
 
 /'. e., wishing Adonis, instead of making love, had to look after 
 his team. 
 
 Antony refers to former letters, and Caesar to former 
 excuses : so that when Antony speaks of patching the quarrel, 
 he means that the quarrel has been already worn out by 
 discussion. Caesar ought (he says) to be able to adduce a new 
 and entire ground of complaint : but that if he will patch up 
 the old quarrel he must do it with something else than the pre- 
 tence that Antony's wife and brother have made wars upon him. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 147 
 
 It is almost impossible to anticipate and provide against 
 all objections. I foresee one, as to the use of the conjunction 
 ' as ' in the second line. It is what I call the conjunction of 
 reminder, being employed by Shakespeare and his contempo- 
 raries to introduce a subsidiary statement, qualifying, or even 
 contradicting, what goes before, which the person addressed is 
 required to take for granted, e. g., 
 
 Though you have no beauty, 
 As by my faith I see no more in you, etc. 
 
 As You Like It. 
 
 Admit no other way to save his life, 
 
 As I subscribe not that nor any other, etc. 
 
 Measure for Measure. 
 
 Say this becomes him, 
 As his composure must be rare indeed, etc. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra. 
 
 This conclusive interpretation of the text was proposed to 
 me by Professor Sylvester, the world-renowned mathematician. 
 After this, an editor who shall reprint the text with Rowe's 
 emendation will only have the excuse of ignorance. 
 
 IV. — There is a passage at the end of the first act of A 
 Winter's Tate which has usually been regarded as the seat of 
 an incurable corruption, though it lias been variously tinkered 
 with a view to its restoration. Polixenes says : 
 
 Feare ore-shades me : 
 Good Expedition be my friend, and comfort 
 The gracious Queene, part of his Theame ; but nothing 
 Of his ill-ta'ne suspition. 
 
14S Shakespeare : the Book. 
 
 So runs the text of the Folio 1623. I see no advantage in 
 repeating the various alterations which have been suggested. 
 Let it suffice to say that Steevens understood 'comfort' as a 
 verb governing ' nothing,' and quotes Paulina's remark as to 
 ' comforting his evils.' Warburton read Queen's for ' Queene,' 
 meaning '[let] comfort [be] the gracious queen's [friend]:' and 
 one of the latest critics privately proposed to me to put a 
 point after 'comfort,' taking 'comfort' (like Warburton) as a 
 substantive. For myself, I will not attempt to pronounce on 
 the merit of such conjectures; for I labour under the disquali- 
 fication of not being able to see in the passage anything 
 whatsoever requiring alteration. I see in it a fine example of 
 Shakespeare's terseness, and two archaic phrases. 
 
 1. As to the terseness of the phrase 
 
 Good expedition be my friend, and comfort 
 The gracious Queene, 
 
 surely this means ' Let both of us make good speed.' On this, 
 compare the expression ' the Queen's speed ' in act iii, sc. 2. 
 The sentence may be thus paraphrased : ' Let me have good 
 speed for my friend, and the Queen have good speed for her 
 comfort.' Polixenes stood in pressing need of friendly help, to 
 enable him to escape his enemy Leontes ; and Hermione stood 
 in special need of eomfort to enable her in her present physical 
 condition to sustain the troubles consequent on her husband's 
 jealousy. 
 
 2. The one archaic phrase is to be part of, meaning, to 
 contribute to. Thus, in Posthumus' soliloquy on Death in 
 Cymbeline, v, 4 : 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 149 
 
 If of my freedom 'tis the main part, 
 
 i. e., if my death will mainly contribute to my freedom, &c. 
 Compare also the King's words in Cymbeline, act iv, sc. 3 : 
 ' Imogen, the great part of my comfort, gone.' The king's 
 ' theame ' was of the Queen and Polixenes : each contributed 
 to it, as he himself says in act ii, sc. 3, 
 
 part o' the cause, [/. e. , of his grief] 
 She, the adultress : for the harlot king 
 Is quite beyond mine arm. 
 
 'The harlot king' was the other part of his 'theame.' 
 But there yet remains the obsolete expression — 
 
 but nothing 
 
 Of his ill-ta'ne suspition. 
 
 To be something of is the same as to be part of; i. e., to con- 
 tribute to : and to be nothing of is not to contribute to. Thus, 
 in Antony and Cleopatra, ii, 2, Antony says — 
 
 Let this fellow 
 Be nothing of our strife : 
 
 and Malone quotes from Twelfth Night, iii, 4, these words : 
 
 Do me this courteous office, as to know of the knight, what my offence 
 to him is : it is something of my negligence, nothing of my purpose. 
 
 V. — Cymbeline, act. iv, sc. 11. 
 
 Belarius, speaking of Cloten, says, 
 
 Being scarse made up, 
 I meane to man ; he had not apprehension 
 Of roaring terrors ; For defect of judgement 
 Is oft the cause of Feare. (Folio 1623.) 
 
1 50 Shakespeare : the Book. 
 
 Theobald says of this, ' Cloten was defective in judgment, and 
 therefore did not fear. Apprehensions of fear grow from a 
 judgment in weighing danger : and a very easy change from 
 the traces of the letters gives us this sense, and reconciles the 
 reasoning of the whole passage.' So he proposes 
 
 For ttt effect of judgment 
 Is oft the cause of fear : 
 
 and this exceedingly ingenious and intelligent emendation has 
 met with almost universal adoption. Hanmer, however, retained 
 ' defect ' and read ' cure of fear : ' Staunton conjectured sauce for 
 'cause;' Dr. B. Nicholson, loss; Dr. Cartwright, salve; Professor 
 Dowden, cease; and Mr. Joseph Crosby, the act for 'defect.' 
 Knight, adopting an anonymous conjecture made in 1814, reads 
 
 he had not apprehension 
 Of roaring terrors for [/. e., on account of] defect of judgment, 
 As [being] oft the cause of fear : 
 
 which suggests to me the strained and creaking timbers of a 
 vessel in a storm. Professor Sylvester was so good as to send 
 me his interpretation of this disputed passage; and the moment 
 I had read it such a flood of light burst upon my mind, that I 
 instantly knew he had for ever redeemed the Folio text from 
 emendation. I put his interpretation into form, adding to it 
 some corroborative notes of my own, and sent it to Mr. Crosby, 
 of Zanesville, the proposer of one of the above-recorded emend- 
 ations. He withdrew his conjecture, and published my letter 
 to him in The American Bibhopolist of October, 1876. The 
 following is reprinted from that paper, with the addition of the 
 two passages in Richard III and Coriolanus. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 151 
 
 " The passage from Cymbeline seems to have stimulated 
 your ingenuity rather than approved itself to your judgment. 
 It is one of the most instructive in all Shakespeare, being one 
 in which a phrase, not in itself obsolete, has lost the special sense 
 it once had; and with the knowledge of that, the sense is abso- 
 lutely perfect. The phrase in question is ' defect of judgment,' 
 which all commentators have taken to mean the total absence of 
 judgment, whereas it means the defective use of judgment. They 
 were betrayed into this mistake by another; interpreting the 
 phrase ' scarce made up to man ' as if it referred to Cloten's 
 youth ('before he arrived to man's estate,' says Knight), whereas 
 Cloten was a middle aged man ; and almost the same phrase is 
 applied to Richard III (act i, sc. 1). 
 
 Deform'd, unfinisht, sent before my time 
 Into this breathing world, scarce half made up. 
 
