NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY The Gift of Winfleld NsLira MsicQ&eea SHAKSPER NOT SHAKESPEARE BY WILLIAM H. AWARDS Author of " The Butterflie^f North America," "A Voyage up the River Amazon," etc. îditb portraits and fac-similés lyET BVKRY TUB STAND ON ITS OWN BOTTOM —Apt Proverb CINCINNATI THK ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY 1900 Copyright, 1900, by THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY, Entered at Stationers' Hall, London. ' ' The life of Shaksfere is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should turn upT —Chari^ks Dickkns. INTRODUCTORY. It is full time that reasonable men should re-exam¬ ine the evidences on which they have beheved that an illiterate butcher, from an ignorant and bookless in¬ land village, who flew to lyondon in disgrace before the constable, and became a servitor, and later, a pla3''er at a public theater, the then most degraded place of amusement, and who spent the greater part of every year in strolling through England with his troupe of comedians, sat himself down, and without preparation or knowledge, dashed off Hamlet,—and not only Ham¬ let, but nearly two score of the world's greatest plays. This exploit is so discordant with the facts of the man's life and environment, that his ablest and most authoritative biographer is obliged to suggest that these plays were written "without effort"; that is, without study or equipment, "by inspiration, not by design' ', thus making of the Bard of his admiration, as he never wearies of calling him, a species of literary Blind Tom. He certainly did write by inspiration, if he wrote at all, for in his uninspired moments he pos¬ sessed not one accomplishment or characteristic that would help him to the writing of a play of any sort,— (v) vi INTRODUCTORY, not even the manual art of writing. Another biogra¬ pher, of high authority, tells us that this man wrote the plays simply to fill the theater and his own pockets—^not because, as a poet, he was compelled to sing. In the pages to follow, I assert and prove that the Shakespeare plays were not written for William Shaksper's theater, and that no one of them was ever played at his theater, except in special scenes, or in pantomime; and also that no man, during his lifetime, attributed the plays to William Shaksper, or suspected him of any authorship whatever. I assert and prove that, until the issue of the First Folio of the Collected Plays, in 1623, years after the death of William Shak¬ sper, these plays, singly or collectively, had no repu¬ tation whatever; that they were not comprehended by the people, learned or unlearned, of that age; and that they are but just now, after a lapse of three hundred years, beginning to be comprehended. The Shaksper myth originated in the verses of Ben Jonson prefixed to the Folio, written as a paid advertisement, and in the bitterest ridicule of William Shaksper and the pre¬ tensions set up for him by the syndicate of publishers: also in the lying testimony, in the same Folio, which Heminge and Condell, Shaksper's ignorant fellow- players, are made by some unknown writer to stand sponsors for. I show that he died as devoid of ac¬ complishments as when he entered I^ondon,—unknown introductory. vii to any man of letters or of eminence, unnoticed and unlamented. The Knglish speaking world has been humbugged in this matter long enough, but the labors of Halliwell-Phillipps, of Ingleby, and Furnivall, and Fleay, at length enable us to know exactly what Wil¬ liam Shaksper did do, and what he did not do. He made, and stuck to, and left behind him, a great heap of money, and that was the sole achievement of his fifty-two years on this planet. Began poor, died rich—^which a Harvard professor, another biographer, thinks was as wonderful a feat as the writing of the Shakespeare plays. It is enough for me to prove that William Shaksper did not write these plays. Who did, I know not, and offer no suggestions; but when the venerable Shaksper image has tumbled, and the critics have a little time to clear their eyes of dust and cobwebs, the real authors may be discovered,—authors, for I believe there were several associates who wrote under the assumed name of "William Shakespeare." widi/iam H. Edwards. CONTENTS. The Proposition, The Demonstration, PART I. I. The Family of William Shaksper, • 7 II. As to the House in which John Shaksper Dived . 16 III. The School advantages of the Boy William, . 20 IV. The Youth of William Shaksper, . ■ 33 V. Whither ? . 40 VI. The Fife of William on entering Dondon, • 49 VII. The Theaters in Don don, .... • 94 VIII. William Shaksper's Thirst for Wealth, . . 