Next follows the dedicatory epistle "To the most Noble and Incomparable Paire of Brethren," William, Earl of Pembroke and Philip, Earl of Montgomery. In sycophantic tones the epistle states that the works are "trifles," but that since their lordships thought well of them and of the author, the writers of the epistle have seen fit to bring out the works after the death of the author, as a service to their worthy friend and fellow, Shakespeare, and humbly to offer them to their lordship's patronage. The writers say they are rash in their undertaking to bring out the book and are fearful of its success. Part of the epistle, dealing with the eminence of the Earls and the humbleness of the presenters, is couched in language which appears to be a paraphrase of Pliny's dedication to the Emperor Vespasian of his Natural History. The epistle closes with "Your Lordshippes most bounden, / IOHN HEMINGE / HENRY CONDELL."
On the following page appears over the same names the epistle "To the great Variety of Readers." This opens with an exhortation to buy the book. It refers to the plays as having been successfully produced. It states that the writers of the epistle have collected and published them, cured of the defects which had previously appeared in "diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters," and that they now appear "cur'd and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers: as the author (unnamed and unidentified) conceived them." They say of him "His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers."
Next follow Ben Jonson's verses under the caption "To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: AND what he hath left us." These verses are extravagantly laudatory of Shakespeare. They refer to him as "a monument without a tomb." Without otherwise identifying Shakespeare the verses apostrophize the "Sweet Swan of Avon."
On the following page is a laudatory sonnet over the name Hugh Holland (who was a traveler and poet of Cambridge). This in no way identifies the author. Then follows the "Catalina" or index with the defects mentioned above. Next appears the poem over the name "L. Digges" (a translator of Oxford) which says the works will live when "Time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment." Then eight laudatory but unidentifying lines appear over the initials I.M., thought by Chambers to be James Mabbe.
The final prefatory page is headed "The Workes of William Shake-speare, containing all his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies: Truely set forth, according to their first ORIGINALL." Then follows a list of "The Names of the Principall Actors in all These Playes" with the name William Shakespeare heading the list and preceding those of Richard Burbadge (sic) and the other leading actors of the day.
On the subsequent pages appear the plays. Although the prefatory epistle states they are cured of the defects which previously appeared, as published they perpetuate many earlier errors and are full of patent mistakes in language, in grammar and in orthography which have baffled scholars and given rise to extended controversy over suggested corrections and emendations.
In the colophon appear the words "Printed at the Charges of W. Iaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623."
This then is the First Folio which, published seven years after the death of Shaksper, the man of Stratford, contains the first bit of evidence which might identify him with Shakespeare, the author. The posthumous evidence in the First Folio is the keystone of the Stratfordian case.
The will of Shaksper has been previously referred to herein, and also more at length in my original article. See the Will The will contains bequests "to my ffellowes John Hemynge Richard Burbage & Henry Cundell xxvjs viijd A peece to buy them Ringes." These bequests are part of what is called the principal "documentary proof" of the Stratfordian authorship. The fact that 26 shillings and 8 pence were left to each of these three, who were actors, and were referred to as fellows, of itself would not tend to establish anything more than that the testator had been a fellow actor. By themselves, these bequests have no bearing upon the question of the authorship of the works. It is only in relation to the First Folio that they could have any relevance to that question. Richard Burbage died in 1619 and had no connection with the First Folio except that his name appears in the list of actors. The names of the other two legatees have been variously spelled Hemynges, Heming, Hemings, Heminge, Cundell, Condel, Cundaile, Condell, etc. Chambers adopts Heminges as the spelling of the former's name. Heminge and Condell are the spellings used in the First Folio, and are used herein for convenience.
Chambers in his Appendix B gives two allusions to a Shakespeare as an actor, in 1603 and 1604, in association with Burbage, Heminge, Condell, Augustine Phillips, and others. (In 1605 he and Condell were legatees under Phillips' will.) These are the only references to this name as an actor recorded before 1616, the year of the Stratford man's death. There are two other subsequent references to a Shakespeare as an actor with Burbage, Heminge, Condell and Phillips. Both of these, however, were in the First Folio of Ben Jonson's works, which was not published until 1616, the year Shaksper died. They show the name of William Shakespeare as having been that of an actor in 1598 in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, and in 1603 in Sejanus.