 On the contrary, the phrase ' made up to man,' signified — in 
 the full possession of a man's judgment; and when it is said 
 that a certain person is ' scarce made up,' or ' scarce half 
 made up/ it means that he had not all his buttons, or had 
 not a man's judgment. Cloten, being scarce made up, took 
 no heed of terrors that roared loud enough for men with their 
 wits about them, and thus he braved danger; for it is the 
 defective use of judgment (when men have any) which is oft 
 the cause of fear. Compare the phrase 'defect of judgment' 
 in Coriolanus, iv, 7, 
 
 whether defect of judgment 
 To fail in the disposing of those chances 
 Which lie was lord of; 
 
15- Shakespeare: the Hook. 
 
 and 'defects of judgment' in Antony and Cleopatra, ii, 2. A 
 man without reason is fearless in the presence of imminent 
 danger; a man with reason in perfection is equally fearless 
 if his reason shows him the means of escape, for ' fear is 
 nothing else but a betraying of the succours which reason 
 offereth,' and therefore cannot be where reason is not. I am 
 quoting from the Wisdom of Solomon, chap, xvii, verse 12." 
 
 I would add, there is no need for the most scrupulous 
 reasoner to be solicitous about the logic of Belarius' reflection. 
 'For' is, indeed, the illative conjunction, but need not be 
 strained to the full logical force. It is sufficient if the clause 
 it introduces should have one of the senses of as: q.d. 'as, 
 on the contrary, it is defect in that very faculty which Cloten's 
 manhood had never reached, that is often the cause of fear 
 in those who possess it.' 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE SOULE ARAYED.* 
 
 He gave them their desire, and sent leanness withal into their souls. 
 
 Psalm cvi, 14. 
 
 N a golden evening in August last [187 1], for the first 
 time in my life, I joined the gleaners in our own corn- 
 fields, — nos, non nobis: for, of course, I left my little 
 sheaf with some of the daughters of toil who were gathering up 
 the ears within the boundary of staves. To glean with the 
 gleaners has great promise : but to glean after the gleaners has 
 little or none. We know, to our cost, what it is to wade through 
 the literature of Elizabeth and James; and also the delight of 
 bearing off a scanty sheaf, of passages not yet utilized, for the 
 elucidation or illustration of Shakespeare's text. He who gleans 
 after the gleaners learns to be thankful for modest gains. Think 
 how Lazarus would have fared if Dives had kept a dog upon 
 
 * This was a privately printed letter to Mr. Howard Staunton, in 1S72. 
 
 X 
 
154 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 the crumbs which fell from his table I Well : the editor of 
 Shakespeare, who should depend upon the fruit of original 
 research, would have but little advantage over such a beggar. 
 
 In these days, of all literary insects, it is the spider, not the 
 bee, that makes a good thing of it. 
 
 In the fair fields of that literature the gleaning was done 
 with the utmost vigilance and patience by that generation of 
 critics who, from Steevens to Dyce, have thereby laid upon us 
 so heavy a debt, but hitherto have been usually repaid by 
 abuse. It has been the fashion to call them a herd, to dub 
 them criticasters, to sneer at their dulness, and laugh at their 
 verbosity. It is true that some of them might have done 
 their work with more temper, othersome with less arrogance, 
 and yet a few with better judgment or stricter integrity. But 
 the labour was incurred, and the fruits of their study and 
 research are our inheritance. 
 
 In the following pages I bring before you the evidences on 
 which I have, as I believe, restored a line in Shakespeare's 
 146th Sonnet. A tractate devoted to the study of a single line 
 will to many seem in the last degree absurd. That ingenious 
 man, the late Mr. N. J. Halpin, was laughed at in The Times 
 for having written a book on a single passage in A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream : and I dare say many have made themselves 
 merry at Mr. J. O. Phillipps' expense, for having written a 
 pamphlet on a single line in Cymbeline. Critics need to have 
 thick skins (more than one a piece, perhaps,) if they are to run 
 the gauntlet at a Fools' Tourney. Our consolation is this : that 
 we are quite capable of uniting the Artist and the Analyst, 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 155 
 
 just as the sculptor knows the anatomy as well as feels the 
 beauty of the human form. If we sometimes cannot ' see 
 the wood for the trees,' we know that we have only to withdraw 
 from the work of analysis to catch the glory of the whole. But 
 however able we may be to appreciate that glory, it is our 
 chosen walk to study the wood itself, I mean the wood which 
 the ordinary spectator cannot see for the bark which covers it. 
 It is, unfortunately, true that the timber has suffered excoria- 
 tion and consequent decay, and that the exposed recesses have 
 become the prey of an army of woodlice, who, if they had their 
 way (I do not say their will), would make ruin of the old trees. 
 It is the critic's duty to cleanse the corrupt recesses and to 
 heal the breaches which have been made in the integrity of 
 the timber. But none the less are we able to rejoice in that 
 majesty which only looms at a distance. 
 
 In the case to which I now call your attention the gleaning 
 was efficiently done nearly thirty years ago by Mr. Dyce; yet 
 unlike Time, in Johnson's absurd lines, I did not ' toil after 
 him in vain,' for I added an ear of corn to his sheaf. But 
 through inattention to the requirements of the text, a remissness 
 to which every critic is occasionally liable, it never occurred to 
 him to question the purity of the received reading, nor to con- 
 sider its relation to his own industry. The fact is that all 
 collections of instances, in illustration of particular words and 
 phrases, possess a potential virtue — an 'unknown worth,' like 
 Love, in Shakespeare's n 6th Sonnet. 
 
 The Sonnet to which I now wish to direct your attention 
 is thus given in the 4to i6oy — 
 
156 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 146. 
 
 Poore soule the center of my sinfull earth, 
 
 My sinfull earth these rebbel powres that thee array, 
 
 Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth 
 
 Painting thy outward walls so costlie gay ? 
 
 Why so large cost having so short a lease, 
 
 Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend ? 
 
 Shall wormes inheritors of this excesse 
 
 Eate up thy charge? is this thy bodies end ? 
 
 Then soule live thou upon thy servants losse 
 
 And let that pine to aggravat thy store ; 
 
 Buy tearmes divine in selling houres of drosse : 
 
 Within be fed, without be rich no more, 
 
 So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, 
 And death once dead, ther's no more dying then. 
 
 The second line of this Sonnet is allowed on all hands to 
 be corrupt. It is not sense, and it is too long by two syllables. 
 Now the repetition of the three words 'my sinful earth' naturally 
 suggests the source of the corruption and a simple mode of 
 cure. With one or two exceptions all the critics have treated 
 those words at the beginning of the second line as a printer's 
 reduplication. I wish I could say, una litura potest : but unfor- 
 tunately the omission of those three words does not afford 
 a perfect remedy, for the line is then deficient by two syl- 
 lables. Malone supplied these by the words FooPd by, reading 
 
 Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
 FooPd by those rebel powers that thee array, 
 
 by which, of course, he meant that it was the soul, not the 
 earth, that is so fooled. His selection of the verb was ap- 
 parently determined by the following considerations. It is 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 157 
 
 asked why the soul spends so much upon the decoration of 
 a mansion which she must so soon quit. Now Malone took 
 arraying the soul to mean adorning the body (!), and understood 
 that the soul herself was induced to commit this wasteful vanity 
 at the suggestion of certain rebel powers, to wit, the lusts of 
 the flesh ; for in that line it is they who are credited with the 
 decoration ! It is plain then that the soul is trepanned, tricked, 
 or fooled by them. So he chose the last word because it ade- 
 quately expresses this meaning, and — what is a most weighty con- 
 sideration in emending so rhythmical a writer as Shakespeare 
 — gives energy and melody to the verse. Malone's reading has 
 been acquiesced in by nearly all subsequent editors. Even Mr. 
 Dyce follows it, retaining, however, ' these ' which Malone had 
 altered into those. But it is founded on a foregone conclusion. 
 Of course, if it be clearly conveyed in the unaltered sonnet 
 that the rebel powers do stultify the soul in the matter of her 
 raiment, the reading is admissible, if not actually justified. But 
 so far from this being the case, apart from the second line, 
 those powers are not once mentioned ; but the soul herself is 
 said to deck and paint not herself but her tenement. Mean- 
 while, then, what are the rebel powers about? What is it that 
 usually occupies rebel powers 1 Surely not the decoration of 
 the enemy's fortress, but the consumption of the enemy's stores, 
 the siege, or the assault. It is one of those three destructive 
 operations which one would have looked for in Shakespeare's 
 line: and after all, is it not there? 
 