177 IX. The Testimony of the Plays, .... . 193 PART II. X. References to Shakespeare, Author or Works, or to the Player, Shaksper, or Shakspere, . . 259 XI. The First Folio, 304 XII. Heminge and Con dell, 350 XIII. The Sonnets, 365 XIV. Fast years at Stratford, and death of Shaksper, . 375 XV. That William Shaksper never learned to write, . 385 XVI. Further evidence of the ignorance of contempo¬ raries respecting William Shaksper, . . . 413 XVII. Absence of allusions to Stratford-on-Avon, or to Warwickshire, in the Plays; the Authors unob¬ servant of Nature, 430 XVIII. Views of the Baynes School 438 (ix) X CONTENTS. XIX. Views of the Phillipps School; of Fleay and some other commentators, 449 XX. The Smattering, Picking-up School, . . . 453 XXI. The Likenesses of William Shaksper, . , . 464 XXII. A Suggestion, ^ 486 XXIII. The Summing Up, 491 I.ISI' 01^ II.LUSTRAI'IONS. PACK I. Fac-simile of John Shaksper's name, 8 2-4. other styles of same, .... 8 5- Same, with terminal German r, . . . 9 6. Another, with open German terminal r, . 9 7. Same, with terminal e following the German r, 9, 10 8. The real boy Shaksper, .... 26 9- Rolfe's notion of boy Shaksper, 27 10. William Kemp, Shaksper's Instructor in Comedy, 60 II. Richard Tarleton, another clown of same Company, 61 12. Interior of the Swan Theater, 1596 . 106 13- William Shaksper's pretended signature to deed. from Malone, ..... 387 14. The same, Boston Library version. 390 15- The pretended signature to a mortgage, Boston Li¬ brary version, ..... 391 16. The five pretended signatures. Deed, Mortgage, and Will, after Drake, ..... 392 17- Malone's copy of the three Will signatures. 394 18. Same, enlarged, ..... 395 19- Second and third of the Will signatures, Boston Li¬ brary version, ..... 396 20. The letters «, k, s, p, of the three Will signatures. Malone, ...... 398 21. The three Will signatures, from Lee, 400 22. Fac-simile of the name John Shaksper, 405 23- The counterfeit signature of William Shaksper in the Florio Montaigne, ..... 411 24. The Droeshout likeness of William Shaksper, 465 25- The Flower Portrait of William Shaksper, 469 26. Macmonnies' Statue of William Shaksper, 472 27. The Stratford Bust, ..... 474 28. The Kasselstadt Death Mask of no one knows whom, 482 29. Lord Ronald Go wer's composition likeness of Will¬ iam Shaksper, at Stratford, .... 484 (xi) SHAKSPER NOT SHAKESPEARE. THE PROPOSITION. That William Shaksper could not have written the "Shakespeare" poems and plays. "It must either be shown that Bacon did actually write them, in which case Shaksper was not their author, or that Shakspere could not possibly have written them, in which case somebody else must have done so. ' ' Alfred Kussel Wallace, T.T.D., F.R.S., etc., etc., in the Arena, July, 1893. "The whole case seems to lie in this: that the bur¬ den of proving that Shakspere did not write the works rests upon those who say he did not write them, and as yet these persons have not submitted an item of proof." ("Tistener"), Boston Transcript, 6th No¬ vember, 1897. THE DEMONSTRATION. I propose to show that William Shaksper, often called Shakspere, could not possibly have written the works attributed to him under the name of ' 'William Shakespeare", or "Shake-speare", in which case, ac¬ cording to Dr. Wallace, "somebody else must have done so". It matters not who that somebody was. The poems and plays are in evidence that, in the time of Elizabeth and James, there lived one man or several men who wrote them; but that the man was the player whose family name was "Shaksper", and whose name is appended to a deed and a mortgage "Shaksper" and ' 'Shakspar' ' and three times to a will ' 'Shaksper' ', 2 SHaksp:ÖR NO'Í SHAK^SPBÍAR:^. there is no evidence; there is nothing but inference, conjecture, unwarranted assumption and baseless (though general) reputation. During his life of fifty- two years none of his relations, neighbors, or intimates, and none of his contemporaries, testified that this man was the author of these works. The story originated after his death—in mockery, and gathered strength as the years went by, for the simple reason that originally nobody cared for the Shakespeare plays, or who wrote them. Towards the close of the seventeenth century, when all who had known anything of the matter had passed away, the legend received a fresh impetus from certain antiquarians and story-tellers; and when, two generations ago, some one bethought him of looking into the matter, the whole world was attributing the plays to illiterate William Shaksper. A great deal of investigation has been going on during these last years, and as the result, I undertake to show that the possibilities and facts are all