Mr. Clary's article states that the three legatees were members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and that the official records show that William Shakespeare was a member of their company. The Lord Chamberlain's books do show an entry of payment to William Kempe, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage as "seruants to the Lord Chamberleyne" for performances before the Queen on December 26 and 28, 1594. But this "official record" which is offered as "documentary proof" is open to grave question. Sir Thomas Heneage was Treasurer of the Chamber from 1569 to 1582 and later Vice Chamberlain from 1588 until his death in 1595. After his death, a shortage was found in his accounts. The Queen wrote a stern demand to his widow, who succeeded him as Treasurer, that she either explain the shortage or make good the amount of it. It was after this demand and several years after the purported date, that the entry of the payment was made. It also appears in the same books that, contrary to the statement in the entry in question, it was the Admiral's and not the Chamberlain's company that played before the Queen on December 26; and Henslowe's diary shows that the Lord Chamberlains's company played The Siege of London at his theater on that date. Furthermore, the records of Gray's Inn show that on December 28, the Lord Chamberlain's company played The Comedy of Errors at Gray's Inn and not at Court before the Queen. Chambers notes these discrepancies in dates. Thus there is ample ground for questioning the genuineness of this "official record."
Elsewhere in Appendix B there are many references to the legatees or some of them as actors in various plays. These indicate specific roles played by them. But there is no other reference to Shakespeare as an actor until the Shakespeare First Folio appeared in 1623. Nowhere is there any indication of any role assigned to him. In the First Folio list of the leading actors who are said to have taken part in the plays, the fact that the name of Shakespeare leads all the rest gives it a prominence utterly unwarranted by any other record.
Burbage was by far the best known, and was a leading actor of the day. Little else is known of the other two legatees, Heminge and Condell. The former is named in the 1613 deed and mortgage with the Stratford man, whose name is signed to these two documents as "William Shakspe" and "Wm Shakspr," respectively. These documents related to the Blackfriars Gate-House. Burbage, Heminge and Condell, as well as Shakespeare and others are named in the answer of Heminge and Condell in the case of Witter v. Heminge and Condell in the Court of Requests in 1619 as having had interests a score of years earlier in the Globe and Blackfriars. Chambers tells us that Heminge stuttered by 1613 and dropped out by 1620. There is an account that Heminge became a grocer and died in 1630; and that Condell became a publican and died in 1623. The testimony of Heminge and Condell appearing in the First Folio is discussed below.
It is necessary to take special note of the fact that the bequests to Heminge, Burbage and Condell in Shaksper's will were not in the body of the will as it was originally written. They are in an interlineation, added some time later, no one knows when, not even whether it was before or after the death of the testator. Chambers points out other "odd features" in the will. According to Chambers, the will was found by Joseph Greene in 1747. That the will, as we know it, may have been tampered with is also suggested by the statement of Sir E. M. Thompson, the expert, who, as stated above, is cited by Chambers as thinking that the last signature on the will does not appear as it was originally written.
Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and James Mabbe, whose verses in the First Folio eulogize the author of the works, were closely associated with Ben Jonson in school or in literary work. Of these, Jonson was, of course, by far the best known. It is upon Jonson's testimony, particularly his two poems in the First Folio, that the Stratfordians place the greatest reliance. As for identification of the author, Digges' reference to "Thy Stratford Moniment," is perhaps the strongest evidence for the Stratfordian case; but it is certainly not definitive. Jonson's testimony is curiously vague.
William Drummond reported of Jonson: "His Censure of the English Poets was this...That Shakesperr wanted Arte."
Drummond also quoted Jonson as ridiculing the author with the words: "Sheakspear in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered Shipwrack in Bohemia, wher ther is no Sea neer by some 100 miles."
Jonson apparently did not know that Bohemia did have a sea-coast in the thirteenth century.
In Timber: or, Discoveries Made upon Men and Matters, Jonson said that: "...the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted out a line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand." And then he explained that although this was thought a malevolent speech, "I lov'd the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any."
Elsewhere, in Rowe's Life of Shakespeare, it is said: "Sir John Suckling, who was a profess'd admirer of Shakespeare, had undertaken his Defence against Ben Jonson with some warmth...Ben frequently reproaching him with want of Learning, and Ignorance of the Antients..."
In John Dryden's Essay on Dramatique Poetry of the Last Age appears the following passage: "In reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth, which are not to be understood, he [Ben Jonson] used to say it was horrour."