 These considerations preclude any such interpretation as 
 Malone's. Before they occurred to me I had tried to supple- 
 
158 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 ment the defective line in many ways, supplying e.g., Foil' d by, 
 SpoiVd by, and Sport of. I afterwards found that Steevens 
 had proposed to read 
 
 Stan^d by the rebel powers &c, 
 
 that the author of The Sonnets of Wm. Shakspere rearranged 
 and divided into four parts reads 
 
 Slave of these rebel powers &c, 
 
 and that the Cambridge editors record an 'anon, conj.,' which 
 
 runs thus, 
 
 Thrall to these rebel powers &c. 
 
 I have since encountered one of my own cast-offs in the Gem 
 Edition of the Sonnets, where Mr. F. T. Palgrave reads, 
 
 FoiVd by the rebel powers &c. 
 
 I may add that an American critic {Remarks on the Sonnets of 
 Shakespeare, [by E. A. H., of Washington City] 1865, p. 60) calls 
 the rebel powers ' the arraigning powers ; ' by which expression 
 he may possibly have intended a covert allusion to ' array : " 
 but even he follows Malone's reading. 
 
 It was, I think, no slight gain to have perceived that Malone 
 had forced on the second line an incongruous metaphor; that 
 the rebel powers could not have been represented as putting 
 raiment on the soul ; for the soul's raiment is ' the muddy 
 vesture of decay,' and that is not wrought by them, but too 
 often destroyed by them : and that the supposition that they 
 discharge so strange an office receives no support from the 
 fourth line. It was, however, a far more important step to 
 detect the required sense in the corrupt line. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 159 
 
 I will relate how I came to take the second step. Mr. Dyce 
 had elaborately prepared himself to make this discovery, years 
 before I had studied the sonnet, by the most accurate discrimi- 
 nation of three verbs pronounced alike, whereof two (if not 
 all three) have the same orthography. The word pronounced 
 array is an equivoke for three distinct verbs. 
 
 (1) Array, to put raiment on anyone. 
 
 (2) Array, to put in array (or in battle-array). 
 
 (3) Aray, or array, to afflict or ill-treat. 
 
 Mr. Dyce had done more : he had collected seven early 
 instances of the last verb; yet he failed to perceive that the 
 verb in the corrupt line is not the first of those three verbs, 
 nor yet the second, but the third ! 
 
 Mr. Gerald Massey, in his big book on Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets, made one step in the right direction ; but unhappily 
 made another in a wrong direction. He saw far more than 
 Mr. Dyce. It was plain to him that the first array was not 
 the verb used in that sonnet. But having reached this conclu- 
 sion, he spoiled all by attempting to impose the second array 
 on the corrupt line. This he did by retaining the three first 
 words, which every critic had discarded as a reduplicative mis- 
 print, and the following is the text adopted by him : 
 
 Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, — 
 My sinful earth these rebel powers array — 
 
 Thus making the second line an impertinent parenthesis, and 
 stultifying the demonstrative pronoun (these) by rejecting the 
 only words which shew who the rebel powers are. What rebel 
 powers'? asks the reader; and here no answer is given in the 
 
i6o Shakespeare: the Hook. 
 
 text or by the critic. Besides this objection, every reader of 
 taste must feel that the speaker having addressed his (or her) 
 soul in the first line, preparatory to asking her, why she pines 
 and starves within her fading mansion, would not have arrested 
 the course of his (or her) thought by an interpolation having no 
 connection, grammatical or substantive, with the rest of the 
 sonnet. For my part, had the sonnet thus appeared in Thorpe's 
 4to, I should have marked it with an obelus: still less can 
 I allow such writing to be imposed upon Shakespeare, when 
 his publisher has not given it the sanction of print. 
 
 While thus condemning Mr. Massey's reconstruction, I 
 honour him for having had one true insight. He saw that the 
 maintenance and adornment of the soul's ' fading mansion ' is 
 not the direct work of the ' rebel powers ' but of the soul 
 herself. At the same time, I must add that his original insight 
 seems to have suffered from his not perceiving that the verb 
 array in that place cannot be an equivoke. His words are 
 " These ' rebel powers ' do not array the soul; they are of the 
 flesh; they array his sinful earth. 'Array' here does not [only] 
 mean dress, I think it [also] signifies that in the flesh these rebel 
 powers set their battle in array against the soul " (Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets never before interpreted: 1866, p. 379). The words I 
 have put in square brackets should have been omitted. Their 
 presence asserts that the letters a.r.r.a.y may stand for two dis- 
 tinct words. I take the last sentence of the extract as an 
 illustration, not an analysis, of the proposed reconstruction ; 
 for of course he never could have believed that Shakespeare, 
 had he written 
 
SJiakespcare : the Book. 161 
 
 My sinful earth these i - ebel powers array, 
 intended array to be understood in the sense of 
 Set (their) battle in array in — 
 
 i. e., in the flesh or sinful earth. If he did, however, I need offer 
 him no apology for rescuing his reconstruction from a non- 
 sensical interpretation. 
 
 A German critic, D. Barnstoff (A Key to Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets, translated by T. J. Graham: 1862, p. 202), retaining 
 the two words rejected by Mr. Massey, takes the verb array 
 to mean 
 
 Set (themselves) in array against — 
 
 for he makes Shakespeare paraphrase the second line (as it 
 stands in Thorpe's 4to) in these words — 'and by the term 
 sinful earth I mean these human instincts, desires, passions, 
 which set themselves in array against the noble ambition to 
 excel.' 
 
 Having at length swept away all considerations supporting 
 the assumption, that array in the 146th Sonnet means to put 
 raiment on, or that it means to set in array, I proceed to 
 consider the third interpretation : viz., that it means to afflict 
 or ill-treat. In this sense to aray, or array, is an old word, 
 seemingly cognate with ray and beray ; and the three forms, 
 1. aray, 2. ray, 3. beray, mean pretty nearly the same thing, 
 though it is still an unsettled question what is the radical 
 concrete sense involved in them. 
 
 I note en passant that there are other verbs, wray and 
 
 Y 
 
162 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 bewray, to disclose or manifest* These must not be confounded 
 with ray and beray. The latter word is common : e. g., ' but 
 our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge, that made him 
 beray his credit.' (T/ic Retinae from Pcrnassus, 1606. Act iv, 
 sc. 3.) ' that * * lets his sonnes be plaine Ladies puppets, 
 to beray a Ladies Chamber.' Ibid., act ii, sc. 5. ' he that 
 * * * makes a set speech to his greyhound, * * and 
 if the dog * * * chance to beray the rorae,' &c. Ibid., 
 act ii, sc. 6. ' yet they do nothing but beray my house.' 
 Ibid., act iii, sc. 2. 
 