against the Stratford man. I propose also to satisfy the requirement of the Tistener of the Transcript. I shall ground my arguments largely on citations from the 9th (and last) edition of Mr. J. O. Halliwell- Phillipps' "Outlines of the Tife of Shakespeare," Ton- don, 1890, and Dr. C. J. Ingleby's "Centurie of Prayse", 2d edition, edited by Miss Tucy Toulmin Smith, 1879. Mr. F. G. Fleay, one of the most eminent of the Shakespearian scholars, says: "The documents on which the facts of his (William Shaksper's) private life are founded have been excellently well collected and arranged in the Outlines, etc., by Mr. Phillipps. This book is a treasure house of documents, and it is 'Th:^ proposiI'ioN. 3 greatly to be regretted that they are not published by themselves". The suggestion of Mr. Fleay seems to have been acted on by Mr. Daniel W. Wilder, who in 1893, Boston, published "The Tife of Shakespeare (Shak- sper) compiled from the best sources without Com¬ ment' '. He copies word for word all the facts given by Mr. Phillipps, 8th edition. Mr. Wilder says in his preface: "Mr. Phillipps' studies embraced the whole field of our earlier literature. . . . Gradually he came to concentrate himself upon Shakespeare (Shak- sper) alone, and more particularly upon the facts of his life' '. The other work, ' 'The Centurie of Prayse' ', with its supplement by Dr. F. J. Furnivall, 1886, is the result of a painstaking search through all Knglish lit¬ erature, poets, prose writers, records of every de¬ scription, from diaries and note books to the records of the Master of the Revels, (as to the names of the plays supposed to be Shakespeare's acted before the court). Private correspondence has everywhere been examined for a mention of either player Shaksper, or author Shakespeare, or allusions to the Shakespeare works; and all this for a period of one hundred years, beginning soon after the arrival at Tondon of the player, and soon after the first appearance of the Shakespeare Plays. Every mention of either player or author or allusion or reference to works for one hundred years by any¬ body which has come down from that age, with two or three exceptions to be hereafter noted, is given in this valuable book. I shall also cite Richard Grant White's Memoirs prefixed to his edition of the "Complete Works of 4 shaksp:^r noo" shakksprarb. William Shakespeare"; and the same author's Studies in Shakespeare' ' ; and ' 'England Without and Within", etc.; Drake's "Shakespeare and His Times", Eondon, 1817; J. P. Collier's "Eife of Shakespeare, and His¬ tory of the English Stage to the time of Shakespeare' ', 1843, New York ed., 1853; "Shakespeare's Prede¬ cessors in the English Drama", by J. Addington Sy- monds, Eondon, 1884; F. G. Fleay's "Chronicle His¬ tory of the Eife and Works of William Shakespeare' ', Eondon, 1886*; and his "Chronicle History of the English Stage", 1890; Bishop Wordsworth's "Shake¬ speare and The Bible", 3d Ed., Eondon, 1880; Pro¬ fessor Barrett Wendell's "William Shakspere", Bos¬ ton, 1894; Mrs. Dall's, "What we really know about Shakespeare", New York, r895; Juggles', "The Plays of Shakespeare founded on Eiterary Forms", Boston, 1895; "Our English Homer, or Shakespeare His¬ torically Considered", by Thomas W. White, Eondon, 1892; Sidney Eee's "Eife of William Shakespeare", Eondon and New York, 1898; Dowden's "Introduction to Shakespeare", New York, 1895; Prof. G. E. Craik's "English of Shakespeare, and English Eiterature and Eanguage"; and Edwin's "Reed's Bacon vs. Shake- spere", Boston, 1897. Also somewhat from Dr. Doran's "Annals of the Stage" ; and from the writings of the Shakespearian editors, Drs. Rolfe and Fumi- vall; and rather by way of comment, I shall quote from Smith's "Bacon and Shakespeare", Eondon, 1857; Morgan's "The Shakespearean 'Myth", 3d ed., Cincinnati, 1888; Donnelly's "The Great Crypto- * The first of these books will be referred to as "Fleay" or "Fleay, kife", the other as "Fleay, Hist." Th:^ proposiimon. 5 gram", Chicago, 1888; and Mrs. Potts' "Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare?", Dondon, 1893. Halliwell-Phillipps is the greatest authority on the subject of William Shaksper by consent of all Shak- sperians. He was a most indefatigable worker, and devoted the greater part of his long life and a great part of his fortune to collecting the facts relating to him of Stratford, under the belief that he was the same individual as the author Shakespeare, and in searching for documents to illustrate his life. Conse¬ quently we know a vast deal about William Shaksper, and about everybody related to him, his grandfather, his father, his brothers and sisters, his daughters and