Drummond, in 1619, said of Jonson: "He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemnor and Scorner of others, given rather to loose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink), which is one of the elements in which he liveth, a dissembler of ill parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth...vindicative, but if he be well answered, at himself for any religion being versed in both."
In 1620 Jonson made a list of the distinguished persons he had known. It contained no mention of Shaksper or Shakespeare. Then within three years the First Folio was published containing his unrestrained praise of "The Soul of the Age," "Star of Poets," etc.
Jonson's principal testimony upon which the Stratfordians rely is that contained in the lines in the First Folio. The first of these relating to the portrait have already been briefly discussed. They do not identify the author in any way. The only other testimony of Jonson's which could relate to the question of the authorship is contained in his extravagantly laudatory poem about Shakespeare, in whose name the works were published. It consists simply in the apostrophe to the "Sweet Swan of Avon." (This may be a significant metaphor, since a swan is believed to have no voice except at its death.) [Another reference by Jonson is to the author as a "monument without a tomb," thus implying that he was still living when the 1623 Folio was published.] But do those words allude to Shaksper, the man of Stratford? There are three rivers in England named Avon. Their combined length is 235 miles. Certainly the Stratford man was not the only person associated with any of these rivers. For instance, the Earl of Oxford (whether or not he wrote the works) owned three estates on the Upper Avon, the one which flows through Stratford. His estate, Bilton on Avon, was a few miles distant from Stratford, on the other side of the forest of Arden. If the phrase was intended to refer to Lord Oxford it would be just as apt.
That Jonson was a prime factor in the publication of the First Folio can hardly be questioned. Steevens suggested that Jonson wrote part of the epistle to the readers and revised the rest. Chambers favors this view. All of those who appear as authors of the prefatory material in the First Folio were close associates of Jonson's. The recorded facts show that the Earl of Pembroke, who in 1615 became Lord Chamberlain, raised Jonson's stipend in 1616 from 20 pounds a year (which Jonson mentioned to Drummond) to 100 marks. In 1621, when Jonson was financially hard pressed, and the First Folio was being prepared for publication, the Earl of Pembroke further increased Jonson's stipend to 200 pounds, or about $8,000 in our [1959] money. The Folio was dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and to his brother, the Earl of Montgomery. The Oxfordians call attention to the fact that the latter was Lord Oxford's son-in-law. They and the others who doubt the Stratfordian authorship point out the weaknesses and even the suspicious character of what is offered as Jonson's testimony, as well as its quite possible financial motivation.
It is in truth difficult to know how to evaluate the testimony of such an equivocal and self-contradictory witness as Jonson. In any event, his praise of Shakespeare does not identify the man, and at the very best Jonson's testimony is vague and indefinite. It is a slender reed to support so weighty a matter as the authorship of the Shakespeare works.
So much reliance is placed by Stratfordians upon what is called the "documentary evidence" in the First Folio, that it is frequently cited as the answer to all doubts about the authorship. Doubters are told that this First Folio settles every question. But does it?
The first question it fails to answer is why this volume, published seven years after the death of Shaksper of Stratford, should be the very first evidentiary link between him and the Shakespeare works. But there are several other questions.
Canon G. H. Rendall in Ben Jonson and the First Folio Edition of Shakespeare's Playswrote as follows:
-
"Financially the Folio implied expenditure on a large scale, in addition to the heavy costs of actual printing, production and distribution; these alone were far beyond the means at the command of William Jaggard, who at this stage of his career was in no position to embark capital in so large a venture. From 1612 onwards, when Jaggard himself was stricken with blindness, the firm declined in productive energy and enterprise, and from 1617 to 1621 were further embarrassed by bad debts and law suits...In 1621 printing of the Folio had already been put in hand, and Jaggard himself died before its issue in 1623."
-
"As a business proposition the published price is 22 shillings for an issue of (say) 500 copies [as estimated by Dr. Samuel Johnson], even if realised in full, must have resulted in a deficit, far beyond the resources of the avowed editors, Heminge and Condell."
The suspicious appearance of the Droeshout portrait and of Ben Jonson's verses relating to it has already been mentioned.
The close association between Ben Jonson and the others who appear as authors of the prefatory epistles and poems is another circumstance to be considered in connection with the contention that a subsidy was paid to Jonson to undertake the actual promotion of the publication.
Jonson's various other equivocal statements about Shakespeare as an author, his own failure to provide any real identification of the author of the contents of the First Folio, and the large payments to him at a time when he was financially embarrassed, add to the suspicion.