 As to aray, Mr. Dyce and Mr. Joseph Payne err, in different 
 directions, in assigning its radical meaning. Mr. Dyce (Edition 
 of Skelton's Works, 1843, v °l- l h P- l 9^) sa y s it means to dispose 
 of to treat. That is assuredly wrong. Mr. Payne (Studies in 
 English Prose, 1868, p. 51) says it means to soil with dirt. 
 While allowing that a physical sense is always more probable 
 than an emotional sense, I must say this particular sense is not 
 supported by any evidence. It is plain to me that the word is 
 used by all writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to 
 mean to ill-treat; and if that is only a 'second intention,' I do 
 not think we have yet discovered the first. Can it be to tear 
 
 * Examples of both verbs abound in the Elizabethan literature, e. g., 
 
 ' With sugred words he wraid his sutes at fill.' 
 
 G. Whetstone's Rock of Regard (The Castle of Delight). 
 
 ' He not abasht the truth in wordes to wray.' 
 
 Ibid. 
 'And can those new Heads no new Witt bewray?' 
 
 J. Davies' Paper's Complaint. 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 163 
 
 (dechirer)?* Two or three of the subsequent examples suggest 
 this sense. Mr. Dyce founds his decision on Palsgrave's defini- 
 tion. 'A ray condicion or case — poynt? Mr. Payne founds his 
 
 * This conjecture implies that the radical sense of aray is to tear to 
 strips, or more generally to shred. In China it is the custom to aray their 
 worst malefactors in this radical fashion : the criminal's flesh being arayed, 
 i. e., slashed, or cut into strips, before he is crucified. Dr. Sebastian 
 Evans remonstrated with me upon a proposed etymology of this word ; and 
 the following remarks are extracted from his letter to me of Christmas, 1872. 
 
 "A ' ray' is a line, or streak, more particularly a line or streak described 
 from some centre or quasi-centre. Thus a hart ' runneth fast on his raies' — 
 i. e., lines of track; 'a bleeding hart the clean waves with purple gore did 
 ray' — i. e., streak with red rays; ' Grumio is rated' — i. e., streaked all over 
 with splashes, etc., etc. Rayed, in fact, came very often to mean splashed, 
 and if you look at a splash you will see why. Berayed accordingly means 
 splashed, and hence in a secondary sense defiled. Cf. in this connection to 
 'ray out,' rayer de sang, etc. Also, 'rayed with the yellows' as applied to 
 a horse: as to which see arra & ialo in Florio's New World of Words, 
 'applied to a horse that hath the laske.' 
 
 Now for array. It means — 
 
 1. to set in lines, rays, ranks, or rows. 
 
 2. to arrange in due order. 
 
 3. to adorn by arranging in due order. 
 
 4. (reflectively) to adorn oneself by arranging one's dress, etc., in due 
 order. 
 
 5. (generically) to clothe or dress any person or thing. 
 
 6. to put any person or thing into a certain state, plight or predicament. 
 I think this is the logical sequence of significances, but I don't exclude 
 
 others which may be given, and I feel that throughout the series there runs 
 a kind of under-current of meaning, conveying a sense of surrounding as 
 with rays." 
 
 I may add that Chaucer employs the substantive in the Prologue to his 
 Canterbury Tales, 11. 38 — 41, but apparently in the sense of order. 
 
 To tellen you alle the condition 
 
 Of eche of hem, so as it semed to me, 
 
 And whiche they weren, and of what degre ; 
 
 And eke in what araie that they were inne : 
 
164 Shakespeare: the lunik. 
 
 on Palsgrave's example, ' Your govvne is foule arrayde ; ' and 
 adds, ' The word is rare ' — which it is not, but frequent with 
 writers of those centuries. It became obsolete early in the 
 seventeenth century. The following is Mr. Dyce's sheaf : 
 
 " WOFFUI.LY ARM I) 
 
 Is mentioned by our author [John Skelton] as one of his compositions in 
 the Garlande of Laurell, v, 1418, vol. i, 417. 
 
 With the opening of this piece compare Hawes's Convercyon of Swerers, 
 where Christ is made to exclaim, 
 
 ' They newe agayne do hange me on the rode, 
 They tere my sydes, and are nothynge dysmayde, 
 My vvoundes they do open, and devoure my blode : 
 I, god and man, moost wofully arayde, 
 To you complayne, it maye not be denayde; 
 Ye nowe to lugge me, ye tere me at the roote, 
 Yet I to you am chefe refuyte and bote.' 
 
 and a little after, 
 
 ' Why arte thou harde herted, &c. Sig. A iii, ed. n. d. 4to. 
 
 Barclay too has, 
 
 ' Some sweareth amies, nayles, heart, and body, 
 Tearing our Lorde worse then the Jewes him arayde.' 
 
 The Ship of Fooles, fol. 33, ed. 1570. 
 
 IVoffully araid is, I believe, equivalent to — wofully disposed of or treated, 
 in a woful condition. 'Araye condicion or case — poynt.' Palsgrave's 
 Lesclar. de la Lang. Fr., 1530, fol. xviii. (Table of Subst.) — (and see 
 note, p. 164, v. 163.) 
 
 'Isaac. — What have I done, fader, what have I saide? 
 Abraham. — Truly, no kyns ille to me. 
 Isaac. — And thus gyltles shalle be arayde.' 
 
 Abraham, — Towneley Mysteries, p. 40. 
 
 ' ITis [Tybert's] body was al to beten, and blynde on the one eye. 
 
SJiakcspeare : the Book. 165 
 
 Whan the kyngewyste this, that tybert was thus arayed, he was sore angry,' 
 &c. — Reynard the Fox, sig. b 8, ed. 1481. Again, in the same romance,* 
 when Isegrym the wolf has received a kick on the head from a mare, he 
 says to Reynard, ' I am so foule arayed and sore hurte, that an herte of 
 stone might have pyte of me.' — Sig. f 4. 
 
 ' Who was wyth love : more wofully arayed 
 Than were these twayne. ' 
 
 Hawes's Pastiine of Pleasure, sig. I iiii, ed. 1555. 
 
 'I am fowle arayed with a chyne cowgh. Laceor pertussi.' — He was 
 sore arayed with sycknesse. Morbo atrociter conflictus est.' 
 
 Hormanni Vulgaria, sigs. H iii, I ii, ed. 1530." 
 
 To this sheaf, as I have said, I was enabled to add but one 
 ear (not counting the passage in Shakespeare's 146th Sonnet), 
 viz., 
 
 'And on the morowe erly the ten men of armes came tofore the daulphyn 
 alle wounded and sore hurt. And they recounted to hym how two yonge 
 men onely had arayed them so and how they nedes must flee for fere of 
 theyrlyves.' — Par/sand Vienna, 1459, Caxton. Reprint, 1868. Roxburgh 
 Library, p. 47. 
 
 Richardson seems to me to go astray in giving, as the 
 radical meaning of aray, ' to cover, to cloak, to dress, to set in 
 order ; ' by which error he is naturally led to assign, as the sig- 
 nification of ray or beray (as Mr. Payne did, after him, of aray), 
 ' to cover with dirt,' ' to dirty, to befoul, to bespatter with dirt.' 
 He quotes, however, two examples apparently in point from 
 Spenser's Faery Queen : 
 
 * From 'Isegrym the Wolf's Experiment in Reading.' 'Alas, Reynart ! 
 alas ! said the wolf, I pray you to leve your mockyng. I am so foule 
 arayed,' Sec. 
 
1 66 Shakespeare; the Book. 
 
 'And the cleane waves with purple gore did ray.' 
 
 B. ii, c. i. 
 
 '[Wypt] from his face the filth that did it ray? 
 