sons-in-law, "and his cousins and his aunts"; also about Stratford-on-Avon. We know of this William from his boyhood to his departure for Dondon, and in Dondon and Stratford again to the day of his death and then to his burial. We know of him as a player, as part proprietor of one or more theaters, as poor, and as rich. We have in great detail his business transac¬ tions, his purchase of lands and houses, his deeds and mortgages, his business of loaning money, his suits at law; his trading in various lines, but surprisingly noth¬ ing whatever concerning any literary employment or pro¬ clivities. A thousand times Mr. Phillipps speaks of him as "the great dramatist", or "the bard of our ad¬ miration' '. Kven in the index he itemizes about ' 'the great dramatist". His two large volumes comprise nine hundred pages,—and after all, striking out some few elegiac verses, or eulogies, from the beginning of the successive Folio editions of the Shakespeare Plays, for good and sufficient reasons, (which I shall give in due time) therç U UQt one Hnç in th^ whole work that 6 SHAKSPER NOT SHAK:ESPBARE. identifies William Shaksper as the author of the poems and plays—not one line. We are made to know about him in every aspect but that of author, and there his¬ tory is silent. The biography, therefore, is of no more value in the case than would have been that of Robert Arden, his grandfather. Mr. Phillipps has carved for himself an unbeautiful idol, out of a shaky pfece of timber, and grovels before it as if he were a Polynesian or a Hindoo. The waste of time and labor shown by his "Outlines" is pitiful. However, as most people believe, without knowing why, just as Mr. Phillipps believed, I have to follow his lead, but before I get through I will substantiate my proposition. The name Shakespeare is quite another etymologi- cally and orthographically from Shagsper, or Shak- spere, or Shaksper, or Shaxpeyr, or Shackysper, or Shaxper. It is not in evidence that any author lived in the age of Elizabeth whose family and baptismal name was William Shakespeare, or Shake-speare. There is no such historical man—no individual known who bore that name—and the inference is fair that the name as printed upon certain poems and plays was a pseudonym, like that of"Mark Twain" or of "George Eliot". Many conjectures have been ventured as to the real author, but there have never been proofs, and the right, even now, in 1900, remains an open ques¬ tion. Nevertheless, without proof, the authorship has been attributed to a player, later a manager in and a proprietor of a Eondon theater, one William Shak¬ sper, and books innumerable have been written on the cool assumption that he was the man. Now the exposure of his dairn is the object of this writing. PART I. SHAKSPER NOT SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER I. THB FAMILY OF WILLIAM SHAKSPER. The family of the player were known to their neigh¬ bors as Shaksper; that is, the first syllable had the sound of back^ the second of per, e short, making Shaksper. As no one of them in all their generations preceding the player had known how to write, there is no evidence from themselves as to the spelling or pro¬ nunciation of the name. It was written by other persons, however, in a variety of forms, but almost always expresses the sound Shak-sper. R. G. White has given thirty of these forms, and other authors have collected nearly as many more. In the records of the town council of Stratford, and of the Court of Records, the name is written many times. We know this because Hälliwell-Phillipps has printed every mention of John Shaksper which has been found. In his pages are to be seen Shaksper, Shakys- per, Shaxper, Shaxpur, Shaxysper, Shexper, Shakis- per, Shakspeyr, Shakgspeyr, Shacksper, Shaxpere, Shakspere, Shaksbere,-Shakspear. Mr. Phillipps gives many fac-similes of the name John Shaksper as writ¬ ten. Also gf Mary Shaksper, John's wife, and one of (7) 8 shakspkr not shakrspbark. his uncle, Hary Shaksper. I find the name in these fac-similes thirty-eight times. We have Shakpeyr or Shakkspeyr fifteen times. Cut i shows this style of signature: 1. Nineteen are Shaksper, Shakysper, some as shown in Cut 2 (the last letter read r by Phillipps): 2. Others end in the ordinary modem r, as in Cut 3: 3. A variation of the r in 3 is shown in Cut 4, page 232. Phillipps reads the name Shakyspere, but it is nothing otherwise than Shakysper: 4. THE FAMIEY OF WIEEIAM shaksper. 9 Others have the terminal r in the German form, as seen in Cut 5, taken from H.