The Project Gutenberg eBook of William Shakspere and Robert Greene: the evidence
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: William Shakspere and Robert Greene: the evidence
Author: William H. Chapman
Release date: October 15, 2025 [eBook #77063]
Language: English
Original publication: Oakland, CA: Tribune Publishing Co, 1912
Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Chris Miceli, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM SHAKSPERE AND ROBERT GREENE: THE EVIDENCE ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE
_and_ ROBERT GREENE
THE EVIDENCE
_By_
WILLIAM H. CHAPMAN
Tribune Publishing Co.
OAKLAND, CAL.
[Illustration]
COPYRIGHTED BY
WILLIAM H. CHAPMAN
SANTA MONICA, CAL.
FEBRUARY 26, 1912
To the Memory of
My Mother
_PREFACE._
_The design of this work is to give some account of the conspicuous
events and of some of the personages connected with the literary
history of England in that wonderful Renaissance which took place
in the Elizabethan age. All that the writer has attempted is a
concise narrative of some of the facts, grouping them together in
a compact form, with such reflections as seemed to him to be just
and appropriate. To secure this end he has labored to strip from
Shakspere’s biography the manufactured traditions which date from a
considerable period after Shakspere’s death. Where all is conjecture
let the reader do his own guessing and strive for the abatement of that
new Freak called Esthetic Criticism with which some of our critics and
commentators designate their own absurdities._
_The writer has given unusual prominence to several distinguished
personages amongst Shakspere’s contemporaries, notably Robert Greene,
William Kemp and Ben Jonson. The work is sketchy in execution because
the materials do not exist for more than an outline figure._
_The readers familiar with the old English dramatic poets do not
believe in an exclusive authorship, or uniform workmanship, of the
greatest of the Elizabethan English works. While they set up no
claimant for the writings so commonly credited to William Shakspere of
Stratford-on-Avon, they believe, nevertheless, that the Stratfordian
canon is open to demurrer._
_Conspicuous among modern and recent writers on the subject of Robert
Greene, who show the courage of their convictions by their valiant
strokes in defense of that poet’s reputation, are Professor J. M. Brown
of New Zealand, Dr. A. B. Grossart, and Professor Storojenko. The
citations borrowed from their works attest the writer’s obligation to
them, and are sufficiently indicated in the text._
_WILLIAM H. CHAPMAN_
_Santa Monica, California._
WILLIAM SHAKSPERE AND ROBERT GREENE
THE EVIDENCE
I
This book was written primarily for private satisfaction, the author
having no desire for approbation, and to disclose merely the true
William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon; to find him as a man; to feel
his personal presence; to know him as he was known by his neighbors as
landowner, money lender, captain of amusements, actor, play-broker and
litigant. From dusty records that do not awaken a deific impulse may
be read the true story of his life, but, before directing the readers’
attention to the documentary evidence, which can be entirely depended
upon in regard to himself, his family, neighbors, fellow-actors and
associates, we desire to cut out the worthless conjectures which are
contained in most, if not all, of the recent works on the subject of
Shakespeare. Circumstances, however slight, may give rise to idle
conjectures, but their worthlessness may be best discerned by setting
up against them reasonable ones. To repeat apocryphal anecdotes and
manufactured traditions that are not reasonable inferences from
concurrent events is to dissipate mental energy; antiquity _per
se_ adds nothing to confirmation or probability. In that digest of
biography, so often quoted, George Stevens tells his readers in less
than fifty words all he knew with any degree of certainty concerning
Shakspere, with the exception of his conjectures as to the authorship
of the poems and plays. This great Shaksperean commentator indulges
in no aesthetic dreams or whimsical conjectures which taint the
credibility of his successors by their statement of them as proven
facts.
Of all kinds of literature, biography extends the most generous
hospitality. Its subjects live an after life in affiliation with the
readers without regard to condition. In seeking to renew the enthusiasm
of our youth for this species of writing we visit the public library
and find many changes in biographical history, such as the elimination
of spurious tradition and fanciful conjecture. For instance, instead
of the traditional life of Washington, there is a life of the true
Washington: and, instead of a caricatured life of Cromwell, there is
a record of the duly attested facts of the many-sided and wondrous
Cromwell. With what astonishment we survey the huge issue of books
on Shakspere which stand conspicuous on the shelves! There are more
than ten thousand books and pamphlets—many of them of the memoir
order—almost every one of which has a biographical preface; but we find
that most, if not all, the biographers of Shakspere still lead the
reader into the shadow of chaotic conjecture and might-have-been, and
that Shaksperean literature still lacks a book on the personal life of
William Shakspere that shall be to most, if not all others, a pruning
hook cutting out the reveries and guess work which unfortunately have
seduced the historian and misled the reader. We hold in our hand one of
the more recent of these books of fictitious biography, transmissive
“fraud of the imagination” which authenticates nothing!
As co-readers, we will now focus our attention and thoughts intently
upon the celebrated letter written by the dying hand of Robert Greene,
and addressed to three brother poets to whom he administers a gentle
reproof on account of their by-gone and present faults, of which,
play-writing was most to be shunned. This remarkable letter reveals
Robert Greene as the most tragical figure of his time—a sad witness of
his ultimate penitence and absolute confession, a character of pathetic
sincerity, weirdness and charnel-like gloom that chills the soul. This
letter, so often referred to, and seemingly so little understood, is
one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing in our literary annals.
It has all the credibility that a dying statement can give, but it also
evidences the fact that Robert Greene had previously drawn the fire of
the improvising actors “who wrought the disfigurement of the poet’s
work.” There is one in particular at whom he hurls a dart and hits the
mark.
“Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our
(poet’s) feathers, that, with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s
hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the
best of you; and being an absolute ‘Johannes Factotum,’ is in his own
conceit, the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.”
This sorrow-stricken man wrote these words of censure with the utmost
sincerity. Earlier biographers made no attempt to read Shakspere into
these lines of reproof, but those only of later times regard the
allusion invaluable as being the first literary notice of Shakspere,
and find pleasure in reading into Shakspere’s life the fact of his
having been satirized in 1592 under the name “Shake-scene,” used by
Greene contumeliously.
The letter is contained in a little work entitled “Greene’s Groats
Worth of Wit,” “Bought with a Million of Repentance, originally
published in 1592, having been entered at Stationers Hall on the
20th of September in that year.” “To those Gentlemen his Quondam
acquaintance, that spend their wits in making Plaies.”
“With thee (Marlowe) will I first begin, thou famous gracer of
tragedians, that Greene, who hath said with thee, like the foole in his
heart, there is no God, should now give glorie unto His greatnesse; for
penetrating is His power, His hand lies heavy upon me, He hath spoken
unto me with a voice of thunder and I have felt He is a God that can
punish enemies. Why should thy excellent wit, His gift, be so blinded
that thou shouldst give no glory to the giver?”....
“With thee I joyne young Juvenall, (Nash) that byting satyrist that
lastlie with mee together writ a comedie. Sweete boy, might I advise
thee, be advised, and get not many enimies by bitter words.... Blame
not schollers vexed with sharp lines, if they reprove thy too much
libertie of reproofe.”
“And thou (Peele) no less deserving than the other two, in some things
rarer, in nothing inferiour; driven (as myselfe) to extreame shifts;
a little have I to say to thee; and were it not an idolatrous oath, I
would swear by sweet S. George thou are unworthie better hap, sith thou
dependest on so meane a stay. (theatre) Base minded men all three of
you, if by my miserie ye be not warned; for unto none of you, like me,
sought those burrs to cleave; those puppits, I meane, that speake from
our mouths, those anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange
that I, to whom they all have been beholding, is it not like that you
to whom they all have beene beholding, shall, were ye in that case that
I am now, be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not; for
there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his
Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to
bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute
‘Johannes Factotum,’ is in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a
countrie.”...
“But now returne I againe to you three, knowing my miserie is to you no
news; and let me heartily entreate you to be warned by my harmes....
For it is a pittie men of such rare wits should be subject to the
pleasures of such rude groomes.”
Those biographers and critics who have written concerning Shakspere and
Greene misapprehensively compound an integrate letter and pamphlet. It
should be made clear that Greene’s letter to his fellow poets is not
an integral part of “Groats Worth of Wit,” though appended towards the
end of this pamphlet. The letter is strikingly personal and impressive,
not a continuance of a pamphlet describing the folly of youth, but a
mere appendage not properly constituting a portion of it. It was the
classical commentator, Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-85), we believe, who first
made current the groundless opinion that purports to identify Shakspere
as the one pointed at, but most, if not all, recent biographers and
commentators state as a “proven fact” that Robert Greene was the first
to bail Shakspere out of obscurity by the “reprehensive reference” to
an “upstart crow.”
The effect of conjectural reading is to raise a tempest of depreciation
by which Shakspere’s biographers and commentators have succeeded
in handing down to posterity Greene’s reputation as a preposterous
combination of infamy and envy, harping with fiendish delight on the
irregularities and defects of Robert Greene’s private life, which were
not even shadowed in his writings. The writings of Greene “whose pen
was pure” are exceptionally clean. Why then this unmerited abuse so
malignant in disposition and passion? We answer that it is because the
biographers of Shakspere have been seduced from truth by a vagrant
conjecture into the belief that William Shakspere was the object and
recipient of Greene’s censure. It is apparent that the statement which
affirms this is false, and we shall endeavor to show that Robert
Greene’s detractors are on the wrong trail.
II
There now arises the crucial enquiry concerning the charge that William
Shakspere was thus lampooned in 1592 by Robert Greene in his celebrated
address “To those Gentlemen of his own fellowship that spend their wits
making plaies”—inferentially, Marlowe, Nash and Peele. The exigency of
the case demands, in the opinion of Shakspere’s modern biographers,
the appropriation of Greene’s reproachful reference to Shakspere,
(though no name is mentioned) yet the actor referred to by Greene the
children in London streets well knew and acclaimed; and every student
of Elizabethan literature, history and bibliography, should know
that the reference is identifiable with William Kemp, the celebrated
comic actor, jig-dancer, and jester, who was, in his own conceit, the
“only Shake-scene (dance-scene) in a country,” “Shake-scene” and
(dance-scene) being interchangeable compounds in the old meaning; but
the votaries of Shakspere, posing as his biographers, in the urgency
of their desire to remove doubts which had existed respecting the
beginning of Shakspere’s early literary productivity as play-maker, or
as an elaborator of the works of other men, prior to the year 1592,
crave some notation of literary activity in the young man who went up
from Stratford to London in 1587 (probably).
As the immortal plays were coming out anonymously and surreptitiously,
there is a very strong desire to appropriate or embezzle “the only
Shake-scene” reference, for, in the similarity and sound of the
compound word “Shake-scene” in one of its elements there is that which
fits it to receive a Shakespearean connotation, thus catching the
popular fancy of Shakespere’s biographers and academic commentators.
The compound word “Shake-scene” is made by the joining of two words
generic in both its elements, and, in combination having generic
characteristics pertaining to a large or comprehensive class—that is
to say, the words “shake” and “scene” bear a sense in which they are
descriptive of all the various things to which they are applied, and
of all other things that share their common properties. The fanciful
biographers of William Shakspere rely on these words of reproof and
censure as being the initial notice of his worth and work which was
to lift him from his place of obscurity in the year 1592. The meaning
of Greene’s words in the idiom of the times, as in their contextural
and natural sense, yield nothing which is confirmatory of such
contention; for “dance” is connoted under the term “shake,” answering
to the first element in “Shake-scene,” which in the old meaning meant
“dance,” generic for quick action; and “scene” meant “stage” instead
of “scenery” as in the modern meaning, for the theatres were then in a
state of absolute nudity—in other words, “Shake-scene” meant a dancing
performance upon the stage. In the plain unobtrusive language of our
day, as well as in Elizabethan English, the word “shake”—the first
element in “Shake-scene” is interchangeable with “dance,” and, when
given a specialized meaning with a view to theatrical matters in the
year 1592, with Kemp and Shakspere claimants for Greene’s reproof, who
could doubt that the name which was so loudly acclaimed is identifiable
with the spectacular luminary of the times, William Kemp? In setting up
the comic actor and jig-dancer as claimant for Greene’s objurgation,
we promise the reader attestative satisfaction by establishing the
truth of our contention by particular passages in “the address” when
explained by the context as transcriptive of Kemp’s actual history.
We now direct the attention of the reader specifically to the arrogant
and boastful comedian, William Kemp. This man, according to Robert
Greene’s view, was the personification of everything detestable in
the actor—whose profession he despised. We think the biographers and
commentators have mistaken the spectacularity of William Kemp for the
rising sun of William Shakspere. In the closing years of the sixteenth,
and the early years of the seventeenth, century there lived in London
the most spectacular comic actor and clown of his day, the greatest
“Shake-scene” or (dance-scene) of his generation, William Kemp, the
worthy successor of Dick Tarlton. He had a continental reputation in
1589. This year also Nash dedicated to Kemp one of his attacks upon
Martin Marprelate entitled “An Almond for a Parrot.” “There is ample
contemporary evidence that Kemp was the greatest comic actor of his
time in England, and his notoriety as a morris-dancer was so great that
his journeyings were called dances. He was the court favorite famous
for his improvisions, and loved by the public,” but hated by academic
play-writers and ridiculed by ballad-makers. Kemp, in giving his first
pamphlet “The Nine Days Wonder” to the press in 1599, turned upon his
enemies and in retaliation called them “Shake-rags,” which he used
derisively and as contumeliously as Greene had used “Shake-scene.” The
use of the word “Shake-rags” by Kemp in his first and only published
work is _prima-facie_ evidence, that he also made use of the same term,
orally and in his usual acrimonious manner, either against Greene,
or those of his fellowship. The first element in the compound words
“Shake-scene” and “Shake-rags” is governed by the same general law of
movement or rhythmic action exemplified in dancing and rhymery. In 1640
Richard Brown in his “Antipodes” refers to the practice of jesters, in
the days of Tarlton and Kemp, of introducing their own wit into poet’s
plays, Kemp, writing in 1600, asserts that he spent his life in mad
jigs and merry jests, although he was entrusted with many leading parts
in farce or broad comedy. His dancing of jigs at the close of a play
gave him his chief popularity (“Camden Society Papers”). “The jigs were
performed to musical accompaniment and included the singing of comic
words. One or two actors at times supported Kemp in his entertainment,
dancing and singing with him. Some examples of the music to which Kemp
danced are preserved in a manuscript collection of John Dowland now
in the library of Cambridge University. The words were, doubtless,
often improvised at the moment, but, on occasions, they were written
out and published. The Stationers Register contains licenses for the
publication of at least four sets of words for the jigs in which Kemp
was the chief performer.”
According to Henslowe’s Diary, William Kemp was on June 15, 1592,
a member of the company of the Lord Strange players under Henslowe
and Alleyn, playing a principal comic part in the “Knack to Know a
Knave,” and introducing into it what is called on the title page his
“Applauded Merriments,” a technical term for a piece of theatrical
buffoonery. In 1593 Nash warned Gabriel Harvey “lest William Kemp
should make merriment of him.” “As early as 1586, Kemp was a member
of a company of great importance which had arrived at Elsinore where
the king held court. He remained two months in Denmark, and received
a larger amount of board money than his fellow actors. In a letter of
Sir Phillip Sidney, dated Utrecht March 24, 1586, he says, ‘I sent
you a letter by Will (Kemp), my Lord Leicester’s jesting player.’ It
was after his return from these foreign expeditions that we find Kemp
uniting his exertions with those of Alleyn at the Rose and Fortune
theatres, as Prince Henry’s servants. During this whole period from
his return in 1586 from Denmark, to the year 1598, he did not stay
uninterruptedly at the theatres of the Burbages. From February 19,
to June 22, 1592, a part of Lord Leicester’s company played under
Henslowe and Alleyn. In 1602 Kemp was again in London, acting under
Henslowe and Alleyn as one of the Earl of Worcester’s men. We gather
from Henslowe’s Diary that on March 10th, he borrowed in ready money
twenty shillings.
“Kemp was a very popular performer as early as 1589. We shall see
hereafter that he, following the example of Tarlton, was in the habit
of extemporizing and introducing matter of his own that has not come
down to us. ‘Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set
down for them’ (Hamlet, Act. III, Scene II.). These words were aimed
at Kemp, or one of his school, and it was about this date, according
to Henslowe’s Diary, that Kemp went over from the Lord Chamberlain to
the Lord Nottingham players. The most important duty of the clown was
not to appear in the play itself, but to sing and dance his jig at
the end of it, even after a tragedy, in order to soften the painful
impression—(Camden Society Papers)—Kemp’s jig of ‘The Kitchen Stuff
Woman’ was a screaming farce of rude verses, some spoken, others sung;
of good and bad witticism; of extravagant acting and dancing. In the
art of comic dancing Kemp was immoderately loved and admired. He paid
professional visits to all the German and Italian courts, and was even
summoned to dance his morris-dance before the Emperor Rudolph himself
at Augsburg.
“Kemp combined shrewdness with his rough humor. With a view to
extending his reputation and his profits, he announced in 1599, his
intention of dancing a morris-dance from London to Norwich; but to his
annoyance, every inaccurate report of his gambols was hawked about in
publication at the time by book-sellers or ballad-makers, like Kemp’s
farewell to the tune of ‘Kerry Merry Buff.’ In order to check the
circulation of falsehood, Kemp offered, he tells us, his first pamphlet
to the press (though at the time he was thought to have had a hand in
writing the Anti-Martinist plays and pamphlets—five pieces erroneously
attributed to his pen). The only copy known is in the Bodleian
Library. The title ran ‘Kemp’s Nine Days Wonder,’ the wonder referred
to being performed in a dance from London to Norwich then written by
himself to satisfy his friends. A woodcut on the title page shows
Kemp in elaborate costume with bells about his knees playing to the
accompaniment of a drum and tabor, which a man at his side is playing.
This pamphlet was entered in the Stationers Book April 22, 1600. The
dedicatory salutation to Anna Fritton, one of her Majesty’s maids of
honor, shows us how arrogant and conceited he must have been.
“Kemp started at seven o’clock in the morning on the first Monday in
Lent, the starting point being in front of the Lord Mayor’s house,
and half London was astir to see the beginning of the great exploit.