 B. vi, c. 5. 
 
 Of the form (abbreviated or radical, whichever it may turn 
 
 out to be) ray, two examples occur in the Taming of the Shrew, 
 
 iii, 2, and iv, 1, thus : 
 
 'His horse * * * rated with the yellowes.' 
 
 ' Was ever man so beaten? was ever man so raideV 
 
 In these two passages Mr. Dyce interpreted the participle, 
 by comparing it in the former case with berayed, and in the 
 latter with a rayed; and he explains it as ' in evil condition, 
 afflicted.' With all this apparatus of learning, however, he failed 
 to perceive that when Shakespeare says, 
 
 ' these rebel powers that thee [the soul] array,' 
 
 he is using exactly the same word; for it is just the lusts of the 
 flesh that (in the words of the Collect) ' assault and hurt the 
 soul,' i. e., array the soul by consuming that store which has 
 been already impoverished by her lavish expenditure on that 
 which profits her nothing. 
 
 I hold it therefore fully established that ' array ' in this 
 sonnet means ill-treat, or bring to an evil condition. This con- 
 clusion seems to necessitate another. Discarding the first three 
 words as an error of the press, it becomes evident that the use 
 of the pronoun ' thee ' in the defective line is conclusive against 
 the reflexion of the leading words to the soul. This is a matter 
 to be felt rather than reasoned out. If I could believe that 
 those words refer to the soul I should read, 
 
Shakespeare : the Book. 167 
 
 Heart of these rebel powers that thee aray. 
 
 But even then, though I should evade the truism that Malone's 
 reading and others should foist into the line, the structure would 
 still be awkward. I most strongly feel that the leading words 
 must have a direct application to the proximate substantive, 
 1 earth,' and that the second line must be a justification of the 
 expression ' sinful earth,' which is otherwise out of relation with 
 the entire sonnet. I feel also that the second line ought to be 
 to the following effect : 
 
 Sinful earth, because it harbours powers that rebel against the 
 Soul, and are therefore sinful. 
 
 Now here I will be careful not to speak dogmatice, there 
 being so few data in the problem. Take the substantive seat 
 tentatively, and you will perfectly understand the reading I 
 desiderate in that line. Had Shakespeare written 
 
 Seate of these rebbel powres that thee aray 
 
 all would have been satisfactory, and the reading would have 
 
 received illustration from the 109th Sonnet, where the bard 
 
 says — 
 
 Never believe, though in my nature reign'd 
 
 All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, &c. 
 
 But it still seems that a more satisfactory sense would be 
 imparted to the passage if the earth were treated as the accom- 
 plice, than as the residence, of the rebel powers. While I was 
 endeavouring to restore the defective line, with a view to this 
 sense, Mr. A. E. Brae (who had been independently studying 
 the sonnet) communicated to me a correction which had at 
 
1 68 
 
 Shakespeare: the Book. 
 
 length occurred to him, viz., Leagued with : so that the first 
 
 two lines would run thus : 
 
 Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
 Leagued with these rebel powers that thee aray, 
 
 which reading strikes me as fulfilling every condition of the 
 case : it is the earth that is in league with the rebel powers, 
 and the earth itself is therefore called 'sinful.' Here we have 
 the flesh represented as leagued or compacted with its carnal 
 desires in the work of defrauding the soul of her rightful 
 nutriment, whereby she pines within and suffers dearth. 
 
 K N D. 
 
 
 aU. 
 
3(iitcrcalatp |j)otc£. 
 
 -0 — 
 
 P. 36. I should have added, that Bishop Percy's interleaved copy of 
 Langbaine, in 4 vols., is now in the possession of Mr. A. Holt White, of 
 Clements Hall, Rochford. 
 
 P. 57. Note. — To the list of books on the Shakespeare and Bacon 
 Controversy, should be added, Shakespeare: from an American Point of View; 
 incltiding an Inquiry into his Religious Faith and his Knowledge of Law : 
 with the Baconian Theory considered, by George Wilkes. 1877. 
 
 P. 61. Exactly so, it is an argument against Shakespeare's authorship 
 of The Merry Devil of Edmonton (4:0, 1631), that there are in it passages 
 which resemble Shakespeare : e. g. , 
 
 My stiffened haire stands upright on my head, 
 As doe the bristles of a Porcupine. 
 
 P. 105. To the references to A r otes and Queries, 5th S., given in note 
 on p. 59, should be added, vi, 370 ; vii, 213; vii, 316. 
 
 T. 143, line 12. 'Very foolishly.' Mr. Hugh Carleton, of New Zealand, 
 writes me word that, in his opinion, 'foolishly' here means stolidly. lie 
 may very well be right. It is also worth a note that, in the previous part of 
 the same scene, the ' fool i' the forest ' is represented by Jaques as having' 
 made some exceedingly trite remarks 'very wisely,' where the qualification 
 appears to mean the same as in the passage under consideration. 
 
i"u Intercalary Notes, 
 
 P, 152. Mr. 1'. I. FurnivaU insists upon it, that the two propositions, 
 
 Being scarse made up, 
 
 1 mean to man ; he had not apprehension 
 Of roaring terrors : 
 
 and 
 
 Defect uf judgement 
 Is oft the cause of Peare : 
 
 though connected by the illative conjunction ' for,' arc not associated as 
 result and condition: and he challenges me to give the logical forms in 
 which they stand. The forms are — 
 
 All not-Ys are not-Xs, 
 Since, All Xs are Vs. 
 
 Belarius, however, contents himself with stating the particular converse of 
 
 the latter proposition : viz., 
 
 Some Ys are Xs, 
 
 the particularity being marked by the word ' oft : ' a reason for which may 
 be found in the imperfect recognition this great psychological fact has 
 received from the critics of the text. 
 
 Of course Mr. FurnivaU, or anyone, may so interpret the two propositions 
 as to save them from these forms : but, if 'for' is to be taken in its full logical 
 force, into these forms they must go ; and surely it is better that they should 
 go into them, or that ' for ' should not be so taken, than that the text of the 
 Folio should be altered to suit ' the taste and fancy ' of the critic. Besides, 
 ' what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,' and Mr. FurnivaU 
 ought in consistency and (7 fortiori to demur to the following text in St. 
 
 John viii, 47, 
 
 He that is of God heareth God's words : 
 
 Ye ttierefore hear them not, because ye are not of God. 
 
 P. 166, line 6. Observing the verb ray in John Davies' Paper's Complaint, 
 1620, p. 230, where Paper says, 
 
 One rates me with course Rimes ; 
 
 and seeing infra, p. 237, 
 
 But that which most my Soule excruciates, &c, 
 and p. 242, 
 
 This, this (U this) my vexed Soule doth kill ! 
 
Intercalary Notes. 
 
 171 
 
 I concluded that ray in the former line meant to excruciate, to vex, &c. 
 But on reading the intermediate part of that foolish poem, I saw that I was, 
 not improbably, on a false scent, and that ray — dress. 
 
 Yet, Poets love I, sith they made me weare 
 
 (What vveares out Time) my rich, and gaudiest Geare. 
 
 Yea, those I love that in too earnest Game 
 
 (or little Spleene) did me no little shame. 
 
 Sith I can witnesse to succeeding Times 
 
 They oft have me araid with royall Rimes, 
 
 That ravish Readers (though they envious bee,) 
 
 Such sacred Raptures they have put on me. 
 
 Printed by JosiAH Aim \, Birmingham. 
 
HAKESPEARE'S CENTURIE OF PRAYSE (1592- 
 1693), being Materials for a History of Opinion on 
 Shakespeare and His Works, culled from Writers of 
 the first Century after his rise, collected and edited, (with 
 elucidations), by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D., printed on thick 
 hand-made paper, in old style type, large paper with fac- 
 simile, 4to, bound in boards, in the antique style, £2. 2s. 
 