-P., 11, 236: 5. Phillipps reads this letter as r, but the same letter written by a rapid or an inexpert penman, so as to open and become like a as in Cut 6 (11, 239), he reads re: There are a few signatures where the r (like that in Cut 3) and e, each distinct, are undoubtedly blended into one character, but in nearly all cases the final letter is merely an expanded r. If the scrivener de¬ sired to make re, with a German r, he wrote it as in Cut 7 (H.-P., II, 13), each letter distinct: Another fine example of this distinct r and e is seen in H.-P., II, 90. Wherever there is the slightest flourish at the extremity of the r (as, for example, Cut 4), Phillipps reads the letter as re, for it would 6. 7. i o SHAKSPKR not SHAKESPEARE. be painful if the name of the ' ' bard of our admira¬ tion ' ' could not be made to end with the two magical letters. But a German when made separately, nat¬ urally carries a flourish at the extremity, as seen in Malone's flgure of that letter accompanying his fac¬ simile of Shaksper's signature to the deed of 1612, and repeated herein, Chapter XV. Also as seen in Cut 8, an enlarged fac-simile of a script r from Wood- berry's "Method of I^eaming the German I^an- guage:" 8. It is plain that the German r carries a flourish that has sometimes been taken for an e. The use of the German r, we are told, was com¬ mon among scriveners during the reigns of Elizabeth and James ; but that it was also used half a century later can be seen in the fac-simile of John Milton's contract with Samuel Symons for the sale of the manuscript of Paradise Eost, given in Pickering's edition of Milton's Works, Vol. i. In this the Ger¬ man r repeatedly occurs in such words as " whereby", "whereof", and "were", followed by a distinct e of the same species as the one which precedes the r in these same words. Inasmuch as nearly, if not quite all, the mentions of John Shaksper's name occur in the records, and were therefore written by scriveners, the larger part of them undoubtedly ending in r, as seen in cuts 1-4, it is to be presumed that these sprawling characters spoken of were intended for r also. Fifteen of the fac-similes have the first syllable th:^ famii^y of wili^iam shakspfr. h of the surname Shax. It is evident that John was known among his neighbors as Shaxper or Shaksper, and nothing else. His son William, therefore, began life as William Shaksper or Shaxper. R. G. White says : ' ' The name sometimes appears as Chaksper or Shaksper. It is possible that Shakes¬ peare is a corruption of some name of a more peaceful meaning, and therefore perhaps of humbler deriva¬ tion. ' ' Dr. Morgan says : ' ' The name is supposed to have been simply Jacques Pierre (John Peter). This Shak is the present mispronunciation of Jacques prevalent in Warwickshire."* Phillipps, II, 59, prints a letter from Abraham Sturley, of Stratford, to Richard Quiney, a towns¬ man, living in Tondon, 4th November, 1598, asking his aid in getting some money ' ' through our countri- man Mr. Wm. Shak." Shak is not Shake, and the mention shows what the pronunciation of the first syllable of the player's name was. This sort of ab¬ breviation of a surname is not uncommon in our * "In all the forms (of the Shakspername) tabulated by "Wise, the one printed on the title pages of the plays and poems "Shakespeare", does not appear. It is unique. So far as we know, no person in Stratford, or in any other part of the king¬ dom, previous to the publication of the "Venus and Adonis, wrote it in that way. Literature had an absolute monopoly of it. " Reed, 13. ' ' In Grecian mythology, Pallas Athene was the goddess of wisdom, philosophy, poetry and the fine arts. Her original name was simply Pallas, a word derived from pellein, signifying to brandish or shake. She was generally represented with a spear. Athens, the home of the drama, was under the protection of this Spear-shaker. In our age such a signature would be understood at once as q, pseudonym." Id. 14. 12 SHAKSPiöR NOP SHAKBSPÍ^AR:^. country among Knglish emigrants. In a mining village which I lived in, Billy Clatworthy went by the name of Billy Clat ; Mrs. Cadwallader, Mrs. Cad ; and Mrs. Shepherd, Mrs. Shep.* So, to a Stratford man, William Shaksper was Wm. Shak. William Shaksper was the son of John Shaksper, who in his younger daj^s had been a tenant of Robert Arden, farmer. After Arden's death, John married Mary, his daughter, and at an uncertain date removed to Stratford-on-Avon, where he practiced the trade of a butcher. H.