His suite consisted of his taborer, Thomas Sly; his servant, William
Bee; and his overseer or umpire, George Sprat, who was to see that
everything was performed according to promise. According to custom, he
put out a sum of money before his departure on condition of receiving
thrice the amount on his safe return. His own fatigues caused him
many delays and he did not arrive in Norwich until twenty-three days
after his departure. He spent only nine days in actual dancing on the
road. Kemp himself on this occasion contributed nothing to the music
except the sound of the bells, which were attached to his gaiters. In
Norwich thousands waited to receive him in the open market-place with
an official concert. Kemp, as guest of the town, was entertained at
its expense and received handsome presents from the Mayor who arranged
a triumphal entry for him. The freedom of the Merchant Adventures
Company was also conferred upon him, thereby assuring him a share in
the yearly income to the amount of forty shillings—a pension for life.
The very buskins in which he had performed his dance were nailed to
the wall in the Norwich Guild Hall and preserved in perpetual memory
of the exploit, which was long remembered in popular literature. In an
epilogue Kemp announced that he was shortly to set forward as merrily
as I may; whither, I myself know not,” and begged ballad makers to
abstain from disseminating lying statements about him. Kemp’s humble
request to the impudent generation of ballad-makers, as he terms
them, reads in part, “My notable Shake-rags, the effect of my suit
is discovered in the title of my supplication, but for your better
understanding for that I know you to be a sort of witless bettle-heads
that can understand nothing but that is knocked into your scalp; so
farewell and crosse me no more with thy rabble of bold rhymes lest at
my return I set a crosse on thy forehead that all men may know that
for a fool.” It seems certain that Kemp kept his word in exhibiting his
dancing powers on the continent. In Week’s “Ayers” (1688) mention is
made of Kemp’s skipping into France. A ballad entitled “An Excellent
New Medley” (dated about 1600) refers to his return from Rome. In the
Elizabethan play “Jack Drum’s Entertainment” (1616), however, there is
introduced a song to which Kemp’s morris dance is performed. Heywood,
writing at this period, in his “Apology for Actors” (1612), says
William Kemp was a comic actor of high reputation, as well in the favor
of Her Majesty as in the opinion of the general audience. There is also
a tribute from the pen of Richard Rathway (1618). Ben Jonson, William
Rowley and John Marston also make mention of him.
Pretty much all that relates to the gambols of sportive Kemp in the
foregoing pages is a mere transcription from the “Camden Society
Papers.”
Our prime object is to establish Kemp’s eligibility as claimant for
Greene’s censure, before alluded to. We are content to advance the
claim of another if found more decisive. We would elect to name
Robert Wilson, senior, an old enemy, doubtless, of Robert Greene, if
we did not think that Kemp has the better claim to that distinction.
According to Collier, Wilson was not only an excellent performer, but
also a talented dramatist, especially renowned for his ready repartee.
Some writers affirm that the authors of the dramas “Faire Emm” and
“Martin Marsixtus” were one and the same person, and that this person
was Robert Wilson, senior, author of “Three Ladies of London” and
“Three Lords and Ladies of London,” the first published in 1584, and
the other in 1590. “Faire Emm” and “Martin Marsixtus” having been
posthumously printed, Greene was severe on the author of the former
for his blasphemous introduction of quotations from the Bible into his
love passages. “We know that the author attacked Greene’s own works
in return and called them lascivious.” He had not read the works, but,
then, an anonymous writer may not very scrupulously confine himself to
the truth. “Loth I was to display myself to the world but for that I
hope to dance under a mask and bluster out like the wind, which, though
every man heareth yet none can in sight descrie.” “I must answer in
print what they have offered on the stage” are the words of Greene.
Robert Wilson may be advanced as claimant for Greene’s reproof by some
persons who are of the opinion that “upstart crow” was both actor and
playwright. Supposition says Kemp also wrote pamphlets and plays,
although at this time he had not given his first and only work to the
press. It matters little at whom he aimed, Kemp or Wilson, so long as
Shakespere was not the object of the aimer. In the Parish Register of
St. Giles, Cripplegate, we read, “Buried, Robert Wilson, yeoman, a
player, 20 Nov., 1600.”
These facts and concurring events in the life of William Kemp
convince us that Shakspere was not, and Kemp very probably was, the
person at whom Greene leveled his satire by bearing witness to his
(Kemp’s) extemporizing power and his haughty and insolent demeanor in
introducing improvisions and interpolations of his “own wit into poet’s
plays.”
From the foregoing, it is evident that, at the time the letter was
written, William Kemp enjoyed an unequaled and wide spread notoriety
and transient fame, extending not only throughout England, but into
foreign countries as well.
And further, by reason of his great prominence, in a calling which
Greene loathed, and despised, he was brought easily within the range of
the latter’s contemptuous designation, of “upstart crow.”
III
We have now reached the crucial matter of the address which, according
to the speculative opinion of many of Shakspere’s biographers, contains
all the words and sentences which they hope, when racked, may be made
to yield support to their tramp conjecture that Robert Greene was the
first to discover Shakspere as a writer of plays, or the amender of the
works of other poets. The identifiable words, so called, are contained
in the following sentences: “Yes, trust them not; for there is an
upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tyger’s
heart wrapt in a Player’s hide.”
“Upstart Crow” in Elizabethan English meant in general, one who assumed
a lofty or arrogant tone, a bragging, boastful, swaggerer suddenly
raised to prominence and power, as was Kemp after the death of Richard
Tarlton (1589). In an epistle prefixed to Greene’s “Arcadia” (1587),
Thomas Nash speaks of actors “As a company of taffaty fools with their
feathers;” and “The players decked with poets’ feathers like Aesop’s
Crow” (R. B.); and again, “That with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a
Player’s hide.” Tiger in the plain language of the day stood for bully,
a noisy, insolent man, who habitually sought to overbear by clamors,
or by threats. These characteristics are identifiable with Kemp; but
the biographers of Shakspere are content to conjecture that Robert
Greene’s parody on the line “Oh Tyger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide”
is not only a contumelious reference to actor, William Shakspere, but
also a declaration of his authorial integrity by their assignment of
“Henry VI. Part III,” which was in action at the “Rose,” when Greene’s
celebrated address was written.
There is _prima-facie_ evidence that Greene authored the line, which he
semi-parodied in the address, which is found in two places. It appears
in its initial form “Oh Tyger’s heart wrapt in a serpent’s hide” in
the play called, “The Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York,” and “The Death
of Good King Henry the Sixth,” and later with “woman” substituted for
“serpent,” again, it is found in the third part of “Henry VI.”, founded
on the true tragedy, which was acted by Lord Pembroke’s company, of
which, as Nash tells us, Greene was chief agent, and for which he wrote
more than four other plays. “Henry VI. Part III” is generally admitted
to be the work of Greene, Marlowe and perhaps Peele. Furthermore,
the catchwords in the lines parodied betray their author, which is
a confirmatory fact. To borrow a citation from the pages of Dr. A.
Grosart, “Every one who knows his Greene knows that over and over again
he returns on anything of his that caught on, sometimes abridging
and sometimes expanding;” and in semi-parodying his own lines, wrapt
“Tyger’s heart” in several kinds of hides. It was William Kemp, the
comic actor and dancer, not Shakspere, whom Greene wanted to hit.
He did not consider as an author at all the “upstart crow” with his
“Tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide,” who bombasted orally his own
improvisions and interpolations out in blank verse.
In their great desire to discover Shakspere as the author, the
words “bombast out in blank verse” are seized upon by Shakspere’s
commentators with evident greediness. But these words yield nothing
in support of author-craft, for bombast or bombastry, in the idiom of
the time, stood for high sounding words which might have proceeded
from the mouth of a buffoon, clown, jester, montebank or actor, whose
profession was to amuse spectators by low antics and tricks, and
whose improvisions and extemporizings were destitute of rhyme, but
possessed of a musical rhythm called “blank verse.” The words “blank
verse” were doubtless intended for the ear of Marlowe, the great
innovator, who was thus reminded that the notorious jig-dancer and
clown, William Kemp, declaimed his own improvisions and interpolations
in the “swelling bombast of a bragging blank-verse,” as Nash called
it, and was an absolute “Johannes Factotum in his own conceit”—that
is, a person employed to do many things. Who could do more “in his own
conceit” than Kemp, who spent his life in mad jigs, as he says? Who
but Kemp, the chief actor in the low comedy scenes, who angered the
academic play-writers by introducing “his own wit into their plays and
make a merriment of them?”
Greene’s address to his fellow craftsmen does not convey plagiary,
or a furbishable, imputation, nor give color to, nor the slightest
circumstance for, the conjecture that Shakspere’s authorial career
had been begun as the amender of other poet’s plays anterior to the
putative authorship of “Venus and Adonis.” Halliwell-Phillips, the
most indefatigable and reliable member of the Congress of Speculative
Biographers, says that not one such play has been found revised, or
amended, by Shakspere in his early career. Still in their extremity,
Shakspere’s commentators give hospitality to stupid conjectures that
are not reasonable inferences from concurrent facts, and construe
Greene’s censure of Kemp, (inferentially) as the first literary notice
of Shakspere. It shows an irrepressible desire without proof to confer
authorship upon Shakspere one hundred and fifty years after his death.
The Shakspere votaries cannot point to a single word, or sentence,
in this celebrated address of Robert Greene which connects the
contumelious name “Shake-scene” (dance-scene) with the characteristics
of either the true, or the traditional, Shakspere.
The biographers of Shakspere never grow weary of charging Robert
Greene with professional jealousy and envy. The charge has no
argumentative value, even if granting Shakspere’s early productivity
as a play-maker, or the amender of the works of other men, for Greene’s
activities ran in other lines; play-making was of minor importance,
a sort of by-production of his resourceful and versatile pen. The
biographers of Shakspere are unfortunate in having taken on this
impression, because there is _prima-facie_ evidence that Greene had
forsworn writing for the stage a considerable time before the letter
was written; thus he followed his friend Lodge, who in 1589 “vows to
write no more of that whence shame doth grow.”
The biographers and commentators, agreeing in their asperities,
charge Robert Greene with that worst of passions, envy, basing it
conjecturally on the assumption of Shakspere’s proficiency as a
drama-maker, notwithstanding the sincere and earnest words contained
in his most pathetic letter, addressed to three friends, in which he
counsels them to give up play writing, which he regarded as degrading,
placing their very necessities in the power of grasping shareholding
actors, and rendering it no longer a fit occupation for gentlemen. They
fail to see the dying should be granted immunity from this ignoble and
base passion. Our own rule of law admits as good evidence the testimony
of a man who believes himself to be dying, and so the letter states,
“desirous that you should live though himself be dying.”
Robert Greene’s charge against “upstart crow” stands unshaken. Henry
Chettle, the hack writer, and self admitted transcriber of the letter,
does not retract Greene’s statement. He denies nothing on behalf of an
“upstart crow” (Kemp); for the author of “Kind Hearts Dreams” does not
identify “Shake-scene” (dance-scene) with Shakspere, or Shakespeare,
who was not one of those who took offense. It is expressly stated that
there were two of the three fellow dramatists, addressed by Greene
(Marlowe, Nash and Peele). Still we are told by Shakespearean writers
that the dying genius was pained at witnessing the proficiency of
another in the very activity (play-making), which he had come to regard
as congruous with strolling vagabondism. He enjoined his friends to
seek better masters “for it is a pittie men of such rare wit should be
subject to the pleasure of such rude groomes, painted monsters, apes,
burrs, peasants, puppets,” not play-makers, but actors, who had been
beholden to him and his fellow craftsmen whom he addressed.
There is another aspect in which the charge of professional jealousy
presents itself to the mind of the reader; those who covet that which
another possesses, or envies success, popularity or fortune. To charge
Greene with envy is most uncharitable by reason of his versatility.
Now what was there in the possession of William Shakspere in 1592 that
could have awakened in the mind of Robert Greene so base a passion
as envy. The name Shakspere had no commercial value in 1592, for
Shakspere of the stage is described many years after this date as
merely a “man player” and “a deserving man.” Note this admission by Dr.
Ingleby: “Assuredly no one during the century had any suspicion that
the genius of Shakespeare was unique.” “His immediate contemporaries
expressed no great admiration for either him, or his works.” There
is not a particle of evidence to show that Robert Greene was envious
of any writer of his time; nor had he cause to be; but the way his
contemporaries and successors robbed and plundered him proves the
reverse to be true.
“Nay, more, the men that so eclipst his fame,
Purloynde his plumes; can they deny the same?”
The fact is, Shakspere passed through and out of life without
having attained the distinction, or celebrity, won by Greene in his
brief literary career of but nine short years. The more truthful of
Shakspere’s biographers concede that the subject of their memoirs
was not, in his day, highly regarded, and that his obscurity in 1592
is obvious. There was not the least danger of the author of “Hamlet”
“driving to penury” the dean of English novelists, Robert Greene, who
was supreme in prose romance, a species of literature, which appealed
to the better class of the reading public. Rival-hating envy! Robert
Greene cannot be brought within the scope of such a charge, for in
1592, he was not striving to obtain the same object which play writers
were pursuing.
The fame of Robert Greene during his lifetime eclipsed that of his
contemporaries. “He was in fact the popular author of the day. His
contemporaries applauded the facility with which he turned his talents
to account.” “In a night and a day,” says Nash, “would he have yearked
up a pamphlet as well as in seven years, and glad was that printer that
might be so blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit.”
Even Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” according to
Dryden, had no such assurance in his day, if we may judge from his own
account of his literary life, which shows that he had to struggle for
a subsistence, as no printer was found glad, or felt himself blest, to
pay him dear for the cream, much less the very “dregs of his wit.” He
told Drummond that the half of his comedies were not in print, and that
he had cleared but 200 pounds by all his labor for the public theatre.
It has been said by one: “In the breadth of his dramatic quality, his
range over every kind of poetic excellence, Jonson was excelled by
Shakespeare alone.” (p. 437, “A Short History of the English People.”)
When not subsidized by the court he was driven by want to write for
the London theatres; he lived in a hovel in an alley, where he took
service with the notorious play broker. To such as he, reference is
made by Henslow, who in his diary records “the grinding toil and the
starvation wages of his hungry and drudging bondsmen,” who were
struggling for the meanest necessities of life. This Titan of a giant
brood of playwrights, in the days of his declension wrote mendicant
epistles for bread, and, doubtless, in his extremity recalled Robert
Greene, the admonisher of three brother poets “that spend their wits in
making plaies.” “Base minded men, all three of you! if by my miseries
ye be not warned, for unto none of you, like me, sought those burrs to
cleave, those puppits, I mean that speak from our mouths those antics
garnisht in our colors. Is it not strange that I, to whom they all have
been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be both at
once of them forsaken?... O that I might intreate your rare wits to
be employed in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate
your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired
inventions.”
It was one of this breed of puppets, we are told, who awakened
incarnate envy in the breast of Robert Greene, and engendered rivalship
against William Shakspere, whose votaries, in their dreams of fancy,
see him revising the dramatic writings of Robert Greene, the most
resourceful, versatile, tireless and prolific of literary men. He was
a writer of greatest discernment from the viewpoint of the people of
his time, “for he possessed the ability to write in any vein that would
sell.” He only, of all the writers of his time, gave promise of being
able to gain a competence by the pen alone, a thing which no writer
did, or could do, in that day, by writing for the stage alone. Hon.
Cushman K. Davis in “The Law in Shakespeare” says, “He (Shakspere)
is the first English author who made a fortune with his pen.” In the
absence of credible evidence, Mr. Davis assumes that the young man
who came up from Stratford was the author of the plays. The senator
does not seem aware of the fact that Shakspere of Stratford was a
shareholding actor, receiving a share in the theatre, or its profits,
in 1599; a partner in one or more of the chief companies; a play broker
who purchased and mounted the plays of other men; and that he, like
Burbage, Henslowe and Alleyn, speculated in real estate. He was shrewd
in money matters and became very wealthy, but not by writing plays.
Suppose that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon had authored all
the plays associated with his name, that alone would not have made him
wealthy. The price of a play varied from four to ten pounds, and all
Shakspere’s labors for the public theatre would have brought no more
than five hundred pounds. The diary of Philip Henslowe makes it clear
that up to the year 1600 the highest price he ever paid was six pounds.
The Shakespeare plays were not exceptionally popular in that day, not
being then as now, “the talk of the town.” Not one of them equalled in
popularity Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” or Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.”
Shakespeare was soon superseded by Fletcher in popular regard. Only one
of the Shakespeare tragedies, one historical play, and eight comedies
were presented at the Court of James First, who reigned twenty-two
years. Plays, written by such hack writers as Dearborn, or Chettle,
were quite as acceptable to princes.
Robert Greene’s romances were “a bower of delight,” a kind of writing
held in high favor by all classes. Sir Thomas Overbury describes his
chambermaid as reading Greene’s works over and over again. It is a
pleasure to see in the elder time Greene’s writings in hands so full
of household cares, since he labored to make young lives happy. Robert
Greene’s works express every variation in the changing conditions of
life. The poetry of his pastoral landscapes are vivid word pictures
of English sylvan scenes. The western sky on amorous autumn days is
mantled with sheets of burnished gold. The soft and gentle zephyr
blows over castled crag and fairy glen fragrant with the breath of
flowers.
In the manuals of our literature great prominence is given to the
fact that Greene led a dissolute, or irregular, life, as if the
debauchment of the author was transmitted by his writings. There are
no indecencies in his works to attest the passage of a debauchee.
Like many persons born to, and nurtured by, religious parents, Greene
doubtless exaggerated his own vices. He was bad, but not altogether
bad. It may truly be said of him that, in regard to all that pertains
to penitence and self abasement, he spares not himself, but like John
Bunyan, he was given to selfupbraiding. He (Bunyan) declares that it
is true that he let loose the reins on the neck of his lust; that he
delighted in all transgressions against the divine law; and that he was
the ring leader of the youth of Elstow in all vice. But, when those
who wished him ill, accused him of licentious amours, he called God
and the angels to attest his purity. No woman, he said, in heaven,
earth, or hell, could charge him with having ever made any improper
advances to her. Blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking seem to have been
Bunyan’s only transgression after all. In Robert Greene’s writings, we
have the reverse of “Herrick’s shameful pleading that if his verse was
impure, his life was chaste.” Unlike Herrick, Greene did not minister
to the unchaste appetite of readers for tainted literature, either in
his day, or in the after time. Powerless to condemn Greene’s writings,
Shakspere’s votaries would desecrate his ashes.