 1874. 
 — small paper, in paper wrapper, uniform in style with 
 the Spencer Society Publications, 21s. 1874. 
 
 Triibner & Co., 57 & 59, Ludgate Hill. 
 
 (D {unions of tlje |)rcss. 
 
 Mr. W. Minto : in the Examiner, January 16, 1875. 
 
 It seems at first sight that it would be easy enough to collect all that can be 
 found about Shakespeare in the writings of a given period, more especially 
 when generations of scholars have gone over the ground and recorded their 
 discoveries. But any investigator who, like Dr. Ingleby, resolves to go over 
 the ground again, and glean references hitherto undetected, has a sufficiently 
 laborious task before him, and one in which the dry research is relieved and 
 rewarded at rare intervals. * * Dr. Ingleby remarks in his preface that he 
 had little conception of the difficulties of his work till he had advanced some 
 way towards its execution. Although he modestly disclaims absolute com- 
 pleteness for his collection, and expects that there are still many gleanings 
 to be had, there can be no doubt that his ' Centurie of Prayse' is all but 
 theoretically complete, and certainly complete enough to afford reasonable 
 satisfaction to all who aie interested in the question that he has proposed to 
 illustrate. * * * It is interesting in itself, and it may be made a most 
 fertile basis for reflection and speculation. 
 
Opinions of the Press. 
 
 The late Mr. Richard Simpson : in the Academy, February 6, 1875. 
 
 Dr. Ingleby's very careful compilation is meant to include almost all the 
 passages alluding to Shakspere which occur in books or writings between 
 1592 and 1693. * * * The series of Shakspere Allusion-books which 
 Dr. Ingleby is publishing for the New Shakspere Society is nearly the same 
 in design as the present work, the difference being that the series professes 
 to give the whole or an integral portion of the books, while the Centurie of 
 Prayse gives only the passages in which the allusions occur. Dr. Ingleby, 
 in a modest preface, states the difficulty of his task, and the unlikelihood 
 that the first attempt to attain completeness should be entirely successful. 
 Indeed, when the whole literature of a hundred years has to be searched, it 
 is hard to see when the collection can be pronounced complete : there may 
 lurk so many allusions which want an CEdipus to unriddle, so many obscure 
 passages may have been wrongly tacked on to Shakspere ; and so many rare 
 books or manuscripts may still be extant which have not been read by any 
 one sufficiently on the look-out for such passages. * * * To know the 
 earlier criticism Dr. Ingleby's book is indispensable. 
 
 Notes and Queries, February 13, 1875. 
 
 Dr. Ingleby had a 'happy thought' when the idea of preparing a work like 
 the present first offered itself to his mind. It is one lacking which no 
 Shakspearian library can pretend to be perfect. Dr. Ingleby gives brief 
 passages from books whose authors wrote between 1592 and 1693. Fach 
 passage refers to Shakspeare, not invariably in praise of him, but always in 
 proof of the hold which the national poet had on the heart or judgment of 
 the nation. * * * Each passage collected by Dr. Ingleby serves as a 
 link in the life of the poet. A second passage is never given on the same 
 page, but some extracts occupy several pages. There is ' ample room and 
 verge enough ' for possessors of the volume to make annotations in the 
 margin ; and the printing is creditable to the press of Josiah Allen, of 
 Birmingham. * * * The danger [of Shakspeare's depreciation], indeed, 
 exists no longer ; and Dr. Ingleby's book will help to keep it from reviving, 
 for it proves (a little, perhaps, against that accomplished gentleman's own 
 opinion) that Shakspeare was in the hearts of the people from the very first, 
 and that with the restoration of the monarchy he was permanently re- 
 enthroned, semper floreat. 
 
 The Saturday Review, March 6, 1875. 
 
 Dr. Ingleby's collection of Shakspearian criticisms, panegyrics, and allusions 
 is a book of luxury ; but it is something more than a mere book of luxury. 
 In that character indeed it leaves nothing to desire. Some of the pieces 
 here collected are merely curious or odd, giving evidence of nothing beyond 
 the fact that particular works of Shakspeare were well enough known to the 
 writers to be the subject of passing mention. But the main scope of the 
 book is such as to take it out of the class of mere literary curiosities. The 
 men of Shakspeare's own time and the times next following it tell us here in 
 
Opinions of the Pirss. 
 
 their own words what they thought of him. We have the judgments of his 
 fellow-poets, sometimes expressed by themselves, sometimes reported at 
 secondhand by collectors of anecdote, the panegyrics of friends, and the 
 sneers of his few enemies. The editor's notes supply concisely but sufficiently 
 such things as are needful for the understanding of the less obvious points. 
 We confess that we should have liked a little more discussion and justifica- 
 tion of some extracts which on the face of them are doubtful, but the fault is 
 on the right side. * * * Dr. Ingleby's conclusion from the evidence 
 is that Shakspeare's own age admired him much, but not adequately. He 
 says that no one during the ' Centime ' (that is, the century after Shakspeare 
 began to publish) had any suspicion that the genius of Shakspeare was 
 unique. This is in some measure true, but we think it is over-stated. That 
 Shakspeare had not in his own generation that sort of classical fame which 
 no man can have till after his death, one may of course readily admit ; that 
 it was not foreseen by any one then how much he would overshadow his 
 contemporaries in the eyes of posterity, seems also probable enough, if not 
 certain; but that the peculiar qualities of his genius — those, in fact, which 
 make it, as Dr. Ingleby says, unique — were to a considerable extent seen 
 and appreciated from the first, we think is fairly made out by the witnesses 
 here collected. Doubtless one must not be misled by the wording of their 
 praise, although the words are often as strong, and perhaps as apt, as any we 
 could find now that we are supposed to know Shakspeare so much better. 
 In those days the language of both praise and blame was much less guarded 
 than it is at present, and the sort of reserve which modern manners impose 
 on us, even in speaking well of living persons, did not exist. Epithets and 
 flowers of speech must be taken as standing in themselves for less than they 
 would stand for now. But, after allowing for all this, we find evidence of a 
 real discernment and sympathy quite incompatible with the notion of Shak- 
 speare's being, in the eyes of the best wits of his time, only one of a number 
 of more or less respectable poets and playwrights of whom for various reasons 
 it was desirable to speak civilly. 
 
 The Athenceum, March 20, 1875. 
 
 In a volume, on which he has bestowed the quaint title of 'Shakespeare's 
 Centurie of Prayse,' Dr. Ingleby has collected so many of these and other 
 references as occurred within a hundred years of the commencement of 
 Shakspeare's fame, from the close of 1592, that is, to 1693. In the dearth 
 of other and more exact information, these ' Materials for a History of 
 Opinion on Shakespeare and his Works ' are not without value. With a 
 few exceptions, however, the criticisms, when such are passed, are only 
 remarkable as evincing how far were contemporaries in general from rightly 
 estimating the size of the man with whom they dwelt. The praise lavished 
 upon him is of the kind which is bestowed upon those of his contemporaries 
 who were most popular with their fellows. * * * To reprint all the 
 slurs of which incapacity has been guilty is a whimsical task. Something 
 may, however, in the case of Shakspeare, concerning whom we know so 
 little, be urged in its favour, and the task has been thoroughly accomplished, 
 brush references to Shakspeare turn up as the by-paths of literature are 
 
( opinions of the Press. 
 
 more fully explored. Dr. Ingleby's work will not, accordingly, long remain 
 complete. * * * It is, however, a creditable result of industry and 
 research. 
 