-P. tells us, I, 35, that " for some years subsequently to this period (his removal) John Shak¬ sper was a humble tradesman, holding no conspicuous position in the town". Aubrey says that John was a butcher, and that young William, as he had been told by some of the neighbors, "exercised his father's trade' '. Phillipps, I, 178, says that "both families"—the Shakspers and the Ardens—^were really descended from obscure Knglish country yeomen ; and on page 55, "that nearly every one of the boys connections was a farmer". Again, on page 38, that "both parents were absolutely illiterate' '. As it was then, so it had ever been, always peasants or obscure country yeomen. "For years the European world grew upon a single type, in which the forms of the fathers' thought were the forms of the sons, and the last descendant was occupied in treading into paths the foot-prints of his distant ancestors." Fronde, Hist. Eng., I, i. Dr. Johnson asserts that "in the time of Shakes¬ peare, the lower classes were but just emerging from barbarity". th:^ famiivy of wii^fiam shakspkr. 13 " The inventory of Robert Arden's (father to Mary) goods (H.-P. says he was a farmer and nothing more), which was taken shortly after his death, in 1556, enables us to realize the kind of life that was followed by the poet's mother during her girlhood. In the total absence of books or means of intellectual educa¬ tion, her requirements must have been restricted to an experimental knowledge of matters connected with the farm. ' ' There can be no doubt that the maiden spent most of her time in the homeliest of rustic employments; and it is not impossible . . . she occasionally as¬ sisted in the more robust occupations of the field. . . . Existence was passed in her father's house in some respects, we should say, rather after the manner of pigs than of human beings. . . . There were no table knives, no forks, no crockery. The food was manipulated on fiat pieces of stout wood. The means of ablution were lamentably defective ; what were called towels were merely for wiping the hands after a meal, and there was not a single wash basin in the establishment. As for the inmates and other laborers, it was very seldom indeed, if ever, that they either washed their hands or combed their hair. ' ' H.-P., 28. It is necessary to call attention to these particulars that the early familiarity of William Shaksper with the ways and manners of gentlewomen, not to speak of ladies, countesses, duchesses, princesses and queens, may be estimated. His wife was just such another rustic as his mother, yet a writer in the Atlantic Monthly, for December, 1897, suggests that the wife 14 SHAKSPEÎR NOT SHAKESPRARB. "served as raw material to be worked up into Imo- genes and Rosalinds—enchanting creatures" ! A great deal of labor has been expended in an effort to make the Ardens to have been of gentle birth, but so high an authority as Dowden is compelled to say: ' 'That these Ardens were connected with an ancient family of gentle folk of that name has been asserted, and may be true, but the statement cannot be proved". "Stratford then contained about 1800 inhabitants, who dwelt chieffy in thatched cottages, which straggled over the ground, etc. The streets were foul with offal, mud, muck heaps and reeking stable refuse, the accumulation of which the town ordinances and the inffiction of which fines could not prevent, even before the doors of the better sort of people." R. G. White, 21. Cottages of that day in Stratford consisted of mud walls and a thatched roof. See H.- P., 205. "At this period, and for many generations after¬ wards, the sanitary condition of the thoroughfares of Stratford-on-Avon was simply terrible Streamlets of a water power sufficient for the operation of corn mills meandered through the town. . . . Here and there small middens were ever in the course of accu¬ mulation, the receptacles of offal and every species of nastiness. A regulation for the removal of these col¬ lections to certain specified localities interspersed through the borough, and known as common dung¬ hills, appears to have been the extent of the interfer¬ ence that the authorities ventured or cared to exercise in such matters. Sometimes when the nuisance was thought to be sufficiently flagrant, they made a raid TH:e FAMII^Y OF WIIyWAM SHAKSPKR. 15 on those inhabitants who had suffered their refuse to accumulate largely in the highways. On one of these occasions, in April, 1552, John Shaksper was amerced in the sum of twelve pence for having amassed what was no doubt a conspicuous sterquinarium before his house in Henley street; and under these unsavory cir¬ cumstances does the history of the poet's father com¬ mence in the records of England". H.