Deplore as we must his dissolute living, it was of short duration,
for he went from earth at the age of two and thirty, and the evil
effects have been lost in Time’s abatements. His associates, doubtless
were as dissolute as he himself. Nash wrote: “With any notorious
crime I never knew him tainted, and he inherited more virtues than
vices.” The reader, at any rate, will give but little credence to
the accusations of such a hyena-dog as Gabriel Harvey. Robert Greene
was not “lip-holy,” nor heart-hollow, for, in regard to his wife and
their separation, “he took to himself all blame, breathed never a word
against her, and did not squander all of his earnings in dissipation,
but sent part of his income to the good woman, the wife of his youth,
and addressed to her in loving trust the last letter he wrote.” Gabriel
Harvey, drenched in hate, could not rob the “Sweet-wife letter of its
pathos.”
In all the galleries of noble women, Greene’s heroines deserve a
foremost place, for all the gracious types of womanhood belonged to
Greene, before they became Shakespeare’s. “Robert Greene is the first
of our play-writers to represent upon the public stage the purity
and sweetness of wife and maiden.” Unselfish love and maternity are
sketched with feminine delicacy and minuteness of touch in all the
tenderness of its purity. His writings have assuaged the sorrow of
the self-sacrificing mother, who is always a queen uncrowned, long
suffering and faithful. Robert Green “is always on the side of the
angels.” When loud mouthed detraction calls him badhearted, we should
not forget that this confessedly dissolute man could, and did, keep
inviolate the purity of his imagination; few have left a wealthier
legacy in feminine models of moral and physical beauty. What is most
characteristic in the pages of Greene is the absence of the indecencies
which attest the passage of the author of “Lear,” “the damnable scenes
which raised the anger of Swinburne and which Coleridge attempted in
vain to palliate.”
Little is known of Greene’s life; and into the little we do know,
his malignant enemy, Gabriel Harvey, has attempted to inject a
deadly virus. The inaccurate figurative expressions in his reputed
posthumously printed works (an alleged description of his manner
of life) cannot be interpreted literally, “but may be resolved in
a large measure into morbid self-upbraidings like the confession
made by the revival convert who sees and paints his past in its
very darkest colors.” But why should the modern reader linger over
the irregularities of dissolute-living authors like Greene and Poe,
whose writings are exceptionally clean. Remember Robert Burns’ noble
words, “What done we partly may compute but know not what resisted.”
The commentators and pharisaic critics, who have written concerning
Greene, are mere computists of the poet’s vices; ministers of hate,
who burlesque the poet’s soul stiffening with despair, and display
their ghoulish instincts “in travestying so pathetic and tragical a
deathbed as Greene’s.” Students of Elizabethan literature know that
Robert Greene resisted the temptation to write in the best paying vein
of the age, that of ministering to the unchaste appetites of readers
for ribaldries. “To his undying honor Robert Greene, equally with James
Thompson, left scarcely a line, that, dying, he need have wished to
blot out.”
There is no record extant of his living likeness. Chettle gives this
pleasant description of his personal appearance, “With him was the
fifth, a man of indifferent years; of face, amiable; of body, well
proportioned; his attire after the habit of scholar-like gentleman,
only his hair was somewhat long, whom I supposed to be Robert Greene,
Master of Arts.” Nash notices his tawny beard, “a jolly long red
peake like the spire of a steeple which he cherished continually
without cutting, whereat a man might hang a jewel, it was so sharp and
pendant.” Harvey, who had never seen Greene, says that he wore such
long hair as was only worn by thieves and cutthroats, and taunts Nash
with wearing the same “unseemly superfluity.” The habit of wearing the
hair long is not unusual with poets. John Milton “cherished the same
superfluity” as does also Joaquin Miller.
Robert Greene expired on the third of September, 1592. When the dead
genius was in his grave, Harvey gloated and leered with hellish glee,
and wrote of Greene’s “most woeful and rascal estate, how the wretched
fellow or, shall I say, the prince of beggars, laid all to gage fore
some few shillings and was attended by lice.” This is one of Harvey’s
malignant, vitriolic, discharges in his attempt to spatter the memory
and deface the monument of the dead. “Achilles tortured the dead
body of Hector, and, as Antonious and his wife, Fulva, tormented the
lifeless corpse of Cicero, so Gabriel Harvey hath showed the same
inhumanities to Greene that lies low in his grave.” The testimony of
Gabriel Harvey, whose malignant attacks on the memory of Greene by
monstrously exaggerated statement, is vitiated by his own statement
that “he was cheated out of an action for libel against Greene by his
death.”
Harvey was vulgarly ostentatious, courting notoriety by the
gorgeousness of his apparel; currying favor with the great, and aping
Venetian gentility after his return from Italy. He was a dabbler
in astrology, a prognosticator of earthquakes, and constructor of
prophetic almanacs. The failure of his predictions subjected him to
much bitter ridicule. His inordinate vanity is best shown by his
publication of everything spoken or written in commendation of himself,
by his obsequious friends and flatterers, who snickered with the public
generally, as he was an object of ridicule, the butt on which to crack
their jokes.
In one of those fanciful studies in Elizabethan literature, which
we now hold in our hand, we may read, in a work called “A Snip for
an Upstart Courtier or A Quaint Dispute Between Velvet-breeches and
Cloth-breeches,” that Greene has very vulgarly libeled Harvey’s
ancestry; but, when we turn to Greene’s book we learn that the
vulgarity consists in calling Gabriel Harvey’s father a ropemaker.
Only a snob would regard any honest employment as a degradation, and
furthermore, the passage does not point contumeliously and spitefully
at Gabriel Harvey’s father, for the reference is very slight. “How is
he (Gabriel’s father) abused?” writes Nash, “Instead of his name he is
called by the craft he gets his living with.” Still the lines which so
mortally offended Gabriel were suppressed by Greene. Notwithstanding
this, those biographers and critics whose sole object is to blacken
the poet’s memory, conceal from the reader the fact of the detachment
of all reference to a rope-maker. Harvey was extremely anxious to
push himself among the aristocracy in order to conceal his humble
antecedents.
With all his faults, there was nothing of this weakness or snobbishness
in Robert Greene, who had himself sprung from the common people,
though born to good condition. Robert Burton, a contemporary, writing
in “The Spacious Time of the Great Elizabeth” says that idleness was
the mark of the nobility, and to earn money in any kind of trade was
despicable. Gabriel Harvey flung in Greene’s face the fact that he made
a living by his pen. Had young Greene lived a longer life, with all its
wealth of bud and bloom, we should now have in fruition a luxuriance of
imagination and versatility of diction possessed by few. With longer
life he would doubtless “have gained mastery of himself, when he
would have gone forward on the path of moral regeneration;” for there
was in the poet’s strivings, during the last few years of his life,
the promise and prophecy of a glorious future. His soul enlarged, he
battled for the commonweal; his heart was with the lowly and his voice
was for the right when freedom’s friends were few.
In his play “The Pinner of Wakefield,” first printed in 1599, Robert
Greene makes a hero, and a very strenuous one, of a mere pound-keeper
who proudly refuses knighthood at the hands of the king. In the sketch
given by Professor J. M. Brown we read, “In the first scene of the play
when Sir Nicolas Mannering appears in Wakefield with his commission
from the rebel, Earl of Kendal, and demands victuals for the rebel
army, the stalwart pound-keeper steps forward, makes the knight eat
his words and then his seal! ‘What! are you in choler? I will give you
pills to cool your stomach. Seest thou these seals? Now by my father’s
soul, which was a yeoman’s when he was alive, eat them or eat my
dagger’s point, proud squire!’ The Earl of Kendal and other noblemen
next appear in disguise and send their horses into the Pinner’s corn to
brave him. The pound-keeper approaches and after altercation strikes
the Earl. Lord Bondfield says, ‘Villain, what hast thou done? Thou
hast struck an Earl.’ Pinner answers, ‘Why, what care I? A poor man
that is true is better than an earl if he be false’.” A yeoman boxing
or cuffing the ear of an earl! This has all the breezy freshness of
American democracy.
“How different from this is Shakespeare’s conception of the place of
the working-man in society. In King Lear, a good servant protests
against the cruelty of Regan and Cornwall toward Gloucester, and is
killed for his courage.” “Give me my sword,” cries Regan, “a peasant
stand up thus!” The voice of the yeoman is often heard in Greene’s
drama, not as buffoon and lackey, as in Shakespeare, but as freeman
whose voice is echoed at Naseby and Marston’s gory fields of glory,
where the sturdy yeomanry of England strove to do and to dare for the
eternal right—soldiers who never cowered from “sheen of spear,” nor
blanched at flashing steel. With Greene rank is never the measure of
merit as with Shakespeare. To peer and yeoman alike, he gave equal
hospitality; for Robin Greene, as his friends called him, was as
friendly to the poor man’s rags as to the purple Robe of King. Greene
in his popular sympathies is thoroughly with the working classes,
the common people, of whom Lincoln says, “God loves most, otherwise
he would not have made so many of them.” His heroes and heroines are
taken, many of them, from humble life. In his Pinner of Wakefield there
is a very clear discernment of democratic principle in the struggle
against prerogative. Half of those plays of Greene’s which we still
possess, are devoted to the representation of the life of the common
people which gave lineage to Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and
John Bunyan. If these are any guide to his character, his is one
distinguished both by his amicable and by his amiable qualities.
We have in the “Coney-catching series” Greene’s exposure of the
practice of sharpers and knaves, who were fleecing the country people
who came to London. The author of these tracts shows great courage
in his effort to abate fool-catching. Greene’s life was threatened,
and it required the utmost exertion of his friends to prevent his
assassination. The Coney-catching knaves, who felt the halter being
drawn about their necks, threatened to cut off his hand if he would not
desist. Greene, notwithstanding these threats, would not be swerved
from his noble aim, but met them like a true Roman, single-handed and
alone, while his literary enemies took advantage of this opportunity to
blacken his good name. “Greene made these revelations for the good of
the commonwealth, and displayed great courage in facing all risks in so
doing. No books are more out-and-out sincere.”
Greene’s account of the repentance and reformation of a fallen woman,
told in a way that discloses the poet’s kindness of heart and fullness
of humanitarian spirit, reveals his better self. “He assured his
readers, in the words of the woman herself, that her first false step
gradually led her on to complete ruin, so heavy-burdened with grief and
shame that death seemed to her a benefaction, and the grave the only
place for perfect rest.” Not a few there may have been, who, on reading
Greene’s account of the reformation and redemption of this unfortunate
woman, were started on the path of regeneration, while the dim-eyed
critic can see nothing but the blurred reputation of the poet. But who
shall estimate Robert Greene’s influence on individual happiness? Who
shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better
by a writer who held out a kind and friendly hand, and had a heart
as true behind it? His statue would crown Trafalgar’s towering shaft
more worthily than the statue of England’s greatest naval hero does;
for there is more true honor and merit in the man who wrote purely to
bring back from evil courses to a state of moral rectitude, than in a
monument for the victory over many enemies.
Greene’s non-dramatic works are the largest contribution left by
any Elizabethan writer to the novel literature of the day. “He was
at once the most versatile and the most laborious of literary men.”
Famous, witty, and brilliant, he was one of the founders of English
fiction, and is conceded to be the author of half a dozen plays for the
theatre. In them we have the mere “flotsam and jetsam” of his prolific
pen. What would we not give for all the plays of Robert Greene from
whom his contemporaries and successors purloyned plumes! According
to Ben Jonson, it was as safe to pillage from Greene in his day, as
it is to persecute his reputation in ours. He was a graduate of both
universities, was a man of genius, but did not live to do his talents
full justice. A born story teller, like Sir Walter Scott, he could do
good work easily and quickly.
We glean the following from the pages of “The English Novel in the
Time of Shakespeare,” by J. J. Jusserand, “Greene’s prose tale,
‘Pandosto, the Triumph of Time,’ had an extraordinary success, while
Shakspere’s drama ‘Winter’s Tale’ founded on Greene’s Pandosto was not
printed, either in authentic or pirated shape, before the appearance
of the 1623 folio, while Greene’s prose story was published in 1588
and was renamed half a century later, ‘The History of Dorostus and
Fawnia.’ So popular was it that it was printed again and again. We
know of at least seventeen editions, and in all likelihood there were
more throughout the seventeenth century, and even under one shape or
another throughout the eighteenth. It was printed as a chap-book during
this last period and in this costume began a new life. It was turned
into verse in 1672, but the highest and most extraordinary compliment
of Greene’s performance was its translation into French, not only once
but twice. The first time was at a moment when the English language
and literature were practically unknown and as good as non-existent to
French readers. In fact every thing from Greene’s pen sold. All of his
writings enjoyed great popularity in their day, and, after the lapse of
three centuries, have been deemed worthy of publication, insuring the
rehabilitation of Greene’s splendid genius.”
We are content to believe that almost all of the so-called posthumous
writings of Robert Greene are spurious, and that but few genuine chips
were found in the literary work-shop of the poet after his death.
We accept the very striking and impressive address to his brother
play-wrights, the after-words to a “Groats Worth of Wit.” We also may
shyly accept the sweet wife letter as the authentic product of the
poet’s mind, heart and hand. Of this letter, there are two versions,
neither of which are very trustworthy, as both are from posthumed
pamphlets. One, which we believe to be a forgery, is found in “The
Repentance.” The other is found in a pamphlet written by his malignant
enemy, Harvey, which contains an account of the poet’s last illness and
death. Nash writes about Harvey, “From the lousy circumstance of his
poverty before his death and sending that miserable writt to his wife,
it cannot be but thou lyest, learned Gabriel.” We would not set down as
auto-biographical the posthumous pamphlets, even though of unquestioned
authenticity, for in the repentance Greene is made to say, “I need not
make long discourse of my parents who for their gravitie and honest
life are well known and esteemed among their neighbors, namely in the
citie of Norwich where I was bred and borne;” and then he is made to
contradict all this in “Groats Worth of Wit,” where the father is
called Gorinius, a despicable miser. “Greene is not known to have had a
brother to be the victim of his cozenage.”
As “there is a soul of truth in things erroneous,” there may be a soul
of truth in the following letter contained in “The Repentance”:
“Sweet wife, if ever there was any good will or friendship between
thee and me, see this bearer (my host) satisfied of his debt. I owe
him tenne pounds and but for him I had perished in the streetes.
Forget and forgive my wrongs done unto thee and Almighty God have
mercie on my soule. Farewell till we meet in heaven for on earth thou
shalt never see me more.
“This 2nd day of Sept., 1592.
“Written by thy dying husband,
“ROBERT GREENE.”
The reader will notice the statement in the posthumed letter that the
poet had contracted a debt to the sum of ten pounds, equal to $400
present money, but there is nothing whatever about leaving many papers
in sundry bookseller’s hands which Chettle averred in the address “To
the Gentlemen Readers Kind Hearts Dreame.” If this were a fact, the
bookseller doubtless would have been called upon; “see this bearer (my
host) satisfied of his debt,” and sweet wife would not have bourne the
burden while booksellers felt themselves blest to pay dear for the very
dregs of her husband’s wit.
Those writers who express no doubt of the authenticity of the posthumed
pamphlets, leave their readers to set down as auto-biographical
whatever portions of those pieces he may think proper. At the same
time the trend of impulse is given the reader by the critics that he
may not fail to read the story of the poet’s life out of characters
devoid of all faith in honesty and in virtue, while the author (Greene)
is anxious evidently to point a moral by them and reprove vice. These
forged pamphlets and so-called auto-biographical pamphlets make Greene
accuse himself of crimes which he surely did not commit, such as the
crime of theft and murder. He says, “I exceeded all others in these
kinds of sinnes,” and he is represented as the most atrocious villain
that ever walked the earth. There is not an atom of evidence adduced
to show Francisco in “Never Too Late” was intended by the author for
a picture of himself, and we do not believe that Greene wrote the
pamphlet in which Roberto, in “Groats Worth of Wit” is one of the
despicable characters.
Very little is known with any degree of certainty concerning the
personal life of Robert Greene, and very little, if anything, in
regard to his family or ancestry, although much prominence is given by
imaginary writers to the history of his person in the manuals of our
literature. These writers attach an auto-biographical reality to their
dreams of fancy. They take advantage of Greene’s unbounded sincerity
and his own too candid confession in the address to the play-writers,
and of his irrepressible desire to sermonize, whether in plays or
pamphlets, with all the fervor of a devout Methodist having a license
to exhort. The closest analogy to Greene’s position, in fact, is that
of the revival preacher—as Prof. Storojenko puts it—“who, to make the
picture of the present as telling as possible, sees and paints his
past in its very blackest colors. This self-flagellation is strongly
connected with a really attractive feature of Greene’s character; we
mean his sincerity, a boundless sincerity which never allowed him to
spare himself. Robert Greene was incapable of posing and pretending to
be what he was not. This is why we may fearlessly believe him when he
speaks of the anguish of his soul and the sincerity of his repentance.
A man whose deflection from the path of virtue cost him so much moral
suffering cannot, of course, be measured by the same standard as the
man who acts basely, remains at peace with himself and defends his
faults by all kinds of sophistry. Speaking further of his literary
labors, he never dealt in personalities in exposing some of the crying
nuisances of London and is perfectly silent as to the moral change in
his own character, which was the fruit of his dealing with them. In a
word, he conceals all that might, in his opinion, modify the sentence
that he pronounces on his own life for the edification of others.”
IV
There is a commendative piece of writing which should be read in
connection with Greene’s letter to “divers play-makers.” We refer
to the preface to “Kind Hearts Dreams,” written by Henry Chettle,
which was registered December 8, 1592. Chettle says, “About three
months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry
book-seller’s hands, among others, his ‘Groats Worth of Wit’ in which
a letter written to diverse play-makers is offensively by one or
two of them taken.” Chettle’s statement about many papers in sundry
book-sellers hands may be discredited because of the poet’s urgent
necessities, and the strong desire on the part of book-sellers to
publish Greene’s writings. Of this we may be sure, that the letter was
not placed in book-sellers hands by Greene or for him. He would not
have called his friends to repentance in that way, for it would have
given publicity to the defects in the lives of his friends as well as
his own.
The letter evidences the fact of its having been written as a private
letter to three of the poet’s friends (Marlowe, Nash and Peele).