 Professor Hiram Corson : in the Cornell Review, May, 1875. 
 
 That William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Gent., was the author 
 of these Dramas, every one who is willing to accept testimony thereunto 
 pertaining, equally strong and conclusive as the testimony that is requisite in 
 a civilized court of justice, to hang a man, can find such testimony in abund- 
 ance in the volume before us. He who would reject the testimony it affords, 
 could not consistently accept the testimony bearing upon the authorship of 
 the Canterbury Tales, the Faerie Queene, the Paradise Lost, the Rape of the 
 Lock, the Task, or any other well-known product of English Literature. 
 
 But let it not be inferred, from the above remarks, that it is a purpose 
 of the 'Centurie of Prayse' to furnish such testimony. There is not the 
 slightest allusion thereto, and such a thing doesn't appear to have been in 
 the editor's mind. But the work does furnish it, nevertheless. * * * 
 
 To return to the work before us. The leading purpose that the editor 
 had in view, in its preparation, was, as set forth in the title, to offer 
 'materials for a history of opinion on Shakespeare and his works, culled 
 from writers of the first century after his rise ; ' that is, from 1592, the 28th 
 year of his age, to 1693 ; and these materials are far more abundant than 
 any who have not made a special study of the subject, and who hold the 
 traditional opinion that little or nothing has been delivered of Shakespeare 
 by his contemporaries, would be apt to suppose. The Index to Authors 
 cited, contains 116 names, a large number of them being those of prominent 
 writers ; Anonymous Works, 25 ; List of Exclusions (I. Irrelevant Allusions, 
 II ; II. Spurious Allusions, 5), 16; and in a Postscript are given the titles 
 of 8 plays, published from 1599 to 1662, which show an influence of Shake- 
 speare's works. In the ' Forespeech ' the editor states that he ' has excluded 
 from the catena all documentary notices of Shakespeare ; for, besides being 
 foreign to its scope, they are sufficiently numerous and extensive to form a 
 considerable volume by themselves.' 
 
 TK 
 
HAKESPEARE HERMENEUTICS, OR THE STILL 
 
 LION, being an Essay towards the Restoration of 
 
 Shakespeare's Text. By C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. Printed 
 
 in all respects to range with Shakespeare's Centurie of 
 
 Prayse, and bound in boards, in the same style, 6s. 1875. 
 
 Trubner & Co., 57 & 59, Ludgate Hill. 
 
 (Opinions of tjjc '|Jress. 
 
 Dr. Friedrich v. Bodenstedt : in the Jahrbuch of the German 
 Shakespeare Society for 1867. (Preface, p. viii.) 
 
 Ingleby, to whom we are indebted for the most complete view and ex- 
 posure of the Shakespeare Forgeries, which made so much stir in the world 
 at their time, gives us here, as the precursor of a larger work [Shakespeare 
 Hermeneutics\, contributions for the restoration of the Shakespearian text. 
 I have considered it unnecessary to translate his essay, because the principal 
 contents of it would, even in a German dress, remain unintelligible to any 
 one not acquainted with the English language. 
 
 The Saturday Review (on first sketch), July 20, 1867. 
 
 Under the eccentric title of Tlie Still Lion, Dr. Ingleby indites an essay on 
 the conjectural emendation of the Text, which abounds in robust, pithy sense, 
 jocose humour, and felicitous illustration. There is also enough personality 
 to remind us that the Shakespearian critics of this country are a quarrelsome 
 brood. 
 
 Mr. F. J. Furnivall's Introduction to Gervinus 1 Commentaries, 
 
 1874, p. xlvi. 
 
 Dr. Ingleby describes his just publisht Still Lion as 'indications of a" 
 systematic Hermeneutic [science of interpretation] of Shakspere's text.' It 
 is strongly against plausible emendations, and is well worth study. 
 
 A \ 
 
Opinions of the Press. 
 
 Mr. Joseph Crosby: in the American Bibliopolist, April, 1875. 
 
 As an ancillary contribution to this study, the clever essay, named at the 
 head of this article, deserves more than a passing notice. * * * From 
 the well-considered principles it lays down for the restoration, and just 
 interpretation, of the Text of Shakespeare ; the happy expositions of many 
 obscure and difficult passages brought out in the illustration of these prin- 
 ciples, and the charming and often harmonious style of the author, we 
 venture to say it will be greedily and gratefully welcomed by every earnest 
 student of the poet. * * * In two noteworthy respects this essay differs 
 from most books of criticism : the author keeps clear of any attempt to 
 display his own acuteness, or powers of satire, under the garb of elucidating 
 Shakespeare ; and albeit every page is replete with originality, sound 
 criticism, and learning, it is so lighted up with good sense, humor, and 
 frequent illustrations, that there is not a line of dry reading in the book. 
 * * * Every sentence bristles with good points. The pen in his hand is 
 a polished weapon, and he deals his blows right and left on all impertinent 
 correctors and blundering restorers of the Text, from Mr. Perkins-Ireland 
 down to Mr. Staunton in his late ' Unsuspected Corruptions,' in a style that 
 is at once vigorous and trenchant, and very amusing. * * * We beg, 
 again, heartily to thank Dr. Ingleby for his masterly little volume ; and to 
 express the hope that every intending editor of Shakespeare will ponder 
 well, and profit by, the sound doctrine it inculcates. Nothing but good — 
 much good — can result from a careful study of its too few pages. 
 
 The Atkenaum, October 9, 1875. 
 
 Dr. Ingleby is entitled to a prominent place in the ranks of those who have 
 taken up the task of the elucidation of Shakspeare, and his work is one of 
 the most scholarly and important contributions yet made to Shakspearean 
 literature. * * * Although separated from the average commentator 
 by gifts of perception and temper, Dr. Inyleby is still of the race. He is 
 unable quite to resist an inclination towards the conjecture he condemns, 
 or to treat with the amused indifference which they merit the framers of 
 absurd suggestions. If, like Narcissa, whose nature 
 
 moderately mild, 
 To make a wash would hardly stew a child, 
 
 he will not condemn his predecessors to the kind of fate heresy in matters of 
 critical opinion is supposed to merit, he will not let them pass entirely 
 scatheless, but will subject them to some form of comic torture. * * * 
 Quite incontrovertible are the canons [of emendation] Dr. Ingleby advances, 
 and an observance of them would winnow to a very small heap the mountain 
 of Shakspeare hermeneutics. 
 
 Notes and Queries, October 30, 1875. 
 
 This is the text on which Dr. Ingleby gives half-a-dozen or so of the best 
 Shakspeare sermons we have ever read. He certainly proves, in a variety 
 of cases, that- critics and commentators have often been miserably ignorant 
 
Opinions of the Press. 
 
 of the very elements of the science which they affected to interpret or illus- 
 trate as so many Sir Oracles, at the opening of whose mouths no dog was to 
 dare to bark. Nothing, in its way, can be more amusing than Dr. Ingleby's 
 dealing with words in Shakspeare which are perfectly unintelligible to every- 
 body. He shows the various conflicting words which critics have proposed 
 to substitute for them, and then demonstrates beyond gainsaying that the 
 proposed substitutes are, in truth, incomprehensible, and that Shakspeare 
 used terms perfectly natural, forming current coins of speech in his time, and 
 pregnant with meaning when translated into the forms used in ours. In 
 many other respects Dr. Ingleby's boldly written and masterly book recom- 
 mends itself to Shakspearian (and indeed to all) readers. He does full 
 justice to skilled commentators ; but seldom has the crowd of incompetent 
 critics been more mauled, bruised, knocked down, and danced over, than by 
 Dr. Ingleby. 
 