-P., I, 24. Garrick described Stratford-on-Avon a hundred years later (1769), as "the most dirty, unseemly, ill-paved, wretched-looking town in all Britain. ' ' i6 shakspkr not shakespkark. CHAPTER II. AS TO THE HOUSE IN WHICH JOHN SHAKSPER LIVED. I quote White's "England Without and Within," p. 526: "Of all that I saw connected with his (William Shaksper) memory, his house was the most disappoint¬ ing; and more, it was sad, depressing. The house had recently been 'restored,' and so destroyed. Its outside has an air of newness that is positively of¬ fensive. All expression of rural antiquity has been scraped and painted, and roofed, and clap-boarded out of it. "Within, however, not much of this smoothing has been done. My heart sank within me as I looked around upon the rude, mean dwelling-place of him who had filled the world with the splendor of his im¬ aginings. It is called a house, and any building in¬ tended for a dwelling-place is a house; but the interior of this one is hardly that of a rustic cottage; it is almost that of a hovel, poverty-stricken, squalid, ken¬ nel-like. A house so cheerless and comfortless I had not seen in rural England. The poorest, meanest farm-house that I had ever entered in New England or on Eong Island was a more-cheerful habitation. And amid these sordid surroundings William Shakespeare grew to manhood. . . . Then for the first time I knew and felt from how low a condition of life Shake- peare had arisen. For his family wçrç nçt reduced tg HOUSE IN WHICH JOHN SHAKSPER EIVED. 17 this; they had risen to it. This was John Shaksper's home in the days of his brief prosperity. . . The upper part of the house, to which you climb by a little rude stairway that is hardly good enough for a decent stable, has been turned into a museum of doubtful relics and gimcracks, and is made as unlike as possible what it must have been when Shakespeare lived there. There is very little of this museum that is worth attention, but there is one object of some in¬ terest. It is a letter written to Wm. Shackspere by Richard Quiney, of Stratford, asking for a loan of money. This scrap of paper has the distinction of being the only existing thing, except his will, that we know must have been in Shakespeare's hands, for as to the Florio Montaigne, others whose judgment on such a point is worth mine ten times over, think, as I do, that it is a forgery." Further: "To Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shottery I went, taking the path through the fields which Shakespeare took too often for his happiness. There is little to be said about this house; which is merely a thatched cottage of the same grade as the house in Henley street—in its original condition a picturesque object in a landscape, but the lowliest sort of human habitation. I sat upon the settle by the great fire¬ place, where the wonderful boy of eighteen was en¬ snared by the woman of twenty-six. I could not help but think of the toil, the wretchedness, the perplexity, and the shame that were born to him beneath that roof. . . . Thus ended my visit to Stratford-on- Avon, where I advise no one to go who would preserve any elevated idea connected with Shakespeare's per- 18 SHASKPKR NOT SHAKKSP:eARB. sonality. ... It was with a sense of mingled gloom and wrong of rightful expectation that I turned my back upon Stratford-on-Avon. ' ' [Mrs. Dall assures her readers that Halliwell-Phil- lipps "is the highest authority in all that concerns the life of William Shakespeare", meaning William Shak- sper, of Stratford. Mr. Phillipps tells us that John Shaksper and Mary, his wife, "were really descended from obscure yeomen", and that "both were absolutely illiterate." Further, that John began life in Stratford "as an humble tradesman", either a butcher or a wool dealer, or both. Yet Mrs. Dall can say: "As to his (William Shaksper's) social station, it was that to which New England is indebted for her best citizens— for the Winthrops, the Peabodys, the Rogerses, and Lawrences and the Appletons"—^which certainly is mighty hard on the Winthrops, etc. Undoubtedly some of the men and women who emigrated to New England after 1620 were of the station to which John Shaksper belonged, absolutely illiterate, obscure yeo¬ men, or humble tradesmen, but it was a far cry from them to the Winthrops and Appletons. One set was at the bottom, the mud sills, the other was the top of the structure. Dr. Leonard Bacon says: "The princi¬ pal planters of Massachusetts were English country gentlemen of no inconsiderable fortune, of enlarged understanding improved by liberal education' '. Dr. Byington also adds his testimony: "The Puri¬ tans who came to Massachusetts Bay were, for the most part, in comfortable circumstances at home, with good education and with good social connections in HOUSE IN WHICH JOHN SHAKSPER EIVED. 