If sent, it did not reach them, but was surreptitiously procured,
doubtless, by some hack-writer, (inferentially, Henry Chettle, who
transcribed it.) Gabriel Harvey may have been accessory to its
procurement, as his ghoulish instinct led him to visit the poor
shoemaker’s house where Greene died, on the day following the poet’s
funeral in search of matter foul and defamatory, and with ink of
slander to blacken the poet’s memory. This snobbish ape of gentility,
Gabriel Harvey, hated Greene because he called his father by “the craft
he gets his living with.” However, when Greene learned that Harvey
was ashamed of his father’s humble employment, that of ropemaker,
he straightway canceled the offensive allusion, but Harvey still
continued to manifest the same hateful malignity and venomous spite.
The letter is a fine character study of the three poets addressed.
Greene drew out the true feature of every distinguishing mark or trait,
both mental and moral, of these, his fellow-craftsmen, who, though he
did not name them, are asserted to be Marlowe, Nash and Peele. Greene
characterized them individually, and twice he collectively admonished
them thus, “Base minded men all three of you, if by my miseries ye be
not warned,” and, in the concluding part of the letter, “But now return
I again to you three, knowing my miseries is to you no news and let me
heartily entreat you to be warned by my harmes.”
All of Shakspere’s biographers and commentators aver that Shakspere was
not one of the three persons addressed. How then could Chettle’s words
bear witness to his (Shakspere’s) civil demeanor or factitious grace
in writing. Mr. Fleay stated many years ago (1886) that there was an
entire misconception of Chettle’s language that Shakspere was not one
of those who took offense. They are expressly stated to have been two
of the three authors addressed by Greene. The recent Shakespearean
writers have evidently mistaken Chettle’s placation of Nash or Peele,
or either of the three play-makers addressed by Greene, it does not
matter which, for an apology to Shakspere, who was not the object of
Greene’s satire or Chettle’s placation for were not Nash, Marlowe and
Peele each “excellent in the quality he professes?” Had they not lived
in an age of compliment they would have merited these complimental
phrases of Henry Chettle? For their names were in the trump of fame.
Christopher Marlowe, the first great English poet, was the father of
English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse. He is, by
general consent, identified with the first person addressed by Greene,
“With thee will I first begin, thou famous gracer of tragedians, who
hath said in his heart there is no God. Why should thy excellent wit,
His gift, be so blinded that thou should give no glory to the giver?”
The second person referred to is identifiable with Thomas Nash, “With
thee I join, young juvenall, that byting satyrist,” though not with
equal accord, as the first with Marlowe, as some few persons prefer to
name Thomas Lodge. This predilection for Lodge is based on their having
been co-authors in the making of a play (“That lastlie with me together
writ a comedie”). This fact, however, signifies very little, for it
is generally conceded that Marlowe, Nash, Peele, Lodge and Greene
mobilized their literary activities in the production of not a few of
the earlier plays called Shakspere’s.
We are convinced that Lodge was not the person addressed by Greene as
young juvenall. He was absent from England at the date of Greene’s
letter, having left in 1591 and did not return till 1593. Moreover,
he had declared his intention long before to write no more for the
theatre. In 1589 he vowed “to write no more of that whence shame doth
grow.” At Christmas time in 1592 he was in the Straits of Magellan.
Born in 1550, Lodge led a virtuous and quiet life. He was seventeen
years older than Nash, and four years older than Greene, who would
not, in addressing one four years his senior, have used these words,
“Sweet boy might I advise thee.” The youthfulness of Nash fits well.
He was boyish in appearance. Born in Nov., 1567, he was seven years
younger than Greene, and was the youngest member of their fellowship.
The mild reproof “for his too much liberty of speech” contained in the
letter, justifies the belief that Thomas Nash was referred to as “young
juvenall, that byting satyrist, who had vexed scholars with bitter
lines.”
The equal unanimity and general consent which identifies the first with
Marlowe, identifies the third and last person, who had been co-worker
in drama making of the same fellowship, with George Peele, “and thou
no less deserving than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing
inferior” driven (as myself) to “extreame shifts, a little have I to
say to thee.” Chettle could, however, have bourne witness to Peele
“his civil demeanor and factitious grace in writing.” Peele held the
situation of city poet and conductor of pageants for the court. His
first pageant bears the date of 1585, his earliest known play, “The
Arraignment of Paris” was acted before 1584. “Peele was the object of
patronage of noblemen for addressing literary tributes for payment. The
Earl of Northumberland seems to have presented him with a fee of three
pounds. In May, 1591, when Queen Elizabeth visited Lord Burleigh’s
seat of Theabald, Peele was employed to compose certain speeches
addressed to the queen, which deftly excused the absence of the master
of the house, by describing in blank verse in his ‘Polyphymnic,’
the honorable triumph at tilt. Her majesty was received by the
Right Honorable the Earl of Cumberland.” In January, 1595, George
Peele, Master of Arts, presented his “Tale of Troy” to the great Lord
Treasurer through a simple messenger, his eldest daughter, “necessities
servant.” Peele was a practised rhetorician, who embellished his
writings with elegantly adorned sentences and choice fancies. He was
a man of polished intellect and social gifts, and possessed of a very
winsome personality. “His soft, caressing woman voice” low, sweet and
soothing, may have had a considerable effect upon Chettle, and could
not have been unduly honored by Chettle’s apology in witnessing “his
civil demeanor and factitious grace in writing.”
As Henry Chettle had been brought into some discredit by the
publication of Greene’s celebrated letter, and his admission that he
re-wrote it, we know that the letter must have been surreptitiously
procured as evidenced by its contents. The letter is as authentic,
doubtless, as any garbled or mutilated document may be; but Chettle’s
foolish statement contained in his preface to “Kind Hearts Dreams” has
awakened the suspicion, in regard to the authorship of “Groats Worth
of Wit,” that, while the letter (or as much as Chettle chose to have
published) is genuine, “I put something out,” the pamphlet “Groats
Worth of Wit” is spurious, and evidently not the work of Robert Greene.
Who can be content to believe Chettle’s statement that Greene placed
this criminating letter in the hands of printers, or that it was left
in their hands by others at his request? A private letter, written to
three friends, who have been co-workers in drama-making, calling them
to repentance, charging one (Marlowe) with diabolical atheism! This was
a very serious charge in those times, when persons were burnt at the
stake for professing their unbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity.
Chettle was the first to make current the charge of atheism against
Marlowe, the one of them that took offense, and whose acquaintance he
(Chettle) did not seek. Chettle reverenced Marlowe’s learning, and
would have his readers believe that he did greatly mitigate Greene’s
charge, but the contents of the letter as transcribed by Chettle and
printed by the bookmakers, discredit Chettle’s statement, as the
charge of diabolical atheism was not struck out, and was, if proven,
punishable by death.
There is no evidence adduced to show that Marlowe was indignant
because of Greene’s admonition, contained in a private letter written
to three play-makers of his own fellowship, but resented the public
charge of atheism, for which he, Chettle, as accessory and transcriber,
was chiefly responsible in making public. We know that Marlowe was
in retreat at the time of his death at Deptford, for in May, 1593,
following the publication of Greene’s letter printed at the end of the
pamphlet, “Groats Worth of Wit,” the Privy Council issued a warrant for
Marlowe’s arrest. A copy of Marlowe’s blasphemies, so called, was sent
to Her Highness, and endorsed by one Richard Bame, who was soon after
hanged at Tyburn for some loathsome crime. But a few days later, before
Marlowe’s apprehension, they wrote in the parish-book at Deptford on
June 1st “Christopher Marlowe slain by Francis Archer.” At the age of
thirty, he, “the first and greatest inheritor of unfulfilled renown,”
went where “Orpheus and where Homer are.”
The loss to English letters in Marlowe’s untimely death cannot be
measured, nevertheless, England of that day was spared the infamy of
his execution. However, the zealots of those days found a subject, in
Francis Kett, a fellow of Marlowe’s college, who was burnt in Norwich
in 1589 for heresy. Unlike Marlowe, he was a pious, God-fearing man
who fell a victim to the strenuousity with which he maintained his
religious convictions. Another subject was found in the person of
Bartholomew Leggett, who was burnt at the stake for stating his
confession of faith, which was identical with the religious belief of
Thomas Jefferson and President William H. Taft. The times were thirsty
for the blood of daring spirits. The shores of the British Isles were
strewn with the wreckage of the great Armada. In Germany, Kepler (he of
the three laws) was struggling to save his poor old mother from being
burnt at the stake for a witch. In Italy, they burnt Bruno at the stake
while Galileo played recanter.
That Marlowe was one of the play-makers who felt incensed at the
publication of Greene’s letter admits of no doubt. He most likely would
have resented the public charge of atheism. “With neither of them that
take offense was I acquainted (writes Chettle) and with one of them
(Marlowe) I care not if I never be.” In such blood bespattered times,
Chettle could and did write “for the first (Marlowe) whose learning
I reverence, and at the perusing of Greene’s book (letter) struck out
what in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ, or had it
been true yet to publish it was intolerable.” Chettle’s conscience
must have been a little seared, for he omitted to strike out the only
statement of fact contained in the letter, which could have imperiled
the life of Marlowe! The letter evidences the fact that all of that
portion referring to Marlowe was not garbled, and that there was not
any intolerable something struck out, but instead, as transcriber for
the pirate publisher, he retained the fulminating passage, “had said
in his heart there is no God.” Notwithstanding Chettle’s statement, we
are of the opinion that the passage about Marlowe was printed in its
integrity.
Chettle’s having failed to omit the charge of diabolical atheism,
reveals the strong personal antipathy he had for Marlowe. Few there
are who set up Marlowe as claimant for Chettle’s apology, and fewer
still, who would not regard him worthy of the compliment, “factitious
grace in writing,” and whose acquaintance Chettle did not seek, but
whose fascinating personality and exquisite feeling for poetry was the
admiration of Drayton and Chapman, who were among the noblest, as well
as the best loved, of their time. George Chapman was among the few men
whom Ben Jonson said he loved. Anthony Wood described him as “a person
of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate qualities.” Chapman
sought conference with the soul of Marlowe:
“Of his free soul whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”
Henry Chettie’s act of placation is offered to one of two of the three
play-makers addressed, and not to the actor referred to, who was not
one of those addressed; therefore, “upstart crow” could not have been
the recipient of Chettle’s apology, or placation, in whose behalf
(“upstart crow”) Chettle retracts nothing. The following reference is
to one of the offended playmakers pointed at in Greene’s address, whom
Chettle wishes to placate, “The other whome at that time I did not so
much spare as since I wish I had—that I did not I am as sorry as if the
original fault had been my fault because myself have seen his demeanor
no less civil excellent in the qualities he professes; besides, divers
of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his
honesty and his factitious grace in writing that approves his art.”
With the votaries of Shakspere, however, these words of Chettle chime
with their dreams of fancy; for there is a pre-inclination and a
predetermination to read Shakspere into them, as if the words of Greene
and Chettle were not accessible to all inquirers—words that can be
made to comprehend only one of the two playmakers that take offense,
who must be one of the three (Marlowe, Nash and Peele) admonished by
Greene, and who were of his fellowship. The reader, after studying
Elizabethan literature and history, is content to believe that the
least celebrated of the three playmakers pointed at in Greene’s address
(Marlowe, Nash and Peele), stood high enough in the scale of literary
merit in 1592 to be the recipient of Chettle’s praise.
The word “quality,” in “excellent in the quality he professes,” is by
the fantastically inclined, made to yield a convenient connotation,
but in the ordinary and contextural meaning of the word, may embrace
all that makes or helps to make any person such as he is. Are these
words of Chettle written in 1592 when the theatre was lying under a
social ban, and the actor was still a social outcast, identifiable
with a vagabond at law, or with Thomas Nash, who took his bachelor’s
degree at Cambridge in 1585? “In the autumn of 1592, Nash was the guest
of Archbishop Whitgift at Crogdon, whither the household had retired
for fear of the plague, and, as the official antagonist of Martin
Marprelate was constrained to keep up such a character as would enable
divers of worship to report his uprightness of dealing,” he certainly
was entitled to commendation for his “factitious grace in writing.” The
appropriation of the complimentary remarks of Chettle on Nash, or any
one of the three playmakers addressed, to Shakspere, who was not one of
those addressed, and therefore, could not have been the recipient of
Chettle’s apology, so called, is one of the fancies in which critics of
the highest reputation have indulged. There is nothing equal to this in
all the annals of literature, unless it be “Cicero’s famous letter to
Lucretius, in which he asks the historian to lie a little in his favor
in recording the events of his consulship, for the sake of making him a
greater man.”
Chettle lost no time in transcribing the posthumous letter. Doubts as
to “Groats Worth of Wit” were entertained at the time of publication.
Some suspected Nash to have had a hand in the authorship, others
accused Chettle. Nash did take offense at the report that it was his.
Its publication caused much excitement and the rumor went abroad that
the pamphlet was a forgery. “Other news I am advised of,” writes Nash,
in an epistle prefixed to the second edition of “Pierce-penniless,”
“that a scald, trivial, lying pamphlet called ‘Greene’s Groats Worth of
Wit’ is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soul,
but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded
from my pen, or if I were any way privy to the writing or printing of
it.” We regard these words confirmatory of the fact that “Groats Worth
of Wit” is not a work of unquestioned authenticity, and, furthermore,
that Nash did not believe it the work of Robert Greene. _Prima facie_,
it is spurious, for Nash spoke in high praise of Greene’s writings.
He neither would, nor could, have used the words “scald, trivial,
lying” of a genuine work of Robert Greene, whose writings were held in
high favor by all classes. Nash could not have taken offense at the
allusion of Greene, which was rather complimental, though personal,
and not intended for publication; but it did, however, contain some
slight mixture of censure,—“Sweet boy, might I advise thee, get not
many enimies by bitter words. Blame not scholars vexed with sharp lines
if they reprove thy too much liberty of reproof.” Nash was very angry,
but only because Greene’s letter was given to the public by Chettle,
who felt constrained to placate “that byting satyrist,” whose raillery
he had reason to fear, by bearing witness to “his civil demeanor and
factitious grace in writing.”
Votaries of Shakspere may take their choice of one of the three
addressed. Which one shall be named? What matter it to them, with
Shakspere barred, whether Nash, Peele or Marlowe be named, the least
of whom was worthy of Chettle’s commendation?
There is not a crumb of evidence adduced for Shakspere as a putative
author of plays until 1598, and then only in the variable and shadowy
Elizabethan title page. Chettle terms Greene “the only comedian of a
vulgar writer,” meaning he was a writer in the vernacular tongue or
common language, a fact which proves Shakspere’s nihility as playmaker
in 1592. Now the fact of the matter is that this “lying pamphlet,”
so called by Nash, was not authored by Greene. It should be called,
“Chettle’s Groats Worth of Wit,” for the pamphlet proper is from
his pen or some other hack writer’s. The letter alone was authored
by Greene, addressed as a private letter to three fellow poets, and
surreptitiously procured for Chettle and transcribed by him. Chettle
writes, “I had only in the copy this share—it was ill written—licensed
it must be, ere it could be printed, which could never be if it might
not be read. To be brief I writ it over and as nearly as I could
follow the copy. Only, in that letter I put something out, but in the
whole book, not a word in, for I protest it was all Greene’s, not mine,
nor Master Nash’s, as some unjustly have affirmed.”
The letter and pamphlet both in Greene’s handwriting would have been
the best possible evidence of the genuineness of its contents and
legibility. Chettle’s not offering in evidence the original letter
is strong presumptive proof of the commission of a forgery. He, if
not the chief actor in the offense, was an accessory after the fact,
and should, in his appeal to the public in defense of his reputation,
have brought forward the pamphlet itself, embracing the whole matter,
for examination and comparison; for we feel satisfied that such an
examination would prove that the celebrated letter was authored and
in the handwriting of Robert Greene, and not so ill written that it
could not be read by the printers, who must have been familiar with
the handwriting of the largest contributor of the prose literature of
his day. For ourselves, what we have adduced convinces us that the
tract, “Groats Worth of Wit,” was authored and written by one of Philip
Henslowe’s hacks, presumedly, Henry Chettle, a literary dead beat,
and an indigent of many imprisonments, who was always importuning the
old play-broker for money. Since the tract, “Groats Worth of Wit,”
was in Chettle’s own handwriting, he strove to fool the printers by
transcribing Greene’s letter and binding both together, through that
“disguised hood” to fool the public. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to
have said, “You may fool all the people some of the time, and some of
the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the
time.” It is possible that Chettle may have fooled some of the people
of his own generation some of the time, but in later times, through the
misapprehension of his quoted words, he has fooled the Shaksperolators
all of the time. Chettle, however, would not permit the letter to come
forward in its integrity and speak for itself, disclosing the nature of
the intolerable something “stroke out,” which piques our curiosity, but
not in anticipation of any of those indecencies that taint the writings
of Ben Jonson and the work of many writers of that age, not excepting
Shakespeare, who is also amenable in no slight degree to the charge of
the same coarseness of taste which excites repulsion in the feelings of
Leo Tolstoy.
The fact of the whole matter appears to be that Henry Chettle,
wishing to profit financially by the great commercial value of Robert
Greene’s name, was accessory to the embezzlement and the commission
of a forgery, and was the silent beneficiary of the fraud. The mutual
connection of hack writer and pirate publisher is so obvious that a
jury of discerning students, with the exhibits, presented together
with the presumptive proofs and inferential evidence contextured in
both letter and preface, should easily confirm our opinion of the
incredibleness of Chettle’s statements contained in the preface to
“Kind Hearts Dreams.” The evidence of their falsity is, _prima-facie_,
destitute of credible attestations.
We are made to see, in our survey of the age of Elizabeth, much that
is in striking contrast with the spirit and activities of our time.
There is a notable contrast between the public play house of those
days, where no respectable woman ever appeared, and with the theatre
of our day—the rival of the church as a moral force. In the elder time
“the permanent and persistent dishonor attached to the stage,” and
the stigma attached to the poets who wrote for the public playhouse,
attached in like manner to the regular frequenters of public theatres,
the majority of whom could neither read nor write, but belonged chiefly
to the vicious and idle class of the population. At all the theatres,
according to Malone, it appears that noise and show were what chiefly
attracted an audience in spite of the reputed author. There was clamor
for a stage reeking with blood and anything ministering to their
unchaste appetites. The spectacular actor and clown was relatively
advantaged, as he could say much more than was set down for him. Kemp’s
extemporizing powers of histrionic buffoonery, gagging, and grimacing,
paid the running expenses of the playhouse.