 The Examiner, November 20, 1875. 
 
 Dr. Ingleby has framed a powerful defence of Shakespeare against the 
 extravagance of conjectural emendators under the somewhat odd and fan- 
 tastic title of 'The Still Lion.' * * * For years a strong feeling has 
 been growing up in favour of a more reverent and scholarly treatment of the 
 text, and Dr. Ingleby's vigorous polemic should help greatly to promote this 
 feeling. * * * 
 
 In his last chapter, in which he impresses us still more with the width 
 and accuracy of his reading, and the strength and sagacity of his critical 
 sense, Dr. Ingleby lays down certain restrictions under which he would 
 permit the reformed emendator to look for an honest living. * * * 
 Under these restrictions, rigorously enforced, the emendator might indeed 
 do comparatively little harm to anything but the temper of his reader, but 
 it would probably be for the advantage of all concerned if for the next fifty 
 years he would consent to hang his harp upon the willows, and study 
 Shakespeare no more. 
 
 Mr. H. H. FURNESS : in Lippincotf 's Magazine, March, 1876. 
 
 The lion's slumbers were here [/. e. , in passages in which the word Jielp has ' 
 been superseded] of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped 
 with whole skins. Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of 
 Shakespeare that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault 
 imputed to it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be 
 it of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan 
 spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic. The mischief that ignorance 
 has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive warnings as Dr. 
 Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the word [i. e., aid and cure], in 
 the future. * * * Great as is the service done in particular cases, the 
 most valuable part of The Still Lion is the moral which it points, that 
 'successful emendation is the fruit of severe study and research on the one 
 hand, and of rare sensibility and sense on the other ; ' and in our opinion 
 Dr. Ingleby might have gone even farther, and demanded for it a spark of 
 that creative power which is genius. 
 
Opinions of the Press. 
 
 Professor Hiram CORSON : in the Cornell Review, May, 1876. 
 
 IT must be a source of gratification to every Shakespeare scholar who has 
 any reverence for 'Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and 
 Tragedies, published according to the True Original! Copies,' to read the 
 evidence which this work affords, of an approach towards a science of 
 interpretation and emendation, in lieu of the arbitrary cutting and slashing 
 to which all the editors of the Poet's works have, for nearly two hundred 
 years, been more or less addicted. 
 
 Professor DoWDEN : in the Academy, September 16, 1876. 
 
 Dr. Ingleby's conservative criticism, his maintenance of the original text in 
 various difficult passages, is highly ingenious, and in not a few instances is 
 decisively successful. Even the reader who is not a special student of the 
 text of Shakspere cannot fail to enjoy the keen and swift coursing of the 
 critic's intellect after truth, which doubles but does not escape. When 
 the famous greyhound, Master Magrath, was anatomised it was ascertained 
 that the extraordinarily swift action of the limbs was due to the enormous 
 relative size of the heart. In like manner it is often the inner imagination 
 which quickens and sustains action that outwardly appears to us wholly 
 intellectual ; the imagination is the blood-propelling organ. And thus it is 
 with Dr. Ingleby. A chapter might well have been added on ' Hygiene of 
 the textual critic' Each occupation has its special diseases. * * * In 
 a similar way a textual cmx plays tricks with the eye that has stared upon it 
 too long. It is thus that we must account for the extraordinary follies in the 
 way of textual criticism perpetrated by very clever men. The mental eye 
 became affected somewhat as Turner's sense of sight is alleged by an eminent 
 oculist to have been. And besides this, there are certain diseases constitu- 
 tional rather than local, to which the verbal critic is exposed. Some one of 
 the craft should study the pathology of his peculiar guild and mystery.^ And 
 it would be satisfactory to know the means by which W. Sidney Walker, 
 and Dr. Ingleby himself, were enabled to keep their faculties all in good 
 form, and in a state of mutually quickening activity. 
 
 Printed by Josiah Allen, Birmingham. 
 
> 
 
 The Trades and Crajts of Shakespeare. — It may be interesting 
 ko trace what Shakespeare Bays of the traders and craftsmen, his 
 contemporaries. And first we will take the mercer, one Master 
 Dumbleton, who very prudently deolines to give credit to that 
 reckless knight Falstaff for the satin for his " short oloak and Blop." 
 He requires better security than the bond of Sir John and his 
 deD°n<ient Bardolph ; and the fat knight is naturally indignant, and 
 rails at the ** smooth pates," who " wear nothing but high shoes and 
 bunches of keys at their girdles," and "stand upon seourity." We 
 may here remark, that the " bond" — a legal instrument binding the 
 .parties to it to the payment of a heavy penalty, generally double the 
 principal, as a forfeit on the non-payment of the actual debt — was a 
 favourite security with traders of the time of Shakespeare, and 
 indeed has not long become obsolete, driven out by the more handy 
 promissory note and bill of exohange. The haberdasher and the 
 tailor are dramatis personce in the " Taming of the Shrew." The 
 haberdasher Bhows the cap he has made for Katharina, and departs 
 without more words ; but the tailor has more to say. He makes 
 gowns and kirtles, the tailor of those days, as well as doublets and 
 hose, and he is just as glib with his tongue as his modern repre. 
 sentative. The tailor has ever been reproached with his insignifi- 
 cance, and Petruohio does not spare the conventional abuse : " Thou 
 thread, thou thimble, .... thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket, 
 thou !" The yard measure is the emblem of the tailor as the last is 
 of the shoemaker (" Romeo and Juliet," aot i. so. 2). In one of those 
 charming scenes between Hotspur and his wife that oocur in the 
 First Part of " Henry IV.," the gallant young Percy justifies her 
 when she refuses to sing to the company ; " 'Tia the next" (nearest) 
 " way to turn tailor or be red-breast teacher." The village tailor is 
 to this day usually the foremost in a carol or a glee ; and this might 
 open to us many curious speculations as to the idiosyncrasies of 
 p.rade ; but we forbear. Prom the tailor and shoemaker to the 
 obbler is no great descent, but Shakespeare marks it with his usual 
 ,droitness : " Cobbler. Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl. 
 meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor woman's matters, but 
 ,rith awl." The cobbler, you will observe, is no tradesman, bnt an 
 rtisan, as ia the carpenter, who (" Julius Csesar," act i. so. 1) is 
 eproved by the tribune Flavins that, being mechanical, he walks 
 upon a labouring day without the sign " of his " profession ;" 
 namely, the leather apron and the rule. One might well conolnde, 
 and the bust and portraits of onr post bear out the inference, that 
 ShakeBpeare meddled not much with razors. No merry Figaro 
 appears in his dramas, and we have few allusions to the barber. We 
 may cite " the barber's chair that fits" everybody (" All's Well that 
 Ends Well," act ii. so. 2), and " the forfeits in a barber's shop," that 
 stand "as much in mock as mark." These forfeits are the penaltiea 
 frolicsomely enforced from customers who meddle with the razors or 
 implements of the barber that are displayed about his shop. Forby, 
 in his " East Anglican Vocabulary," Bays that this exaotion of forfeits 
 existed in his day (1830), and we have no doubt the custom might 
 yet be traced in out-of-the-way country districts. The barber natur- 
 ally brings us to the surgeon, of whom — and we may take the faot 
 as an indication that Shakespeare had " no regular medical 
 attendant" — little is said by our dramatist. Portia adjures Shylock 
 to have one present when he exacts the forfeiture of hia pound of 
 flesh from Antonio ; bnt the prudent Jew — who has had experience 
 of dootorb' bills, no doubt — cannot see the necessity of inourring auoh 
 a charge. — Belgravia. 
 
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