The listing of the name of William Shakespeare on the list of "The Principall actors in all of these Playes," ahead of the names of those who were otherwise well known as leading actors of the day, is at variance with every other record and seems to have no reasonable warrant in good faith.
In the prefatory epistles to which the names of Heminge and Condell are subscribed (probably by Jonson) it is stated that they were friends of the author, Shakespeare. This statement is the only link with the suspiciously interlined bequest in the will of Shaksper of Stratford.
The statement over the names of Heminge and Condell asserts that they collected the works "according to the true originall copies" and that they cured them of the defects which appeared in the "stolne and surreptitious" copies.Manifestly this is untrue, since the First Folio is full of obvious errors and defects.
The statement also asserts that they scarcely received a blot in the author's papers. Chambers' comment is "What one does not find is the absence of `blots' for which Heminges and Condell especially lauded Shakespeare." The gist of the purported statement of Heminge and Condell is that the author wrote with such facility that he made few corrections and scarcely blotted a word. Can this truly be a reference to the man of Stratford, in whose six painfully scrawled signatures there are no less than three blots? See his signatures
When we contemplate the probability that the financing of the publication was provided from the outside, the concern expressed by Heminge and Condell as to the financial success of the venture sounds hollow indeed.
The letters over the names of Heminge and Condell contain so many patent misstatements that it is difficult to believe they were made in good faith inadvertently, and not deliberately intended to deceive. The Stratfordians place much reliance upon this testimony. But the statements themselves, if indeed Heminge and Condell really made them, contain no direct identification of the author whose works they purport to have collected, corrected, published and sponsored.
Thus even the First Folio, containing as it does the principal evidence for the Stratfordian authorship, is itself subject to persistently haunting doubts. The Stratfordians either dismiss or ignore them, and accept the First Folio as settling all questions about the authorship. To others, however, the Stratfordian authorship appears factually unsupported at best, and moreover seems an utterly incredible paradox--a phenomenon contravening human experience. To them the unlikelihood of the Stratfordian authorship, the absence of other evidence and the doubts about the First Folio quite naturally suggest clues to a deliberate masquerade.
These supplementary notes will, it is hoped, make clearer the basis for the doubts about the Stratfordian authorship. They at least expand the "all-too-condensed" summation of the external evidence in the case of William Shaksper of Stratford as given in the original article...
With all these in mind perhaps you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, will wish again to retire and consider further your verdict. It is for you to answer the two questions put to you at the outset: Was Shakespeare the same man as Shaksper, and if not, who was he? Was the author William Shaksper; Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; or someone else?
In arriving at your own individual answers to these questions, each one of you will be solving for yourself the most baffling, and what is indeed, "the greatest literary whodunit of all time."
Thus ends Richard Bentley's summary of the "Great Controversy." He was not the first able trial lawyer who weighed the positive evidence in this case and found most of it, favoring the authorship of William Shakespeare, to be inadmissible. The negative evidence showing the incompetence of this supposed writer is exceptionally persuasive. To the contrary, the Works betray the unmistakable signs of an attorney's practiced hand. To me, experienced lawyers like Bentley, those who must evaluate dispassionately the proofs before they are presented to a court and who have a sharpened cynicism toward the kind of evidence that can, at best, be considered as speculative, are the most practical judges of a hard case like this. Yet the real judges, whose opinions have again and again become final without hope of appeal, are the schoolmasters. They are accustomed to speak with conclusive authority to their students whom, upon graduation and happy relief from such literary quarrels, must carry the scars of scholastic dogmatism forever after. Those outside the classrooms, those with opinions unpopular to the teachers within them, are easy victims for classification as amateurs or hobbyists, or even cranks if they should obtrude unwelcome doubts concerning their Most Worshipful Bard.
Richard Grant White, an American Shakespeare critic, described the Bard's home at Stratford as "hardly equal to a rustic cottage, almost a hovel, poverty stricken, squalid, kennel-like." The town itself he portrayed as "A dirty village...the streets foul with offal, mud, muck-heaps and reeking stable refuse." J. O. Halliwell-Phillips wrote that the birthplace was "in the vicinity of middens, fetid watercourses, mud walls and piggeries." David Garrick described the place as, "the most dirty, unseemly, ill-paved, wretched looking town in all Britain."