“It must be borne in mind that actors then occupied an inferior
position in society, and that in many quarters even the vocation of
a dramatic writer was considered scarcely respectable.” Ben Jonson’s
letter to the Earl of Salisbury, lets us see very clearly that he
regarded play writing as a degradation. We transcribe it in part as
follows:
“I am here, my honored Lord, unexamined and unheard, committed to
a vile prison and with me a gentleman (whose name may perhaps have
come to your Lordship), one Mr. George Chapman, a learned and honest
man. The cause (would I could name some worthier though I wish we
had known none worthy our imprisonment) (is the words irk-me that
our fortune hath necessitated us to so despise a course) a play, my
Lord—.”
We see how keenly Jonson felt the disgrace, not on account of the
charge of reflecting on some one in a play in which they had federated,
for he protested his own and Chapman’s innocence, but he felt that
their degradation lay chiefly in writing stage poetry, for drama-making
was regarded as a degrading kind of employment, which poets accepted
who were struggling for the meanest necessities of life, and were
driven by poverty to their production, and to the slave-driving
play-brokers, many of whom became very rich by making the flesh and
blood of poor play-writers their maw.
In looking into Philip Henslowe’s old note-book, we see how the
grasping play-brokers of the olden time speculated on the poor
play-writers necessities, when plays were not regarded as literature;
when the most strenuous and laborious of dramatic writers for the
theatre could not hope to gain a competence by the pen alone, but
wrote only for bread; when play-writers were in the employ of the
shareholding actors, as hired men; and when their employers, the
actors, were social outcasts who, in order to escape the penalty for
the infraction of the law against vagabondage, were nominally retained
by some nobleman. In further proof of the degradation which was
attached to the production of dramatic composition, “when Sir Thomas
Bodley, about the year 1600, extended and remodeled the old university
library and gave it his name, he declared that no such riff-raff as
play-books should ever find admittance to it.” “When Ben Jonson treated
his plays as literature by publishing them in 1616 as his works, he was
ridiculed for his pretentions, while Webster’s care in the printing of
his plays laid himself open to the charge of pedantry.”
V
What Lord Rosebery says of Napoleon is equally true of the author
of “Hamlet” and “King Lear,” “Mankind will always delight to
scrutinize something that indefinitely raises its conception of its
own powers and possibilities, and will seek, though eternally in
vain, to penetrate the secrets of this prodigious intellect,” and
it is to Stratford-on-Avon that many turn for the final glimpse of
what Swinburne calls “the most transcendent intelligence that ever
illuminated humanity.” William Shakspere, the third child and eldest
son (probably), of John Shakspere, is supposed to have been born at
a place on the chief highway or road leading from London to Ireland,
where the road crosses the river Avon. This crossing was called
Street-ford or Stratford. This, at any rate, was the place of his
baptism in 1564, as is evidenced by the parish register. The next
proven fact is that of his marriage in 1582, when he was little more
than eighteen years old. Before this event nothing is known in regard
to him.
John Shakspere, the father apparently of William Shakspere, is first
discovered and described as a resident of Henley Street, where our
first glimpse is had of him in April, 1552. In that year he was
fined the sum of twelve pence for a breach of the municipal sanitary
regulations. Nothing is known in regard to the place of his birth and
nurture, nor in regard to his ancestry. The evidence is, _prima-facie_,
that the Shaksperes were of the parvenu class. John Shakspere seems to
have been a chapman, trading in farmer’s produce. In 1557 he married
Mary Arden, the seventh and youngest daughter of Robert Arden, who
had left to her fifty-three acres and a house, called “Ashbies” at
Wilmecote. He had also left to her other land at Wilmecote, and an
interest in two houses at Smitterfield.
This step gave John Shakspere a reputation among his neighbors of
having married an heiress, and he was not slow to take advantage of
it. His official career commenced at once by his election in 1557, as
one of the ale-tasters, to see to the quality of bread and ale; and
again in 1568 he was made high bailiff of Stratford. John Shakspere
was the only member of the Shakspere family who was honored with civic
preferment and confidence, serving the corporation for the ninth time
in several functions. However, the time of his declination was at hand,
for in the autumn of 1578 the wife’s property at Ashbies was mortgaged
for forty pounds. The money subsequently tendered in repayment of the
loan was refused until other sums due to the same creditor were repaid.
John Shakspere was deprived of his aldermanship September 6, 1580,
because he did not come to the hall when notified. On March 29, he
produced a writ of habeas corpus, which shows he had been in prison
for debt. Notwithstanding his inability to read and write, he had more
or less capacity for official business, but so managed his private
affairs as to wreck his own and his wife’s fortune.
At the time of the habeas corpus matter William Shakspere was thirteen
years old. “In all probability,” says his biographer, “the lad was
removed from school, his father requiring his assistance.” There was
a grammar school in Stratford which was reconstructed on a medieval
foundation by Edward VI, though the first English grammar was not
published until 1586. This was after Shakespere had finished his
education. “No Stratford record nor Stratford tradition says that
Shakspere attended the Stratford grammar school.” But, had the waning
fortune of his father made it possible, he might have been a student
there from his seventh year—the probable age of admission—until his
improvident marriage when little more than eighteen and a half years
old. However, a provincial grammar school is a convenient place for
the lad about whose activities we know nothing, and whose education is
made to impinge on conjecture and fanciful might-have-been.
We are told that Shakspere must have been sent to the free school at
Stratford, as his parents and all the relatives were unlearned persons,
and there was no other public education available; nevertheless, it
was the practice of that age to teach the boy no more than his father
knew. One thing is certain, that the scholastic awakening in the
Shakspere family was of short duration, for it began and ended with
William Shakspere. His youngest daughter, Judith, was as illiterate
as were her grandparents. She could not even write her name, although
her father at the time of her school age had become wealthy, and his
eldest daughter “the little premature Susanna,” as De Quincy calls her,
could barely scrawl her name, being unable to identify her husband’s
(Dr. Hall) handwriting, which no one but an illiterate could mistake.
Her contention with the army surgeon, Dr. James Cook, respecting her
husband’s manuscripts, is proof that William Shakspere was true to his
antecedents by conferring illiteracy upon his daughters. The Shakspere
of Stratford-on-Avon was not exceptionally liberal and broad minded in
the matter of education in contrast with many of his contemporaries,
notably Richard Mulcaster, (1531-1611), who says that “the girl should
be as well educated as her brother,” while the real author of the
immortal plays had also written, “Ignorance is the curse of God,” and,
“There is no darkness but ignorance.”
It was not the least of John Shakspere’s misfortunes that in November,
1582, his eldest son, William, added to his embarrassments, by
premature and forced marriage. It is the practice of Shakespere’s
biographers to pass hurriedly over this event in the young man’s life,
for there is nothing commendable in his marital relations. There
is expressed in it irregularity of conduct and probable desertion
on his part; pressure was brought to bear on the young man by his
wife’s relations, and he was forced to marry the woman whom he had
wronged. Who can believe that their marriage was a happy one, when
the only written words contained in his will are not words expressive
of connubial endearment, such as “dear wife” or “sweet wife,” but “my
wife?” He had forgotten her, but by an interlineation in the final
draft, she received his second best bed with its furniture. This was
the sole bequest made to her.
We are by no means sure of the identity of his wife. We do not know
that she and Shakespere ever went through the actual ceremony of
marriage, unless her identity is traceable through Anne Wateley, as a
regular license was issued for the marriage of William Shaxpere and
Anne Wateley of Temple Grafton, November 27, 1583. Richard Hathaway,
the reputed father of Shakspere’s wife, Anne, in his will dated
September 1, 1581, bequeathed his property to seven children, his
daughters being Catherin, Margaret and Agnes. No Anne was mentioned.
The first published notice of the name of William Shakspere’s
(supposed) wife appears in Rowe’s “Life of Shakespere” (1709), wherein
it is stated that she “was the daughter of one Hathaway said to have
been a substantial yeoman in the neighborhood of Stratford.” This
was all that Betterton, the actor Rowe’s informant, could learn at
the time of his visit to Stratford-on-Avon. The exact time of this
visit is unknown, but it was probably about the year 1690. This lack
of knowledge in regard to the Hathaways shows that the locality of
Anne Hathaway’s residence, or that of her parents, was not known at
Stratford. The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hathaway’s cottage,
and reached from Stratford by fieldpaths, may have been the home of
Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakspere, before his marriage, but of
this there is no proof.
Shakspere was married under the name “Shagspere,” but the place of
marriage is unknown, as his place of residence is not mentioned in
the bond. In the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester)
is contained a deed wherein Sandells and Richardson, husbandmen of
Stratford, bound themselves in the bishop’s consistory court on
November 28, 1582, as a surety for forty pounds, to free the bishop
of all liability should any lawful impediment, by reason of any
precontract, or consanguinity, be subsequently disclosed to imperil
the validity of the contemplated marriage of William Shakspere with
Anne Hathaway. Provided, that Anne obtained the consent of her friends,
the marriage might proceed with at once proclaiming the bans of
matrimony. The wording of the bond shows that, despite the fact that
the bridegroom was a minor by nearly three years, the consent of his
parents was neither called for, nor obtained, though necessary “for
strictly regular procedure.” Sandells and Richardson, representing
the lady’s family, ignored the bridegroom’s family completely. In
having secured the deed, they forced Shakspere to marry their friend’s
daughter in order to save her reputation. Soon afterwards—within six
months—a daughter was born. Moreover, the whole circumstances of
the case render it highly probable that Shakspere had no thought of
marriage, for the waning fortune of his father had made him acquainted
with the “cares of bread.” He was a penniless youth, not yet of age,
having neither trade, nor means of livelihood, and was forced by her
friends into marrying her—a woman eight years older than himself. In
1585 she presented him with twins.
When he left Stratford for London we do not know positively, but the
advent of the twins is the approximate date of the youth’s Hegira.
He lived apart from his wife for more than twenty-five years. The
breath of slander never touched the good name of Anne (or Agnes), the
neglected wife of William Shakspere. There is _prima-facie_ evidence
that the playbroker’s wife fared in his absence no better than his
father and mother, who, dying intestate in 1601 and 1608, respectively,
were buried somewhere by the Stratford church, but there is no trace
of any sepulchral monument, or memorial. If anything of the kind had
been set up by their wealthy son, William Shakspere, it would certainly
have been found by someone. The only contemporary mention made of the
wife of Shakspere, between her marriage in 1582 and her husband’s
death in 1616, was as the borrower, at an unascertained date, of forty
shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father’s
shepherd. The money was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and his
executor was directed to recover the sum from Shakspere and distribute
it among the poor of Stratford. There is disclosed in this pecuniary
transaction, coupled with the slight mention of her in the will and the
barring of her dower, _prima facie_ evidence of William Shakspere’s
indifference to, and neglect of, if not dislike for, his wife. All
this is in striking contrast with the conduct of Sir Thomas Lucy, whom
the biographers of Shakespere have attempted to disparage, and whose
endearment for his wife is so feelingly expressed in his will. And, in
contrast also, is the conduct of Edward Alleyn, famous as an actor, and
as the founder of Dulwich College, who lived with his wife in London,
and called her “sweet mouse.”
The tangibility of this Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon is very much in
evidence along pecuniary lines, especially as money lender, land-owner,
speculator and litigant. In 1597 he bought New Place in Stratford
for sixty pounds; also mentioned as a holder of grain at Stratford X
quarters. The following entry is in Chamberlain’s accounts at Stratford
in 1598: “Paid to Mr. Shaxpere for one lode of stone xd;” in the same
year Richard Quiney wrote to William Shakspere for a loan of thirty or
forty pounds; in 1599 William Shakspere was taken into the new Globe
Theatre Company as partner; in 1602 Shakspere bought one hundred seven
acres of arable land at Stratford for three hundred two pounds (in
his absence the conveyance was given over to his brother, Gilbert);
in the same year he bought a house with barns, orchards, and gardens,
from Hercules Underhill for sixty pounds; also a cottage close to his
house, New Place; in 1605 Shakspere bought the thirty-two-year lease of
half Stratford tithes for four hundred forty pounds; in 1613 Shakspere
bought a house near Blackfriars’ Theatre for one hundred and forty
pounds, and mortgaged it next day for sixty pounds; in 1612 Shakspere
is mentioned in a law suit brought before Lord Ellsimore about
Stratford tithes; in 1611 Hamnet, his only son, died at Stratford at
the age of eleven and half years. The father, however, set up no stone
to tell where the boy lay.
In the autumn of the year 1614 Shakspere became implicated with the
landowners, William Combe and Arthur Mannering, in the conspiracy to
enclose the common field in the vicinity of Stratford. The success of
this rapacious scheme would have advantaged Shakspere in his freehold
interest, but might have affected adversely his interest in the tithes,
so he secured himself against all possible loss by obtaining from
Riplingham, Combe’s agent, in October, 1614, a deed of indemnification;
then, in the spirit of his agreement, he acted in unison with the two
greedy land-sharks to rob the poor people of their ancient rights of
pasturage. The unholy coalition caused great excitement. The humble
citizens of Stratford were thoroughly aroused, and the town corporation
put up a sharp and vigorous opposition to the scheme, for enclosure
would have caused decay of tillage, idleness, penury, depopulation, and
the subversion of homes. Happily, the three greedy cormorants Combe,
Mannering and Shakspere failed in their efforts and the common field
was unenclosed.
Shakspere is thought to have been penurious for his litigious strivings
point in that direction, but this feature of his character was not
disclosed in 1596 and 1599, when he sought to have his family enrolled
among the gentry, as shown by his extravagance in bribing the officers
of the Herald College to issue a grant of arms to his father, “a
transaction which involved,” says Dr. Farmer, “the falsehood and
venality of the father, the son and two kings-at-arms, and did not
escape protest, for if ever a coat was cut from whole cloth we may be
sure that this coat-of-arms was the one.” Shakspere himself was not in
a position to apply for a coat-of-arms—“a player stood far too low in
the social scale for the cognizance of heraldry.” Nevertheless, recent
writers on the subject of Shakespeare stamp this bogus coat-of-arms on
the covers of their books. We know that the Shaksperes did not belong
to the Armigerous part of the population, and that they stood somewhat
lower in the social scale than either the Halls or Quineys, who bore
marital relations with them.
Shakspere’s son-in-law, John Hall, was a master of arts and an eminent
physician. He was summoned more than once to attend the Earl and
Countess of Northampton at Ludlow Castle. He was of the French Court
School, and was opposed to the indiscriminate process of bleeding. On
June 5, 1607, Dr. Hall was married at Stratford-on-Avon to Shakspere’s
eldest daughter, Susanna. Stratford then contained about fifteen
hundred inhabitants. One hundred sixty-two years later, Garrick gave
his unsavory description of Stratford-on-Avon as “the most dirty,
unseemly, ill-paved, wretched-looking town in all Britain.” Cottages of
that day in Stratford consisted of mud walls and thatched roofs. “At
this period and for many generations afterwards the sanitary conditions
of the thoroughfares of Stratford-on-Avon were simply terrible.”
On February 10, 1616, Thomas Quiney, a vintner, and also an
accomplished scholar and penman, was married at Stratford church to
Judith, Shakspere’s younger daughter, who could neither read nor write.
The marriage ceremony took place without a license or proclaiming the
bans. For this breach of ecclesiastical procedure both the parties were
summoned to the court at Worcester and threatened with excommunication.
When the fortune hunter goes forth to woe, and is determined to win,
he is content to wade through reeking refuse and muckheaps to marry a
rich heiress and does not much care if her histrionic father by XXXIX
Elizabeth were a vagabond.
If “there is a soul of truth in things erroneous,” so there may be a
soul of truth in the creditableness of the Shakspere traditions, for
in them are revealed the environment in which they had their genesis,
and the character of the inventor or fabricator. All of the traditions
are comparatively recent or modern, and were made current by people
who were, with few exceptions, coarse and densely ignorant. These
apocryphal accounts serve to show also how little educated people knew,
or cared, about writing with literary or historical accuracy when
Shakspere was the subject. Unfortunately all of the traditions about
Shakspere are of a degrading character.
The poaching escapade of his having robbed a park is one of the
invented stories of fancy-mongers. There is very little likelihood
that the young husband, with a wife and three babies to support, would
voluntarily place himself in a position where he would have to flee
from Sir Thomas Lucy’s prosecution; thereby degrading the lowermost
rank of life by bringing disgrace upon himself, his wife and children,
while his parents in straitened circumstances were struggling to keep
the wolf from the door. The records show that Sir Thomas Lucy had no
park either at Charlecote or Fulbroke, still the Lucys of a later day
were not anxious to lose the honor of having spanked Shakspere for
poaching on the ancestral preserves.
England was called in those days “The toper’s paradise,” and tradition
informs us that Shakspere was one of the Bedford topers. However,
we should not infer from this that William Shakspere, a firm man of
business, was at any time a drunken sot. The only story recorded during
Shakspere’s life is contained in John Manningham’s note-book. It savors
strongly of the tavern, the diarist criminating Shakspere’s morals.
This entry was made on March 13, 1601, the reference being to player
Shakspere.
No wonder that such eminent votaries of Shakspere as Stevens, Hallam,
Dyce and Emerson are disappointed and perplexed, for, while the
record concerning the life of the player, money-lender, landowner,
play-broker, speculator and litigant are ample, they disclose nothing
of a literary character; but the pecuniary litigation evidence, growing
out of Shakspere’s devotion to money-getting in London and Stratford,
does unfold his true life and character. The records do not furnish a
single instance of friendship, kindness or generosity, but upon the
delinquent borrower of money he rigidly evoked the law, which gave a
generous advantage to the creditor, and its vile prison to the debtor.
In 1600 Shakspere brought action against John Clayton for seven pounds
and got judgment in his favor. He sued Philip Rogers, a neighbor in
Stratford Court, for one pound, fifteen shillings and six pence due
for malt sold, and two shillings loaned. In August, 1608, Shakspere
prosecuted John Addenbroke to recover a debt of six pounds. He
prosecuted this last suit for a couple of years until he got the
defendant into prison. The prisoner was bailed out by Horneby.
Addenbroke, running away, escaped from the clutches of his tormentor,
who then bore down on his security, Horneby.
“The pursuit of an impoverished man for the sake of imprisoning him,
and depriving him both of the power of paying his debts and supporting
his family, grate upon our feelings,” says Richard Grant White, “and,”
adds this eminent Shakspearean, “we hunger and we receive these husks,
we open our mouths for food and we break our teeth against these
stones.” We may be sure that there was left in the impoverished home
of John Addenbroke little more palatable than husks and stones, when
the father fled to escape from the clutches of his insistent creditor,
William Shakspere of Stratford.
