An Introduction to Shakespeare Part 16

+Date+.--The Globe Theater was burned on June 29, 1613, when a play called _Henry VIII or All is True_ was being performed. So far as stylistic tests can decide, this was not long after the composition of the play. Sir Henry Wotton, the antiquarian, writing from hearsay knowledge, says that the play being acted at the time of the fire was "a new play called All is True." Shakespeare's scenes in this drama may thus have been his last dramatic work. A praise of King James in the last scene was probably written not later than the rest of the play, and thus insures a date later than 1603. The earliest print of the play was the First Folio, 1623.

+Source+.--Holinshed was the chief source. Halle furnished certain details. Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_ tells the Cranmer story.

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CHAPTER XIV

FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

The mystery which enwraps so much of Shakespeare's life, combined with the interest which naturally centers around a great genius, is ideally calculated to stimulate human imagination to fantastic guess-work. It is probably for this reason that a number of famous delusions about Shakespeare have at different times arisen. Some of these are of sufficient importance to deserve attention. Three widely different types of mistakes can be observed.

+The Shakespeare Apocrypha+.--The most excusable of these delusions was the belief that Shakespeare wrote a large number of plays which are now known to be the work of other men. Some of these plays were printed, either during the poet's life or after his death, with "William Shakespeare" or "W. S." on the t.i.tle-page. It is now practically certain that the full name was a printer's forgery, and that the letters W. S. were either designed to deceive or else the initials of some contemporary dramatist (such as Wentworth Smith, for example).

Six of these spurious dramas were included in the Third Folio of Shakespeare's complete works. Since this came out forty years after the First Folio, when men who had known Shakespeare personally {211} were dead, we certainly cannot believe that its editor had better information than those of the First Folio, who were the poet's personal friends, and who did not include these plays. The spurious dramas printed in the Third Folio were: _The London Prodigal, The History of the Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The History of Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _The Tragedy of Locrine_.

Among the other plays imputed to Shakespeare at various times are: _Fair Em, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Feversham, The Two n.o.ble Kinsmen, Edward Third_, and _Sir Thomas More_. Some good critics, chiefly literary men, not scholars, still believe that Shakespeare wrote parts of the last three; but it is practically certain that he had nothing to do with the others, and his part in all these disputed plays is extremely doubtful.

+Shakespearean Forgeries+.--Men who a.s.signed the above spurious plays to Shakespeare made an honest error of judgment, but other men have committed deliberate forgeries in regard to him. At the end of the eighteenth century, W. H. Ireland forged papers which he attempted to impose on the public as recently discovered Mss. of the 'Swan of Avon.'

One of these finds, a play called _Vortigern_, was actually acted by a prominent company. But the unShakespearean character of these 'great discoveries' was soon perceived, and Ireland at length confessed.

Another famous fraud of a wholly different kind was that of J. P.

Collier. The great services which this man has rendered to the world of scholarship make {212} all men reluctant to pa.s.s too severe censure on his conduct; but it is only fair that the public should be warned against deception. He pretended to have found a folio copy of the plays corrected and revised on the margin in the handwriting of a contemporary of Shakespeare. Some of these revisions were actual improvements on the carelessly printed text; but it is now known that they were forgeries. Similar changes were made by him in other important doc.u.ments, and were for some time accepted as genuine.

+The Bacon Controversy+.--During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the contention was started that Shakespeare was merely an obscure actor who never wrote a line, and that the Shakespearean plays were actually written by his great contemporary, Francis Bacon, who was pleased to let these products of his own genius appear under the name of another man. This delusion is usually considered as beginning with an article by Miss Delia Bacon in _Putnam's Monthly_ (January, 1856), although the idea had been twice suggested during the eight years preceding.

The Baconian arguments fall into four groups. First, they argue that there is no proof to establish the ident.i.ty of Shakespeare, the actor, with the author of the plays. This is untrue. We have more than one reference by his contemporaries, identifying the actor with the poet, some so strong that the Baconians themselves can explain them away only by a.s.suming that the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully deceives the public. By a.s.sumptions like that, any one could prove anything.

The second point of the Baconians is that a man of {213} Shakespeare's limited education could not have written plays replete with so many kinds of learning. This argument is weak at both ends. It a.s.sumes as true that Shakespeare had a limited education and that his plays are full of knowledge learned from books rather than from life. The first of these points rests on vague tradition only, and the second is still a debatable question. But even if we admit these two points, what then? Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old and had probably lived in London for five or six years when the first book from his hand appeared in its present form. Any man capable of writing _Hamlet_ could educate himself during several years in the heart of a great city.

Thirdly, a certain lady found in Bacon's writings a large number of expressions which seemed to her to resemble similar phrases in Shakespeare. Except to the mind of an ardent Baconian many of these show no likeness whatever. Most of those which do show any likeness were proverbial or stock expressions which can be found in other writers.

Lastly, various Baconians have repeatedly a.s.serted that they had found in the First Folio acrostic signatures of Bacon's name; that one could spell Bacon or Francis Bacon by picking out letters in the text according to certain rules. But unfortunately either these acrostics do not work out, or else the rules are so loose that similar acrostics can be found anywhere, in modern books or pamphlets, and even on the gravestones of our ancestors. Many of the more intelligent Baconians themselves have no faith in this last form of evidence.

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On the other hand, there are certain very weighty objections to Bacon as author of the plays. In the first place, it is a miracle that one man should produce either the works of Bacon or Shakespeare alone; it is a miracle past all belief that the same man in one lifetime should have written both. In the second place, the little verse which Bacon is known to have written shows clearly how limited he was as a poet, no matter how great in other directions. Moreover, his prose, though splendid in its kind, is wholly unlike the prose of Shakespeare.

Finally, Bacon's contemptuous att.i.tude toward woman and marriage was diametrically opposed to that found in Shakespeare. To imagine that the same man wrote both sets of writings is to a.s.sume that he was one man one day and another the next.

The advocates of this strange theory vary greatly in fairmindedness and ability, and it is not just to judge them all by the mad extremes of some; but, nevertheless, their writings, taken as a whole, form one of the strangest medleys of garbled facts and fallacious reasoning which has ever imposed on an honest and intelligent but uninformed public.

On the _Shakespeare Apocrypha_, see C. F. Tucker Brooke's edition of fourteen spurious plays, under this t.i.tle, Oxford, University Press, 1908. On the forgeries and other questions, Appendix I of Mr. Lee's _Life_ is the readiest place of reference.