But the managers of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust seem to view these reports as matters to be disregarded, and to call attention to them a sign of prejudice and intolerance. A new publication, The Shakespeare Handbook, (G. K. Hall, 1987) written by a "team of leading international scholars under the editorship of Levi Fox" revives the Shakespeare legends. They buy, for example, the Thomas Plume tale referred to by Bentley, that Shakespeare was a glover's son. Levi Fox has been the director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Stratford-upon-Avon since 1945. The "Birth-place" is visited by a more than a million tourists each year. Obviously, this editor may entertain some bias in favor of orthodoxy and enduring revenue. A passage must be quoted:
-
"It is important the emphasize this: One of the curiosities of Shake speareana is that peculiar popular myth, now at last disappearing, that Shakespeare was not, so to speak, Shakespeare, but someone else altogether, such as Bacon or the Earl of Oxford. This has been a curiously tenacious myth which still, from time to time, is put forward with much enthusiasm, but little scholarship. This strange notion was nourished by the conviction that Stratford in the 16th century was a dirty and insignificant huddle of squalid dwellings. The argument, in part, ran that the extraordinary knowledge shown by Shakespeare could only have come from someone socially elevated--in London and at court, preferably. Thus was snobbery wedded, as always, to ignorance."
Richard Bentley was Editor-in-Chief of the American Bar Association Journal from 1961 until his death in 1970. His essays, including those quoted above, were published by the A.B.A. Journal as part of a book entitled Shakespeare Cross-Examination.
Did a lawyer write Shakespeare's sonnet 46?
MIne eye and heart are at a mortall warre,
How to deuide the conquest of thy sight,
Mine eye, my heart their pictures sight would barre,
My heart, mine eye the freedome of that right,
My heart doth plead that thou in him doost lye,
(A closet neuer pearst with christall eyes)
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And sayes in him their faire appearance lyes.
To side [decide] this title is impannelled
A quest of thoughts, all tennants to the heart,
And by their verdict is determined
The cleere eyes moyitie, and he deare hearts part,
As thus, mine eyes due is their outward part,
And my hearts right, their inward loue of heart
Lord Chief Justice Campbell comments on this stanza:
-
I need not go further than this sonnet, which is so intensely legal in its language and imagery, that without a considerable knowledge of English forensic procedure it cannot be fully understood. A lover being supposed to have made a conquest of (i.e. to have gained by purchase) his mistress, his eye and his heart, holding as joint-tenants, have a contest as to how she is to be partitioned between them--each moiety then to be held in severalty. There are regular pleadings in the suit, the heart being represented as Plaintiff and the eye as Defendant. At last issue is joined on what the one affirms and the other denies. Now a jury (in the nature of an inquest) is to be impanneled to "side" and by their verdict to apportion between the litigating parties the subject matter to be decided. The jury fortunately are unanimous, and after due deliberation find for the eye in respect of the lady's outward form, and for the heart in respect of her inward love..."
Did Francis Bacon's contemporaries believe that he was a lawyer turned poet?
In the Scourge of Folly, John Davies of Hereford (1565-1618) wrote this epigram:
Sr Francis Bacon
Thy bounty and the Beauty of thy Witt
Compris'd in Lists of Lawand the learned Arts,
Each making thee for great Imployment fitt,
Which now thou hast, (though short of thy deserts)
Compells my pen to let fall shining Inke
And to bedew the Baies that deck thy Front;
And to thy health in Helicon to drinke
As to her Bellamour the Muse is wont;
For thou dost her embozom; and dost vse
Her company for sport twixt graue affaires.
So vtter'st Law the liuelyer through the Muse.
And for that all thy Notes are sweetest Aires;
My Muse thus notes thy worth in ev'ry Line.
With ynke which thus she sugers; so, to shine.
Thus John Davies in 1610 states plainly that Francis Bacon was a poet and that he had woven into his works spirited illustrations of the law. John Davies was the same man to whom Bacon had written a letter which concluded, "so desiring you to be good to concealed poets."
Sir Edmund Chambers, writing in William Shakespeare: a Study of Facts and Problems, quotes a statement of Edmund Howes' in 1615:
-
"Our moderne, and present excellent poets which worthely florish in their owne workes, and all of them in my owne knowledge lived togeather in this Queenes raigne, according to their priorities as neere as I could, I have orderly set downe (viz) George Gascoigne, Thomas Churchyard, Edward Dyer, Edmond Spencer, Philip Sidney, John Harrington, Thomas Challoner, Frauncis Bacon, John Davie, Iohn Lillie, George Chapman, W. Warner, Willi Shakespeare, Samuell Daniell, Michaell Draiton, Christopher Marlo, Benjamine Johnson, Iohn Marston, Abraham Frauncis, Frauncis Meers, Joshua Siluester, Thomas Deckers, John Flecher, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, George Withers."