The paltry suits he brought to recover debts do not tend to disclose
this Shakspere’s “radiant temperament,” or fit him to receive the
adjective, “gentle,” except in contumely for his claim to gentility. It
is not known that Shakspere ever gave hospitality to the necessities
of the poor of his native shire, for whom, it appears, there beat no
pulse of tenderness. A man of scanty sensibilities he must have been.
The poor working people of Stratford, we may be sure, shed no tear at
this Shakspere’s departure from the world.
We do not envy the man, who can regard these harsh pecuniary practices
in this Shakspere, as commendable traits of his worldly wisdom, for
he was shrewd in money matters, and could have invested his money in
London and Stratford so as not to have brought sorrow and distress upon
his poor neighbors. These matters are small in themselves, but they
suggest a good deal, for they bear witness to sorrow-stricken mothers,
hungry children and fathers in loathsome prisons, powerless to provide
food, warmth and light for the home. The diary, or note-book, of Philip
Henslowe, the theatrical manager and play-broker, shows that Henslowe
was himself a very penurious and grasping man, who, taking advantage
of starving play-makers’ necessities, became very wealthy. William
Shakspere, of Stratford-on-Avon, as a theatrical manager, became rich
also, but his note-book has not been preserved, so nothing is known
of his business methods in dealing with the poor play-makers; but the
literary antiquarians, by ransacking corporations’ records and other
public archives, have proven that Shakspere was very much such a man as
the old pawnbroker and play-broker, Philip Henslowe, of a rival house.
The biographers should record these facts, and not strive to shun
them, for the literary antiquaries have unearthed and brought them
forward, and they tell the true story of Shakspere’s life, though we
do not linger lovingly over them, for, like Hallam, “we as little feel
the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford,
was afterward an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired
to his native place in middle life, with the author of ‘Macbeth’ and
‘Lear,’” for the Stratford records are as barren of literary matter as
the lodgings in Silver street, London. Not a crumb for the literary
biographer in either place!
Professor Wallace has added another non-literary document in the matter
of Shakspere’s deposition in the case of Bellot vs. Mountjoy, which he
discovered in the public record office, but it in no way contributes to
a literary biography. The truth is that, with all their industry, the
antiquarians have in this regard not brought to light a single proven
fact to sustain the claim that this Shakespere was either the author of
poems or plays. This bit of new knowledge gives us a glimpse of this
William Shakspere as an evasive witness, having a conveniently short
memory. These depositions disclose his intermediation in the matter of
making two hearts happy, but not the faintest glimpse of the author
of poems or plays. When the claim of authorship is challenged, new
particulars of the life of Shakspere, such as this and others that have
been unearthed by antiquarians, whether in the public record office
or corporation archives, are alike worthless so far as establishing
the poet Shakspere’s identity. They fail to confirm the identity of
the actor Shakspere with the author of the plays and poems that are
associated with his name. There are no family traditions, no books,
manuscripts, or letters, addressed to him, or by him, to poet, peer
or peasant. The credible evidence supplied by contemporaneous, or
antiquarian, research do not identify the player and landowner with the
author of “Hamlet,” “Lear” and “Othello.”
Our belief in the pseudonymity of the author of the poems and
plays, called Shakespeare, is strengthened by the absence of verse
commemorative of concurrent events, such as the strivings of his
boldest countrymen in the great Elizabethan age. There is, from
his pen, neither word of cheer, nor sympathy, with the daring
and suffering warriors and adventurers of that time, although his
contemporaries versified eulogies to the heroes of those days for their
stirring deeds. There is, in the poems and plays, no elegiac lay in
memory of Elizabeth, “the glorious daughter of the illustrious Henry,”
as Robert Greene calls her, nor is there one line of mourning verse at
the death of Prince Henry, the noblest among the children of the king,
by a writer who was always a strenuous and consistent supporter of
prerogative against the conception of freedom. This is another evidence
of the secrecy maintained as to the authorship of the poems and plays.
We cannot discover a single laudatory poem or commendatory verse,
or a line of praise of any publication, or writer of his time. All
this is in contrast with his contemporaries, whose personalities are
identifiable with their literary work, and, so liberal of commendation
were they, that they literally showered commendatory verses on literary
works of merit, or those thought to have merit. Of these, thirty-five
were bestowed on Fletcher, a score or more on Beaumont, Chapman and
Ford, while Massinger received nineteen. Ben Jonson’s published works
contain thirty-seven pieces of commendation. His Roman tragedy,
“Sejanus,” was acclaimed by ten contemporary poets. In praise of his
comedy, “Volpone,” there are seven poems. The versified compliments
bestowed on him by his fellow craftsmen embrace many of the most
celebrated names antecedent to his death, which occurred in 1637. Early
in 1638 a collection of some thirty elegies were published under the
title of “Jonsonus Virbius,” or “The Memory of Ben Jonson,” in which
nearly all the leading poets of the day, except Milton, took part.
It must appear strange to the votaries of Shakspere that Jonson should
have received so many crowns of mourning verse, while for Shakspere
of Stratford-on-Avon, the reputed author of “Hamlet,” “Lear” and
“Macbeth,” there wailed no dirge. Not a single commendatory verse
was bestowed by a contemporary poet antecedent to his death, nor
was a single elegiac poem written of him in the year of his death,
1616. Already in that fatal year there had been mourning for Francis
Beaumont, who received immediate posthumous honors by many poets, in
memorial odes, sighing forth the requiem to his name in mournful elegy.
Eight and forty days after the death of Francis Beaumont, all that was
mortal of William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was buried in the
chancel of his parish church, in which, as part owner of the tithes and
consequently one of the lay rectors, he had the right of interment.
Over the spot where his body was laid, there was placed a slab with the
inscription imprecating a curse on the man who should disturb his bones,
“Good friend, for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust enclosed here
Bless be ye man yt spares this stown
And curst be he yt moves my bones.”
This rude, absurd and ignorant epitaph has given much trouble to
writers on the subject of Shakespeare. The usual explanation of the
threat is given that the Puritans thought that the church had been
profaned by the ashes of an actor. These ignorant words could not have
been written as a deterrent to the Puritans, for they did not belong to
the ignorant section of the population, but to the middle class, nor
would they have been deterred from invading Shakspere’s tomb by the
superstitious fear of a threat contained in doggerel verse cut on the
tomb. There was not the least danger that the actor’s grave would be
violated by the Puritans, for Dr. John Hall, Shakspere’s son-in-law,
was a Puritan. If he had had this warning epitaph cut on the tomb it
would have been written in scholarly English. The doggerel lines, rude
as they are, satisfied, doubtless, the widow and daughters, themselves
ignorant. The most pleasing epitaph, it seems to us, would have been
one expressing a known wish of their “dear departed” in words, when
read by others, that would best suit their understandings, for the
Shakspere family were uncultured. They could not read the stupid
epitaph on his tomb, and so their hearts were not saddened as they
gazed upon an inscription of barbaric rudeness.
Some slight circumstance may have given rise to William Hall’s
conjecture, during his visit to Stratford, in 1694, that Shakspere
authored his own epitaph, and that these lines were written to suit
the capacity of clerks and sextons, who, according to Hall, in course
of time would have removed Shakspere’s dust to the bone house. This is
not improbable from the point of view taken by those who believe that
Shakspere of Stratford wrote the doggerel epigram on John Combe, money
lender, and the vituperative ballad abusing the gentleman whose park he
(Shakspere) robbed, for the three compositions are of the same grade
of ignorant nonsense. But we do know that had the author of “Hamlet”
written his own epitaph, it would have been as deathless as the one
over the Countess of Pembroke:
“Underneath this sable hearst
Lies the subject of all verse
Sidney’s sister—Pembroke’s mother
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learned and fair and good as she
Time shall throw a dart at thee.”
It should be borne in mind that clerks and sextons were not the only
ignorant people in and about Stratford. There were some that had a
grievance, or thought they had, which parish clerks and sextons had
not. We have reference to the poor debtors, who regarded Shakspere of
Stratford as a grasping usurer, hard upon poor people in his power, so
the curse inscribed slab was placed over Shakspere’s grave as a shield
to protect his ashes from those who would not hesitate to invade the
tomb of one whose memory had become hateful to them. If in pressing
his claim the money lender elects to be a tormentor, his name will be
execrated while living and a hateful memory when dead.
One thing is evidenced by the maledictory epitaph; that the one who
wrote it was afraid the tomb might be violated by the removal of the
bones to the charnel house. Who were they that would most likely
invade Shakspere’s tomb? Obviously those, we repeat, who regarded him
as a hard-hearted man, who pressed poor debtors with all the rigor of
the law to enforce the payment of petty sums; the man who had shown
himself supremely selfish in an attempt to enclose the Stratford common
field; the man who would be made “a gentleman” by misrepresentation,
fraud and falsehood. The foregoing facts, and the legal and municipal
evidence bound up in dusty records, a bogus coat-of-arms, and a rude
epitaph, tell the true story of the life of William Shakspere of
Stratford-on-Avon.
There is no record of any pretended living likeness of Shakspere better
representing him than the Stratford bust. This bust is erected on the
north side of the chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon.
On the floor of the chancel in front of the monument are the graves of
Shakspere and his family. We have no means of ascertaining when the
monument and bust were erected. The first folio edition of his reputed
works was published in 1623. It contained words from Leonard Diggs
prefatory lines “and time dissolves thy Stratford moniment,” monument
being used interchangeably with tomb; but these words do not prove that
the bust was set up before 1623. His image was rudely cut, sensual and
clownish in appearance.
There is not a tittle of evidence adduced to show that a knowledge
of Shakspere’s putative authorship of poems and plays was current
at Stratford when the first folio edition of his reputed works
was published in 1623. The records attest that Shakspere’s fame
reputatively as writer is posterior to this event. How strange it
must seem to those who claim for Shakspere an established reputation
as poet and dramatist of repute anterior to the first folio edition in
1623, that Dr. Hall, himself an author and most advantaged of all the
heirs by Shakspere’s death, should fail to mention his father-in-law in
his “cure-book” or observations! The earliest dated cure is 1617, the
year following Shakspere’s death, but there are undated ones. In “Obs.
XIX.” Hall mentions without date an illness of his wife, Mrs. Hall;
and we find him making a note long afterwards in reference to his only
daughter, Elizabeth, who was saved by her father’s skill and patience.
“Thus was she delivered from death and deadly diseases and was well
for many years.” The illness of Drayton is recorded without date in
“Obs. XXII.,” with its wee bit of a literary biography, and he is
referred to as “Mr. Drayton, an excellent poet.” Had Shakspere received
a like mention as a poet or writer by one who knew him so intimately,
what a delicious morsel it would have been to all those who have
followed the literary antiquarian through the dreary barren waste of
Shakespearean research. We have found nothing but husks, and these,
eulogists of Shakespeare—Hallam, Stevens and Emerson—refused to crunch!
For nearly three centuries the Stratford archives have contained all
matters concerning Shakspere’s life and character, and have given us
full knowledge of the man; nothing has been lost; but of his alleged
literary life, there is not a crumb, no family traditions, no books,
no manuscripts, no letters, no commendatory verses, plays, masques or
anthology.
The biographers of Shakespeare have none of the material out of
which poets and dramatists are made, but only those facts which are
congruous with money lenders, land speculators, play-brokers and
actors; also, a good assortment of apocryphal stores and gossipy yarns
which have become traditional currency. According to Mark Twain there
is something more. He says, “When we find a vague file of chipmunk
tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village we know that
Hercules has been along.” Again he proceeds, “The bust, too, there in
the Stratford church, the precious bust, the calm bust with a dandy
mustache, and the putty face unseamed with care—that face which has
looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty
years, and will look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more with
the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.”
Not having found the slightest trace of Shakespeare in 1592 as writer
of plays, or as adapter or elaborator of other men’s work, his
advent into literature must have been at a later date, if at all. In
1593 “Venus and Adonis” appeared in print with a dedication to Lord
Southampton, and signed “William Shakespeare.” In 1594 appeared another
poem, “Lucrece,” also with a dedication to Lord Southampton. The
poems bore no name of an author on the title page. Here is literary
tangibility, but does it establish the identity of their author, or
attest the responsibility of the young Stratford man for the poems
which were published under the name of Shakespeare? This was the first
mention of the now famous name? Was it a pseudonym, or was it the
true name of the author of the poem? The enthusiastic reception of
the poems awakens a suspicion when we learn that their popularity was
due to a belief in their lasciviency; and that the dedicatee was the
rakish Henry Wriothesley, third Earle of Southampton; and, furthermore,
that the name of the dedicator, “Shakespeare,” was one of a class of
nicknames which in 1593 still retained in some measure that which was
derisive in them. In 1487 a student at Oxford changed his own name of
“Shakespeare” into “Saunders,” because he considered it too expressive
and distinctive of rough manners, and significant of degradation, and
as such was unwilling to aid in its hereditary transmission, when all
that is derisive in the name Shakspere remained fixed and fossilized
in the old meaning. In those unlettered times, lascivious persons
were sometimes branded, so to speak, with the nickname “Shakspere.”
Primarily, the name has no militant signification. There is no such
personal name in any known list of British surnames. They are of the
parvenu class without ancestry.
Mr. Sidney Lee admits that the Earle of Southampton is the only patron
of Shakspere that is known to biographical research (p. 126). By
what fact, or facts, may we ask, is the authenticity of the Earl’s
friendship or patronage attested? Southampton was the standing patron
of all the poets, the stock-dedicatee of those days. It was the fashion
of the times to pester him with dedications by poets grave and gay.
They were after those five or six pounds, which custom constrained
his Lordship to yield for having his name enshrined in poet’s lines.
All the poets of that age were dependents, and there is, with few
exceptions, the same display of pharisaic sycophancy, greediness, and
on the part of dedicatee an inordinate desire for adulation. Every
student of Elizabethan literature and history should know that the
Southampton-Shakspere friendship cannot be traced biographically.
The Earl of Southampton was a voluminous correspondent, but did not
bear witness to his friendship for Shakspere. A scrutinous inspection
of Southampton’s papers contained in the archives of his family,
descendants and contemporaries, yields nothing in support of the
contention that Southampton’s friendship, or patronage, is known
to biographical research, and it is as attestative as that other
apocryphal story preserved by Rowe “which is fast disappearing from
Shakespearean biography.”
“There is one instance so singular in its munificence that if we
had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William
Davenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs,
we should not venture to have inserted that my Lord Southampton at
one time gave him (Shakspere) a thousand pounds, to enable him to go
through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.” (Davenant
was the man who gave out that he was the natural son of Shakspere).
A present of a thousand pounds which equals at least twenty-five
thousand dollars to-day! The magnitude of the gift discredits the story
nevertheless, the startled Rowe, is the first to make it current, but
does not give his readers the ground for his assurance. Be it what it
may, he could hardly satisfy the modern reader that this man, a son,
who insinuatingly defiles the name and fair fame of his own mother,
is a credible witness, or that such a man is “fit for wolf bait.”
What purchase did Shakspere “go through with?” Not New Place in 1597,
for the purchase money was only sixty pounds. Neither could it have
been the Stratford estate in 1602, for at that time Southampton was a
prisoner in the Tower. In fact, the whole sum expended by Shakspere did
not amount to a thousand pounds in all. The truth is, the social Rules
of Tudor and Jacobin times did not permit peer and peasant to live on
terms of mutual good feeling. Almost all the poets in hope of gain,
penned adulatory sonnets in praise of Lord Southampton. In those times
they had a summary way of dealing with humble citizens. Jonson, Chapman
and Marston, were imprisoned for having displeased the king by a jest
in “Eastward Ho,”—
“A nobleman to vindicate rank brought an action in the star-chamber
against a person, who had orally addressed him as ‘Goodman Morley.’”
The literati of those days found in scholastic learning, neither
potency, nor promise, to abrogate class distinctions by giving a
passport to high attainment in literature, poetry and philosophy. Ben
Jonson says, “The time was when men were had in price for learning, now
letters only make men vile. He is upbraidingly called a poet as if it
were a contemptible nickname.”
Mr. Lee tells us, that the state papers and business correspondence
of Southampton were enlivened by references to his literary interest
and his sympathy with the birth of English Drama. (P. 316.). “However,
Mr. Lee has extracted no reference to Shakspere from the paper.”
Southampton’s zest for the theatre is based on the statement contained
in the “Sidney Papers” that he and his friend Lord Rutland “come not
to court but pass away the time merely in going to plays every day.”
When a new library for his old college, St. Johns, was in course
of construction, Southampton collected books to the value of three
hundred and sixty pounds wherewith to furnish it. Southampton’s
literary tastes and sympathy with the drama cannot be drawn from
his gift to the library, for it consisted largely of legends of the
saints and mediaeval chronicles. When and where did William Shakspere
acknowledge his obligations to the only patron of the player? According
to Mr. Lee, who is known to biographical research, not one of the
Shakespearean plays was dedicated to Southampton. The name “Shakspere”
is conspicuously absent from among the distinguished writers of his
day, who in panegyrical speech and song acclaimed Southampton’s release
from prison in 1602.
Francis Meres, a pedantic schoolmaster and Divinity student, had his
“Palladis Tamia” registered September 7, 1598, and published shortly
after. Meres in his “Tamia” writes of the mellifluous and honey-tongued
Shakespeare, and his “Venus and Adonis,” and his “Lucrece,” and his
sugared sonnets to his friends, and enumerates twelve plays—though
at the time three only had been published with his name. Like others
of his contemporaries, Meres writes tritely of the honey-tongued,
the honey sweet and the sugared. With him, everything written is
mellifluent, but he says nothing of the man. In fact, no contemporary
left on record any definite impression of Shakespeare’s personal
character. Meres asserted that Ben Jonson was one of our best poets
for tragedy, when at that time (1598) Jonson had not written a single
tragedy, and but one comedy.
Before, we transcribe, in part, “Wits Treasury” by Francis Meres, we
ask the readers’ pardon for this abuse of their patience, for Meres
merely repeats names of Greek, Latin and modern play-makers. “As
these tragic poets flourished in Greece—Aeschylus, Euripides” (in all
seventeen are named and these among the Latin, Accius, M. Attilus,
Seneca and several others). “So these are our best for tragedy; the
Lord Buckhurst, Dr. Leg of Cambridge, Dr. Eds of Oxford, Master Edward
Ferris—the author of the ‘Merriour for Magistrates,’—Marlowe, Peele,
Watson, Kyd, Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, Decker and Benjamin Jonson.
The best poets for comedy”—(Meres proceeds with his enumeration, naming
sixteen Greeks and ten Latins, twenty-six in all.) “So the best for
comedy amongst us be Edward, Earl of Oxford; Dr. Lager of Oxford;
Master Rowley; Master Edwards: eloquent and wittie John Lilly; Lodge;
Gascoyne; Greene; Shakespeare; Thomas Nash; Thomas Heywood; Anthony
Munday. Our best plotters: Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathaway and Henry
Chettle.”
Meres does not seem to have considered it necessary to read before
reviewing. Had he done so he would not have placed the name of Lord
Buckhurst first in his list, giving primacy to this mediocrist, and
the author of “Romeo and Juliet,” whoever he was, ninth in his list of
dramatic poets which he considered best among the English for tragedy;
nor, would he have named for second place on the list Dr. Leg of
Cambridge, instead of the author of “The Jew of Malta” (Marlowe). What
has Dr. Eds of Oxford, whose name stands third in the Meres list,
written that he should have been mentioned in the same connection with
the author of “The White Devil” (Webster) or the author of that classic
“The Conspiracy,” and “The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron” (Chapman)?
Why this commingling of such insignificant writers as Edward, Earl of
Oxford, Lord Buckhurst, Drs. Lager and Leg, with the giant brotherhood?
The fact is, so far as attesting the responsibility of anybody or
anything, the Meres averments are as worthless as “a musty nut.” What
was said of John Aubrey is also true of Francis Meres, “His brain was
like a hasty pudding whose memory and judgment and fancy were all
stirred together.” Yet this is the writer that many Shakespearean
commentators confidently appeal to, in part, and whose testimony, in
part, they, with equal unanimity impeach.
The slight mention of Shakespeare by the “judicious Webster,” as Hazlet
calls him, comprehends no more than that Shakspere was one of the hack
writers of the day: “detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance.” For
mine own part I have ever truly cherished “my good opinion of other
men’s worthy labours, especially of that full and heightened style of
Master Chapman, the laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson,
the no less worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Master
Beaumont and Fletcher, and lastly (without wrong last to be named) the
right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker
and Master Heywood.”
These words written by the third greatest of English tragic poets
are very significant, for Webster wrote for the theatre to which
Shakspere, the player and play-broker, belonged; yet industry is
the only distinguishing mark in Shakspere which he must share with
Dekker, and Heywood, hack writers for the stage. Dekker’s many plays
attest his copious industry, when we remember that this writer spent
three years in prison, and Heywood’s industry cannot be doubted for
he claimed to have had a hand and main finger in two hundred twenty
plays. Copious industry signifies to the reader the existence of an
author not utterly unknown, it is true, but it fails to identify him
as the author of the immortal plays. What shall we say then? Were the
works called Shakespeare’s but little known? Shakspere’s biographers
say that they were the talk of the town. If that is true, then the
writer who was commended for industry was not regarded by Webster
as the author of “Hamlet,” “Lear,” and “Macbeth,” for Shakespeare’s
distinctive characteristics are not individualized from those of Dekker
and Heywood, while those of Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher are.
In the last four named is perfect interlacement of personality with
authorship, but not so in Shakespeare.
John Webster’s judgment of his fellow craftsman was just, “I have
ever truly cherished my good opinion of other men’s worthy labours.”
Webster never conceals or misrepresents the truth by giving evasive, or
equivocating, evidence. He reveals the judicial trait of his character
in placing Chapman first among the poets then living, assuming that
the name Shakespeare was used by printers and publishers, if not by
writers, as an impersonal name, masking the name of a true poet.
Sidney, Marlowe and Spencer had then descended to the tomb.
George Chapman’s name has not received due prominence in the modern
hand-books of English literature, but he was a bright torch and
numbered by his own generation, among the greatest of its poets. He,
whom Webster calls the “Prince’s Sweet Homer” and “My Friend,” was not
unduly honored by the “full and heightened style” which Webster makes
characteristic of him. “Our Homer-Lucan,” as he was gracefully termed
by Daniel, is a poet much admired by great men. Edmund Waller never
could read Chapman’s Homer without a degree of transport. Barry is
reputed to have said that when he went into the street after reading
it, men seemed ten feet high; Coleridge declares Chapman’s version of
the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the “Faerie Queene.” He
also declares that Chapman in his moral heroic verse stands above Ben
Jonson. “There is more dignity, more lustre, and equal strength.”
Translation was in those times a new force in literature. By the
indomitable force and fire of genius Chapman has made Homer himself
speak English by translating the genius, and by having chosen that
which prefers the spirit to the letter. It is in his translation that
the “Iliad” is best read as an English book. Out of it there comes a
whiff of the breath of Homer. It is as massive and majestic as Homer
himself would have written in the land of the virgin queen. “He has
added,” says Swinburne, “a monument to the temple which contains the
glories of his native language, the godlike images, and the costly
relics of the past.” “The earnestness and passion,” says Charles Lamb,
“which he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible
to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal for the
honor of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew
bigotry with which Milton, as if personating one of the zealots of the
old law, clothed himself when he sat down to paint the acts of Samson
against the uncircumcised.” It was the reflected Hellenic radiance of
the grand old Chapman version to the lifted eyes of Keats flooded with
the “light which never was on sea or shore.” This younger poet sang:
“Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen,
Round many western islands have I been,
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold;
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.”
The preface to Webster’s tragedy, “The White Devil,” which contains
a slight mention of Shakespeare, was printed in 1612, after all the
immortal plays were written and their reputed author had returned to
Stratford, probably in 1611, in his forty-seventh year, where he lived
idly for five years before his death. John Webster possessed a critical
faculty and an independent judgment, but the way he makes mention of
Shakespeare shows that he knew nothing about the individual man, or
the work, called Shakespeare.
The generous reference to “The laboured and understanding works of
Master Jonson” gives a clear idea of the main characteristics of the
work of Jonson, who, not having reached the fruition of his renown in
1611, but in the after time, came into Dryden’s view as “The greatest
man of the last age, the most learned and judicious writer any theatre
ever had.” John Webster writes of “the no less worthy composures of
Beaumont and Fletcher” then in the morning of life. They present an
admirable model for purity of vocabulary and simplicity of expression
and were of “loudest fame.” “Two of Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s plays
were acted to one of Shakespeare’s, or Ben Jonson’s,” in Dryden’s time.
There is strong presumptive proof that printers and publishers in
Elizabethan and Jacobin times were in the habit of selecting names or
titles that would best sell their books. The most popular books or
best sellers they printed were books of songs, love-tales, comedies and
sonnets of the amorous, scented kind, and it mattered not to publishers
if the name printed on the title-page was a personal name, or one
impersonal. Title-pages were not even presumptive proof of authorship
in the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. The printers chose to
market their publications under the most favorable conditions, and
some writers chose the incognizable name “Shakespeare” which had been
attached to the voluptuous poem “Venus and Adonis.” This was published
by Richard Field, in whose name it had been entered in the Stationer’s
Register in 1593. There was no name of an author on the title-page, but
the dedication was to the Earl of Southampton and was signed “William
Shakespeare.” This was the first appearance of the name “Shakespeare”
in literature, being the non-de-plume, doubtless, of the writer who
gave this erotic poem to the world—“The first heir of my invention.”
Not finding “Shakespeare” in the anthology of his day, the most
natural inference would be that all those who wrote under the name
“Shakespeare” wrote incognito. We know that Marlowe, Beaumont, Greene,
Drayton and many writers of that age wrote anonymously for the
Elizabethan stage. Many of the anonymous writings have been retrieved;
much, doubtless, remains still to be reclaimed from the siftings of
what are named Early Comedy, Early History, and Pre-Shakespearean
Group of plays. Mr. Spedding had the good fortune to be the first to
demonstrate the theory of a divided authorship of “Henry VIII.,” to
reclaim for Fletcher “Wolsey’s Farewell to all his Greatness.” Thirteen
out of the seventeen scenes of “Henry the Eighth” are attributed by Mr.
Lee (P. 212) to Fletcher. A majority of the best critics now agree with
Miss Jane Lee, in the assignment of the second and third part of Henry
VI. to Marlowe, Greene and Peele.
The difficulty of identifying Shakespeare, the author poet, with
the young man who came up from Stratford, has induced Shakespearean
scholars to question the unity of authorship. Mr. Swinburne tells us
that no scholar believes in the single authorship of “Andronicus.”
Mr. Lee admits that Shakespeare drew largely on the “Hamlet,” which
he has attributed to Kyd (P. 182). “It is scarcely possible,” says
Mr. Marshall in the “Irving Shakespeare,” “to maintain that the play
‘(Hamlet)’ referred to as well known in 1589, could have been by
Shakspere—that is—by the young actor from Stratford. Surely not. We
see the question of the unity of the author and authorship involves
the question of his identity.” It is evident that the author poet,
whoever he was, had, in his time of initiation, “purloyned plumes” from
Marlowe, Kyd and Greene, and, when nearing the close of his literary
career, according to Prof. A. H. Thorndike, he was a close imitator of
John Fletcher—not so much an innovator as an adapter.
What do we know of Shakespeare, the author poet, “The Man in a Mask?”
We know nothing, absolutely nothing. No reputed play by Shakespeare was
published before 1597, and none bore the name Shakespeare on the title
page till 1598. Lodge, in his prose satire “Wits Misery,” dated 1596,
enumerates the wits of the time. Shakspere is not mentioned. Dr. Peter
Heylys was born in 1600, and died in 1662, thus being sixteen years old
when Shakspere, the player died. In reckoning up the famous dramatic
poets of England he omits Shakspere. Ben Jonson, in the catalogue
of writers, also omits Shakspere, and at a later date, writing on
the instruction of youth and the best authors, he forgets all about
Shakspere. Philip Henslow, the old play-broker, also in writing his
notebook during the twelve years beginning in February, 1591, does not
even mention Shakspere. Milton’s poem on Shakespeare (1630) was not
published in his works in 1645. This epitaph was prefixed to the folio
edition of Shakespeare (1632), but without Milton’s name. It is the
first of his reputed poems that was published. Its pedigree was not at
all satisfactory. Milton, having been misled by Ben Jonson’s lines on
Shakespeare, “And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” writes
of
“Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,
Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”
Milton’s acquaintance with Shakespeare verse must have been very
meager, for had he read “Venus and Adonis,” so classic and formal,
he would agree with Walter Savage Lander that “No poet was ever less
a warbler of woodnotes wild.” It was never said in the original
authorities that a Shakespeare play, or one by Shakspere, was played
between 1594 and 1614. There were published in quarto twenty-three
plays in Shakespeare’s name—twelve of which are not now accepted—and
nine without his name. The folio (1623) is the sole original authority
for seventeen plays, but five writers—four of them very inferior
men—refer to Shakespeare, antecedent to the folio of 1623.
Search as we may, we fail to find the play-actor in affiliation
with poets or scholars. How unlike the literary men of that age;
for instance, George Chapman, who had been called the “blank of his
age,” and not without reason for, in all that pertains to the poet’s
personal history, absolutely nothing is known in regard to his family,
and very little of his own private life. Much, however, is known
concerning Chapman’s personal authorship of poems and plays for the
list of passages extracted from his poems in “England’s Parnassus”
or the “Choicest Flowers of Our Modern Poets” contains no less than
eighty-one. At the time of this publication (1600), he had published
but two plays and three poems. “The proud full sail of his great verse”
(Chapman’s Homer) had not at this time been unfurled.
At the time, this first English anthology was compiled and published,
thirteen of the Shakespeare plays and two poems had been issued.
Nevertheless Shakespeare does not figure in the anthology of his day.
Why? The play-actor, William Shakspere, in his life time was not
publicly credited with the personal authorship of the plays and poems
called Shakespeare’s, except possibly by three or four poeticules,
Bomfield, Freeman, Meres, and Weaver, who followed each other in the
iteration and reiteration of the same insipid and affected compliments,
not one of them implying a personal acquaintance with the author. Some
few persons may have believed that the player and play-wright were one
and the same person, and were deceived into so believing. This much
we do know, that the player Shakspere never openly sanctioned the
identification, although he may have been accessory to the deception.
It should be borne in mind also that no poet was remembered in
Shakspere’s will, as were the actors.
Many writers of that age were communistic in the use of the name
“Shakespeare” as a descriptive title, very much like the Italians’
pantomime called “Silverspear,” standing for the collocuted works of
not one, but several play-makers. Sir Thomas Brown complained that
his name was being used to float books that he never wrote. In the
list before us there are forty-nine plays which were published with
Shakespeare’s name. Doubtless there were many others: not one in fifty
of the dramas of this period, according to Hallowell-Philips, having
descended to modern times. Many writers of that age wrote anonymously
and pseudonymously. Edmund Spencer, author of “The Shepherd’s
Calendar” remained incognito for seven years. Eight years after this
work appeared George Whitstone ascribed it to Philip Sidney and a
cotemporary writer, mistaking Spencer’s masking name for the author
of the works. Spencer committed “The Faerie Queen” to the press after
nine years. Only four of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays were published
in Fletcher’s lifetime and none of them bore Beaumont’s name. Fletcher
survived his partner nine years. Robert Burton, author of “The Anatomy
of Melancholy,” maintained his incognito for a time, he avers, because
it gave him greater freedom. Jean Baptiste Poquelin preferred to be
known as Molière. Francais-Marie Aronet won enduring fame as Voltaire.
Sir Walter Scott maintained his incognito as the great unknown for
years like “Junius,” “whose secret was intrusted to no one and was
never to be revealed.” Sir Walter Scott preserved his secret until
driven to the brink of financial destruction. Drayton also had written
under the pseudonym of Rowland. Who can doubt that the author of
“Hamlet,” “Lear” and “Macbeth,” chose to sheath his private life and
personality as a man of letters in an impenetrable incognito—“the
nothingness of a name.”
Of the thirty-seven plays assigned by the folio of 1623, not one had
received the acknowledgment of their reputed author (Shakespeare).
Not a single line in verse or prose assented to for comparison and
identification, and in the absence of credible evidence of his
authorship of certain poems, there can be no authoritative sanction of
the assignment.
No person writing on the subject of Shakespeare can write a literary
life of the individual man, for player Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon
does not offer a single point of correspondence to the activities of
a literary man or scholar. The fantastical critics profess to read
the story of the author’s life in his works. This is an absurdity,
for dramatic art is mainly character creation and cannot be made to
disclose a knowledge of his private life. The artist is an observer
and paints the thing seen. He, himself, is not the thing which he
depicts but he gives the character as it is. In the opinion of the
present writer it is a waste of time to attempt to identify Shakspere,
the play-actor, with any one of the dramatic personages contained in
the plays called Shakespeare’s.
Forty-six years after the death of William Shakspere of Stratford,
Thomas Fuller in his “Worthies,” published posthumously in 1662, wrote:
“Many were the wit-combats between him and Ben Jonson, which two I
behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war.”
Fuller being born in 1608, was only eight years old when
player-Shakspere died, and but two when he quitted London. If this
precocious youngster beheld the “wit-combats” of the two, he could only
have beheld them as he lay “mewling and puking in his nurse’s arms.”
VI.
We have in conclusion decided to focus the interest of the reader
chiefly in the attestation of Ben Jonson for the works which were
associated with the name of William Shakspere of Stratford. Ben Jonson
presents a contrast to William Shakspere, in almost every respect, so
striking as to awaken an irrepressible desire to compare the mass of
proven facts adduced from authentic records. Being born in the city
of London in the early part of 1574, he was ten years younger than
Shakspere. He was the son of a clergyman. In spite of poverty he was
educated at Westminster School, William Camden being his tutor, to whom
Jonson refers as “Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe all that I
am—in arts all that I owe.” A recent writer on the subject of Jonson
says, “No other of Shakspere’s contemporaries has left so splendid and
so enthusiastic an eulogy of the master.” In this statement all must
concur, for Jonson is the only writer of eminence among Shakspere’s
cotemporaries, who has left words of praise or censure, or have taken
any notice, either of Shakspere, or of the works which bear his name;
notwithstanding, it was the custom among literary men of the day to
belaud their friends in verse or prose, Shakspere in his lifetime was
honored with no mark of Ben Jonson’s admiration. Not a single line
of commendatory verse was addressed to Shakspere by Jonson, although
this promiscuous panegyrist was, with characteristic extravagance, so
indiscriminate in sympathy or patronage. What shrimp was there among
hack writers who could not gain a panegyric from his generous tongue?
For five and twenty years Shakspere and Jonson jostled in London
streets, yet there was no sign or word of recognition as they passed
each other by. Writers on the subject of Jonson and Shakspere say
that we have abundant tradition of their close friendship. There are
no credible traditions. The manufactured traditions, so conspicuous in
books called, “A Life of William Shakspere,” are the dreams of fancy,
fraud and fiction, used to fill the lacuna, or gap, in the life of the
Stratford man.
The proven facts of William Shakspere’s life are facts unassociated
with authorcraft—facts that prove the isolation and divorcement of
player and poet. The proven facts of Ben Jonson’s life are facts
interlacing man and poet. Almost every incident in his life reveals his
personal affection, or bitter dislike, for his fellow craftsmen, always
ready for a quarrel, arrogant, vain, boastful and vulgar. There is
much truth in Dekker’s charge, “’Tis thy fashion to flirt ink in every
man’s face and then crawl into his bosom.” He had many quarrels with
Marston, beat him, and wrote his “Poetaster” on him. He was federated
in a comedy “(Eastward Ho)” with Chapman, and was sent to prison for
libeling the Scottish nobility. Ben Jonson’s personality and literary
work are inseparable. Drunk or sober, few have served learning with
so much pertinacity, and fewer still, have so successfully challenged
admiration even from literary rivals, with whom at times he was most
bitterly hostile, and at other times, indisputably open-handed and
jovial.