The Manes Verulamiani is a collection of laudatory poems written in Elizabethan Latin. It was published in 1626, a few months after the death of Francis Bacon and in his commemoration. John Haviland (who before had printed several of Bacon's books) was also the publisher of these tributes. The "Manes" was reprinted in facsimile with translations by W.G.C. Gundry, Barrister-at-Law (Chiswick Press, London 1956).
In this volume there is a translation of a Latin verse signed by "H.T., Fellow of Trinity College" (Cambridge). H.T. was Herbert Thorndike (1598-1672) who later became deputy Public Orator to George Herbert, Bacon's friend and elegist.
Thorndike's poem speaks of Francis Bacon in this manner:
-
[Nature says] "Stay your advance and leave to posterity what will delight the coming ages to discover. Let it suffice for our times, that being ennobled by your discoveries they should glory in your genius. Something there is, which the next age will glory in; something there is, which it is fit should be known to me alone: let it be your commendation to have outlined the frame with fair limbs, for which no one can wholly perfect the members: thus his unfinished work commends the artist Apelles, since no hand can finish the rest of his Venus. Nature having thus spoken and yielding to her blind frenzy cut short together the thread of his life and work. But you, who dare to finish the weaving of this hanging web, will alone know whom these memorials hide."
-
"Directly as men were aware that the main purpose of the published plays was not so much to entertain them as to put them to school, the New Method was certain to become a failure. Long and patient trial of the system could alone attain success. To disclose the author was to reveal the schoolmaster, whose work would be resented as an impertinence by those for whom it was most fit."
-
"Dramatic poesy, which has the theatre for its world, would be of excellent use if well directed. For the stage is capable of no small influence both of discipline and of corruption. Now of corruption in this kind we have enough; but the discipline has in our times been plainly neglected."
-
"Without a mask, Bacon's plan for his Instauratio Magna would not have been possible; William Shakespeare was a necessary feature in the vast scheme of Bacon's philosophic experiment which had the world for its theatre, ages for its accomplishment, and posterity for its beneficiaries."
Professor Rowse, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy, is, according to the jacket of his book, "the greatest living authority on Elizabethan England." His biography of the Bard, consisting of 484 pages and replete with endnotes, is an example of what Sam Clemens had to say about Shakespearean biographers. It is a veritable Thesaurus of synonyms for phrases such as, "we are justified in assuming."
The real meat of his book is explained as follows: "We can build up a picture of the kind of youth Shakespeare was from the information he drops as to his choices and preferences in his writings, though we must watch for corroboration from external evidence. After all a writer writes about his own experience--he cannot exclude himself from his work, even if he would..."
In other words, aside from the doubtful traditions and aside from the "we must presume" assurances from this author, the most reliable way to get acquainted with Shakespeare is to read his Works. The proof that Shakespeare lived Shakespeare's life is obvious: even reading Rowse seems not to be a requirement; we may read Shakespeare instead. The tired circular argument survives; begging the question remains a matter of Stratfordian principle.
Is an old book, with Shakespeare's name printed on it as the author, any proof that Shakespeare wrote it? Not necessarily. One may be surprised to read this in the good Professor's own book:
-
"From this year, too, [1613] we have some of Shakespeare's last handiwork, his contribution to Fletcher's play, The Two Noble Kinsmen. When this play was published in 1634, as "presented at the Blackfriars by the King's Majesty's Servants, with great applause," Shakespeare's name appeared along with Fletcher's on the title-page. This in itself is no decisive evidence, for his name was made use of on other playbooks, with which he had no connection, to help sell them. On the other hand, its exclusion from the First Folio is decisive, for in our time the honesty and fidelity of Heminges and Condell have been completely vindicated--nor need they ever have been questioned. What this means is that they did not regard The Two Noble Kinsmen any more than Pericles, as wholly, or even mainly, by Shakespeare."