Ben Jonson had a literary environment always for there is perfect
interlacement of man and craft. He became one of the most prolific
writers of his age occupying among the men of his day a position of
literary supremacy. “In the forty years of his literary career he
collected a library so extensive that Gifford doubted whether any
library in England was so rich in scarce and valuable books.” From the
pages of Isaac De Israeli we read, “No poet has left behind him so many
testimonials of personal fondness by inscriptions and addresses in the
copies of his works which he presented to his friends.” But of all
these, as strange as it must seem to the votaries of Shakspere, not a
single copy of Jonson’s works is brought forward to bear witness of his
personal regard and admiration for Shakspere, and we may add that there
is no testimonial by Shakspere of his regard and personal fondness for
Ben Jonson, although many of the literary antiquaries have unearthed
in their researches facts or new discoveries, which they have brought
forward as new particulars of the life of William Shakspere. These,
if not incompatible with authorship, are surely divorcing Shakspere,
the actor, from Shakespeare, the author poet. They but deepen the
mystery that surrounds the personality of the author of the immortal
plays—“The shadow of a mighty name.” At the same time they disclose the
true character of Shakspere the actor, money-lender, land-owner and
litigant, which is affirmative of John Bright’s opinion that “any man
who believes that William Shakspere of Stratford wrote ‘Hamlet’ or
‘Lear’ is a fool.”
The student reader will perceive that Jonson’s verse does not agree
with his prose, and that his “Ode to Shakespeare,” which Dryden called
“an insolent, sparing, and invidious, panegyric,” was not the final
word of comment which is contained in Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries”—a
prose reference in disparagement of Shakespeare, the writer, while
laudatory of the man whom he may have believed was identifiable with
the play-wright. We believe he was mistaken in so believing. Ben Jonson
was vulnerable most in his character as a witness. The reader must
therefore be indulgent if we make some remarks upon the credibility and
competency of this witness. The elder writers on the subject of Jonson
and Shakespeare before Gifford’s time (1757-1826) were always harping
on Ben Jonson’s jealousy and envy of Shakespeare. Since Gifford’s day
the antiquary has been abroad in the land without having discovered
anything of a literary life of Shakespeare. As if by general consent,
all recent writers on the subject regard Jonson’s attestation, or his
metrical tribute, to the “memory of my beloved author, Mr. William
Shakespeare, an essential element in Shakespeare’s biography as the
title deed of authorship.” Having made him their star witness, we shall
hear no more of Jonson’s jealousy and envy of Shakespeare.
A final consideration will show how little Ben Jonson is to be relied
on “as attesting the responsibility of the Stratford player for the
works which are associated with his name.” There is not a word or
sentence in all Jonson’s writings which bear witness to Shakspere
as a writer of plays or poems anterior to the Stratford player’s
death, as all reference to Shakespeare in Jonson’s verse and prose
are posterior to this event. They refute each other and discredit the
writer. “Conversations of Ben Jonson with William Drummond” are of
great literary and historical value and are important too, as bearing
on Ben Jonson’s competency and credibleness as a witness. The Drummond
notes were first printed by Mr. David Lang, who discovered them among
the manuscripts of Sir Robert Sibbald, a well known antiquarian.
“Conversations,” as we have it on the evidence of Drummond, is
in accord with almost every contemporary reference to Jonson and
internally they agree with Ben Jonson’s own “Discoveries.” There
should be no controversy in regard to the justice of the Scottish
poet’s criticism. From the notes recorded by Drummond we learn, “He
(Ben Jonson) is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and
scorner of others, especially after drink which is one of the elements
in which he liveth.” The conversations recorded by Drummond took place
when Jonson visited him at Hawthornden in 1618-19 and disclose the
fact that “Rare Ben” was a vulgar, boastful, tipsy backbiter, who
black-guarded many of his fellow craftsmen. The last circumstance
recorded of Ben Jonson is where reference is made to his display
of self-worship at the expense of others. In a letter dated from
Westminster April 5, 1636, James Howell describes a Solem supper given
by Jonson at which he and Thomas Carew were present, when Ben seems to
have drenched himself with his favorite canary wine. Howell writes,
“I was invited yesternight to a Solem supper by B. J. whom you deeply
remember. There was good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and
jovial welcome. One thing intervened which almost spoiled the relish of
the rest. Ben began to engross all the discourse to vapour extremely
of himself and by vilifying others to magnify his own muse. Thomas
Carew buzzed me in the ear that Ben had barreled up a great deal of
knowledge, yet seems he had not read the ‘Ethiques’ which, among other
precepts of morality, forbid self commendation. But for my part I am
content to dispense with this Roman infirmity of B’s now that time has
snowed upon his pricranium.”
The reader is not unmindful that the language of Ben Jonson is
sometimes grossly opprobrious, sometimes basely adulatory, while
his laudatory verses on Shakespeare, Silvester, Beaumont and other
cotemporary writers, are in striking contrast by the discrepancy of
testimony disclosed by his prose works and conversations. In the
memorial verses Jonson tells us Shakespeare stood alone—“Alone for
the comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome sent forth
or since did from their ashes come.” The strictest scrutiny, however,
into the life and works of Ben Jonson fails to denote his actual
acquaintance with the works of the greatest genius of our world. What
became of his enthusiastic eulogy of Shakespeare, when “from my house
in the Black-Friars this 11th day of February, 1607” Ben Jonson writes
his dedication—“Volpone” to “The Two Famous Universities,” which should
have disclosed his close friendship with, and admiration for, William
Shakespeare, for the great dramatist was then in the zenith of his
power. The dedication of “Volpone” was written nine years before the
death of William Shakspere, the player, when Jonson declared “I shall
raise the despised head of poetry again and stripping her out of those
rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form.”
It should be remembered, that at the time of this sweeping condemnation
of what he terms dramatic or stage-poetry, thirty-one of the thirty-six
of the immortal Shakespearean plays were then written. All of the very
greatest—“Hamlet,” “Lear,” “Macbeth”—were, in Ben Jonson’s estimation
in 1607, “rotten and base rags.” While in 1623 in the “Memorial Verses”
he tells us that their reputed author was the “soul of the age.” “It
is a legal maxim that a witness who swears for both sides swears for
neither, and a rule of common law no less than common sense that his
evidence must be ruled out.” Ben Jonson’s egotism would, of course,
preclude a just judgment of the work of his fellow craftsman. He felt
that his own writings were immeasurably superior. Did he ever read
the so-called Shakspere plays before he wrote the “Ode to the Memory
of my Beloved The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath
Left Us” for the syndicate of printers? For the affirmative of the
proposition there is not the faintest presumption of probable evidence.
Jonson often became the generous panegyrist of poets whose writings in
all probability he never had read. He took pleasure in commending in
verse the works of men not worthy of his notice, and in lauding and
patronizing juvenile mediocrity and poeticules of the gutter-snipe
order. In his prefatory remarks to the reader in “Sejanus” there is the
same display of excess of commendation. Ben Jonson writes, “Lastly I
would inform you that this book in all numbers is not the same with
that which was acted on the public stage wherein a second pen had good
share, in place of which I have rather chosen to put weaker and no
doubt less pleasing of my own than to defraud so happy a genius of his
right by my loathed usurpations.”
According to Dryden, Ben Jonson’s compliments were left-handed.
Nevertheless, the words “so happy a genius” have directed the thoughts
of commentators to Shakespeare. Mr. Nicholson, however, has shown
that the person alluded to is not Shakespeare, but a very inferior
poet, Samuel Sheppard, who more than forty years later claimed for
himself the honor of having collaborated in “Sejanus” with Ben Jonson.
Compliments bestowed on inferior men of the elder time are in later
times the reprisal of Shakespearean buccaneers; while many of Jonson’s
versified panegyrics on cotemporary poets were retrieved by his
withering contempt for many of them, orally expressed, or contained in
his prose works, Shakespeare being included among these. Still, at the
Apollo room of the Devil Tavern were numbered the most distinguished
men of the day outside of literary circles, as well as within, who
sought his fellowship and would gladly have sealed themselves of the
tribe of Ben. Clarendon tells us that “his conversations were very good
and with men of most note.”
The following is, in part, from the notes recorded by William Drummond,
Laird of Hawthornden.
“Conversations of Ben Jonson. His censure of the English poets was
this: That Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as
well as himself. Spencer’s stanzas pleased him not nor his matter.
“Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children, but no poet,
and was jealous of him; that Michael Drayton’s long verses pleased
him not—Drayton feared him and he esteemed not of him; that Donne’s
‘Anniversary’ was profane and full of blasphemies ... that Donne, for
not keeping of accent deserved hanging; that Shakespeare wanted art;
that Day, Dekker and Minshew were all rogues; that Abram Francis, in
his English hexameters, was a fool; that next to himself only Fletcher
and Chapman could make a masque.
“He esteemeth John Donne the first poet in the world in some things;
that Donne, himself, for not being understood would perish.
“Sir Henry Wotton’s verses of a ‘Happy Life’ he hath by heart, and a
piece of Chapman’s translation of the thirteen of the ‘Iliads,’ which
he thinketh well done. That Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and
his own verse.
“He had many quarrels with Marston; that Markham was not of the
number of the faithful, and but a base fellow; that such were Day and
Middleton; that Chapman and Fletcher were loved of him; that Spencer
died for lack of bread in King street; that the King said Sir P. Sidney
was no poet. Neither did he see any verses in England to the Scullers,
meaning that John Taylor was the best poet in England; that Shakespeare
in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck
in Bohemia where there is no sea near by some 100 miles.
“Sundry times he (Jonson) hath devoured his books, sold them all for
necessity; that he hath consumed a whole night in lying looking at
his great toe, about which he hath seen Carthagenians and the Romans
fighting; that the half of his comedies were not in print; he said to
Prince Charles, of Inigo Jones, that when he wanted words to express
the greatest villain in the world, he would call him an ‘Inigo,’ Jones
having accused him for naming him, behind his back, a fool, he denied
it; but, says he, I said he was an arrant knave, and I avouch it; of
all his plays he never gained 200 pounds; he dissuaded me from poetry
for that she had beggared him when he might have been a rich lawyer,
physician, or merchant; that piece of the ‘Pucelle of the Court’ was
stolen out of his pocket by a gentleman who drank him drowsy.”
These occasional infractions of sobriety by Ben Jonson when he
conversed with Drummond at Hawthornden in 1618-19 became habitual with
him long before James Howell’s invitation to a Solem supper by B. J.
1636.
Day, Middleton, Dekker and Sir Walter Raleigh could have instituted
a civil suit against Ben Jonson for defamation of character, because
of the defamatory words in conversation with William Drummond of
Hawthornden, had the notes recorded by Drummond been published in
the lifetime of the defamed. However, they had come to regard him,
doubtless, as a notorious slanderer who would as soon falsify as
verify, and was not to be believed in unsworn testimony about his
fellowmen or as a credible witness as to any matter—one whose testimony
was none too good under every sanction possible to give it. This is the
writer who gave genesis to the Stratford myth. The matter-of-fact to be
accentuated is that the contemporaries of the writer of the immortal
plays did not know positively who wrote them; we do not know positively
who wrote them; and our latest posterity, when Holy Trinity’s
monuments, turrets, and towers shall have crumbled and commingled with
the shrined dust of William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon, may not
know positively who wrote them.
In conclusion, it has not been our design to point out, or suggest,
who, in fact, wrote the poems and plays, but rather to show that the
man of Stratford was by education, temperament, character, reputation,
opportunity and calling, wholly unequal to so transcendent a task,
and that the authorship assumed in favor of this man, rests upon
no tangible proof, but to the contrary upon strained and farfetched
conjecture, merely.
INDEX.
Pages
Alleyn Edward, 17, 18, 19, 42, 107
Addenbroke John, 115, 116
Aubrey John, 141
Blank Verse, 31
Bame Richard, 78
Burbages, 18, 42
Beaumont Francis, 122, 123, 142, 148, 150, 157, 169, 174
Burns Robert, 48
Burton Robert, 53, 157
Bruno, 79
Bodley Sir Thomas, 94
Betterton, 103
Bright John, 164
Brown Sir Thomas, 156
Brown Richard, 16
Bunyan John, 44, 45
Brown J. M., 54
Camden William, 160
Chapman George, 81, 93, 122, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146,
147, 154, 155, 163, 174, 175
Chettle Henry, 35, 43, 49, 63, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79,
80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91
Collier J. P., 25
Cook Dr. James, 101
Coleridge S. T., 47, 144, 145
Cicero, 50, 84
Combe William, 109, 110, 125
Cromwell Oliver, 3
Dryden John, 39, 148, 165, 172
Drummond Sir William, 39, 166, 167, 173, 176
Dearborn, 43
Daniel Samuel, 145, 173
Davis Cushman K., 41
Dowland John, 17
Diggs Leonard, 128
Dance-Scene, 100, 111, 124, 129
Dyce A., 114
Davenant Sir William, 135
Donne, 174
Dekker, 143, 162, 174
Drayton, 150, 153, 174
Elizabeth Queen, 53, 157
Emerson R. W., 114, 130
Fletcher John, 43, 122, 142, 148, 150, 152, 157
Fleay, 70
Ford John, 122
Farmer Dr., 110
Fuller Thomas, 159
Garrick David, 111
Grosart A., 30
Greene Robert, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47,
48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64,
65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84,
85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 121, 140, 150, 151
Gifford William, 165
Groats Worth of Wit, 6, 9, 61, 62, 65, 68, 76, 85, 87, 89
Galileo, 79
Hathaway Richard, 102, 103
Howell James, 168, 176
Hall Dr. John, 100, 111, 124, 129
Hathaway Agnes or Anne, 103, 104, 106
Herrick, 45
Henry VI., 30
Henslowe Diary, 17, 19
Henslowe Philip, 17, 19, 32, 42, 89, 93, 117, 118, 152, 156
Hallam Henry, 114, 118, 130
Heywood, 24, 143
Halliwell-Phillips, 32, 156
Harvey Gabriel, 18, 40, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 62, 69
Ingleby Dr., 37
Jonson Ben, 24, 39, 59, 81, 90, 92, 93, 94, 122, 136, 137, 139, 140,
142, 143, 145, 148, 152, 153, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164,
165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176
James First, 43, 147
Jusserand J. J., 60
Jefferson Thomas, 79
Kemp William, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,
26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 92
Kyd, 43, 151
Keats John, 146
Kind Hearts Dreams, 35, 63, 68, 76, 91
Lucy Sir Thomas, 107, 113, 114
Lincoln Abraham, 89
Lodge Thomas, 34, 72, 73, 140, 152
Lee Sidney, 133, 137, 151
London, 15, 20, 21, 105
Lee Miss Jane, 150
Lucrece, 131, 138
Lamb Charles, 146
Lander Walter Savage, 153
Marlowe Christopher, 6, 11, 30, 31, 35, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77,
78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 144, 150, 151
Milton John, 49, 122, 146, 153
Mulcaster Richard, 101
Miller Joaquin, 50
Malone, 94
Mannering Arthur, 109, 110
Middleton, 174
Massinger Phillip, 122
Marston John, 24, 136, 162, 174
Meres Francis, 138, 139, 140, 141, 155
Nash Thomas, 7, 11, 15, 18, 29, 30, 32, 35, 38, 45, 49, 52, 62, 69,
70, 71, 72, 73, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 140
Napoleon, 96
Nicholson Dr., 172
Norwich, 20, 22, 62
Overbury Sir Thomas, 43
Peele George, 7, 11, 30, 35, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 83, 86, 151
Poe Edgar Allen, 48
Quiney Richard, 108, 111, 112
Rathway Richard, 24
Rosebery Lord, 96
Rowe N., 103, 134, 135
William Shakspere the Stratfordian, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 45,
70, 71, 82, 86, 87, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105,
106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117,
118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130,
133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 159,
160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 170, 171, 177
Shakespeare the Author Poet, 2, 31, 33, 37, 39, 43, 55, 60, 70, 72,
90, 124, 130, 131, 132, 138, 140, 142, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149,
150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170,
171, 172, 175
Shakspere John, 96, 97, 98, 101
Shakspere Susana, 100, 111
Shakspere Judith, 100, 112
Shakspere Hamnet, 108
Shake-scene, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
Shake-rags, 16, 23
Spencer Edmund, 144, 156, 157, 173
Stratford-on-Avon, 1, 12, 41, 90, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107,
108
Sidney Sir Phillip, 18, 144, 157
Stevens George, 2, 114, 130
Swinburne A., 47, 96, 146, 151
Scott Sir Walter, 59, 157
Strojenko Prof., 66
Stratford Bust, 128, 131
Spedding James, 150
Saunders, 132
Southampton Earl of, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 149
Tarlton Richard, 15, 114, 130
Tyrwhitt Thomas, 9
“The Nine Days Wonder”, 16, 21
Twain Mark, 130
Thompson James, 49
Taft William H., 79
Taylor John, 175
Thorndike A. H., 152
Tolstoy Leo, 90
Upstart Crow, 5, 9, 28, 82
Venus and Adonis, 32, 131, 138, 149
Voltair, 157
Washington George, 3
Wilson Robert, Senior, 25, 26, 27
White Richard Grant, 116
Wallace Professor, 119
Waller Edmund, 145
Wately Anna, 102
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphen inconsistencies are retained as printed.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
Page 21. “Anti-Martnist” replaced by “Anti-Martinist”.
Page 21. “Bodelean Library” replaced by “Bodleian Library”.
Page 24. “William Rowly” replaced by “William Rowley”.
Page 25. “blamphemous” replaced by “blasphemous”.
Page 28. “amendor” replaced by “amender”.
Page 43. “Kid’s” replaced by “Kyd’s”.
Page 47. “assauged” replaced by “assuaged”.
Page 47. “Swinburn” replaced by “Swinburne”.
Page 49. “harp and pendant” replaced by “sharp and pendant”.
Page 72. “prediliction” replaced by “predilection”.
Page 85. “‘of Wit’” replaced by “of Wit’”.
Page 118. “ramsacking” replaced by “ransacking”.
Page 121. “elegaic” replaced by “elegiac”.
Page 122. ‘“Volpone,” There’ replaced by ‘“Volpone,” there’.
Page 127. “charnal” replaced by “charnel”.
Page 132. “Worthesley” replaced by “Wriothesley”.
Page 138. “Palladin” replaced by “Palladis”.
Page 141. “John Aubury” replaced by “John Aubrey”.
Page 157. “Popuelin” replaced by “Poquelin”.
Page 157. “Moliere.” replaced by “Molière”.
Page 162. ‘“Poetaster on him.”’ replaced by ‘“Poetaster” on him.’.
Page 166. ‘William Shakespeare, “an’ replaced by ‘William Shakespeare, an’.
Page i. “Aubury John” replaced by “Aubrey John”.
Page ii. “Robert Greene” replaced by “Greene Robert”.
Page iv. “Swinburn” replaced by “Swinburne”.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM SHAKSPERE AND ROBERT GREENE: THE EVIDENCE ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