A. L. Rowse has a chapter on the Sonnets. "The Sonnets of Shakespeare have hitherto presented the greatest problem in our literature...the answers to these questions are of fundamental importance not only to Shakespeare's life, but to our conception of him; and the Sonnets are documents of the first importance, for they are the most autobiographical ever written." We must conclude that "hitherto" refers to Before Professor Rowse who continues: "Now, for the first time, certainty as to dating has been achieved and the consequences are immeasurable: a flood of light pours in, all the main problems of the Sonnets receive their solution, the questions are answered..."
Then follow many expository pages and other "floods of light," and quarrels with previous Sonnet annotators who were not Historians. "Hitherto they have provided an unsolved problem...After all Shakespeare did not write his sonnets to provide a puzzle for posterity: he wrote them simply and directly, straightforwardly and rapidly..."
Professor Rowse has not only discovered the speed with which Shakespeare's quill flashed over the foolscap, but he knows when the Sonnets were written: "...in the years 1592-5, though they mostly belong to the two plague years of crisis in Shakespeare's career when the theaters were closed, 1592 and 1593." And, "We all know the rapidity with which Shakespeare worked, with which his imagination carried him away..." As imagination might carry us all away, if we didn't keep our eyes open.
The unerring Professor has no love for Francis Bacon. Bacon and Essex had been friends, until Essex mounted an armed rebellion against the Queen that failed dismally. Bacon was ordered to participate in the prosecution which was led by Coke. These events provoke Rowse to say, "Francis Bacon had been the first rat, understandably, to leave Essex's leaky vessel."
Behinde the Arras, hearing something stirre,He whips his Rapier out, and cries "a Rat, a Rat."
And in his brainish apprehension killes
The vnseene good old man.
Hamlet (iv, 1, 9).
Baconians, at least of the English variety, are also distasteful to our Oxford scholar. He has referred to them as "crackpots."The Professor has recently published a book. He explains the connection between Shakespeare and his patron, the Earl of Southampton, and how he fathomed it. "One needs to be pretty subtle to catch the exact tone of this complex, not wholly unparalleled relationship--no wonder ordinary minds fail to do so and have made such a mess of it." Rowse's perceptions are so subtly acute that he declares,"Really, unless drenched in the Elizabethan age, poets, novelists, critics should not hold forth on what they do not, perhaps cannot, understand." He forgot to mention undrenched lawyers.
Also recently published is an attack upon all of the leading pretenders to Shakespeare's throne.
H. N. Gibson, M. A., Ph. D., describes himself as a lecturer "on Shakespeare to senior forms in schools and to adults in W.E.A. classes." (H. N. Gibson, The Shakespeare Claimants, Methuen & Co. Ltd., London 1962).
Gibson, the Refuter, places Francis Bacon first on his list of unworthy impostors and then disposes neatly of Edward De Vere, the Sixth Earl of Derby, and Christopher Marlowe. He denies that he carries a brief for Shakespeare, saying that he is "no opponent of the various theories in the sense that I wish to stop them from being propagated." Yet he cannot desist from scorn (p. 306):
"Before bringing this book to a close there is one other point with which I wish to deal. Though they may not be great Elizabethan scholars, some of the theorists are eminent men in other walks of life, and certainly they are not fools. How is it then that they can seriously put forward such hopelessly inadequate and often ludicrous arguments as we have examined in these pages?" Then schoolman Gibson begins to apologize for the answer he is about to supply to his own question. He calls it his "theory of theorists." Those who have suggested any author, other than the Stratford actor, he tars with this interesting accusatory brush: "...I do not think that subconsciously they believe in their theories, though no doubt consciously they have persuaded themselves that they do..." He says, concerning the insincerity of lesser doubters, "there are a few about whom I have darker suspicions. I do not think they really believe their own theories...I incline to the belief that they are playing a gigantic practical joke upon their readers to see how much these will swallow..." Thus spake Gibson the Refuter--but is (or was) he the last of the Troglodytes? No. Yet he often implies that Baconians, of whatever ilk, sometimes added to Elizabethan and sixteenth century history a few verifiable facts. One must cherish a concealed Bardolater who retreats even an inch. Can you hear me, Sam?Queen Elizabeth I could speak five languages. Francis Bacon's mother Anne could read Greek and Latin and had memorized several Greek tragedies. The well-to-do of the times educated both their sons and daughters.
Shakespeare cannot be blamed that his father and mother and his two sisters were illiterate. But it is inexcusably and exceedingly strange that his daughter Judith, who signed her marriage record with an "x," was never taught to read or write.