19 Kngland; and an unusual proportion of them were graduates from English Universities." Mrs. Dall heads her list of authorities for the life of William Shaksper with Charles Knight's "Eife of Shakespeare",—a work of imagination strictly, built up to suit the man who, he thinks, wrote the Shakes¬ peare plays, but without one historical fact to sup¬ port it.] 20 SHAKSPEÍR NOT SHAKRSPKARR. CHAPTER III. THE SCHOOL ADVANTAGES OF THE BOY WILLIAM. "It must have been about this period, 1568, that Shakespeare (Shaksper) entered into the mysteries of the horn-book and the A, B, C. Although both his parents were absolutely illiterate, they had the sagacity to appreciate the importance of an education for their son, and the poet, somehow or other, was taught to read and write, the necessary preliminaries to admis¬ sion into the Free Schools. There were few persons in Stratford capable of initiating him even into these pre¬ paratory accomplishmentd\ etc. H.-P., I, 38. As a matter of fact, there is no proof whatever that William ever went to any sort of school, or ever learned to read; and as to his illiterate parents having the sagacity to appreciate the importance of his learning, the prob¬ ability is that as became such illiterate people, they cared nothing about it. The Shakspers had got on very well so far without that accomplishment. ' 'Al¬ though there is no certain information on the sub¬ ject, it may perhaps be assumed that at this time boys usually entered the free schools at the age of seven. ... If so, unless its system of instruc¬ tion differed essentially from that pursued in other estabhshments of a similar character, his earliest knowledge of Tatin was derived from two well-known books of the time, the 'Accidence', and the 'Senten- tiae Pueriles'. The best authorities unite in telling us SCHOOI, ADVANTAGES OF THE BOY WIEElAM. 21 that the poet" (z. e., player Shaksper) "imbibed a certain amount of hatin at school, but that his ac¬ quaintance with that language was, throughout his life, of a very limited character. It is not probable that scholastic learning was ever congenial to his tastes, and it should be recollected that books in most parts of the country were then of very rare occur¬ rence. I/ily's Grammar and a few classical works, chained to the desks of the free schools, were prob¬ ably the only volumes of the kind to be found at Stratford-on-Avon, Exclusive of Bibles, Church Services, Psalters and education manuals, there were certainly not more than two or three dozen books, if so many, in the whole town. The copy of the black- letter English Historj'^, so often depicted as well thumbed by Shakespeare in his father's parlor, never existed out of the imagination." H.-P., I, 53. This disposes of Charles Knight's figment: "In the humble home of Shakespeare's boyhood, there was in all probability to be found a thick, squat, folio volume, then some thirty years printed, in which might be read, 'What misery, what murder! and what execrable plagues this famous region hath suffered by the divi¬ sion and dissensions of the renowned houses of Ean- caster and York'. This book was Hall's Chronicle." R. G. White says of that school and of boy Shaksper: "He could have learned Eatin, and some Greek; some English, too, but not much, for English was held in scorn by the scholars of those days, and long after' '. Dr. Morgan says: "Children in those days were put at their hicy hœc, hoc, at an age when we send them to the 22 SHAKSPiÖR NOT SHARBjSPi^AR^. kindergarten. But no master ever dreamed of drilling them in their own vernacular. ' ' "A maximum of caning and a minimum of parrot- work in desultory lyatin paradigms, which, whether wrong or right, were of no consequence whatever to anybody, was the village idea of a boy's edu¬ cation in England for long centuries, easily inclusive of the years within which William Shakspeare lived and died. The greatest scholars of those centuries either educated themselves, or by learned parents were guided to the sources of human intelligence and ex¬ perience. At any rate, they drew nothing out of the country grammar schools. ' ' * That William Shaksper attended the free school at Stratford, or any other school, is a conjecture on the part of his biographers. The common people of En¬ gland at that period, and all through the reign of Elizabeth, were illiterate, "gross and dark", in the words of Dr. Johnson. In his preface to Shake¬ speare, 1765, Dr. Johnson asserts that in the time of Shakespeare, "to be able to read and write, outside of professed scholars, or men and women of high rank, was an accomplishment still valued for its rarity." What writing was necessary for such people, letters, * "The annual charge on the town of Stratford Tor support of its grammar schools was, in 1568, ^^20.13; £10 of which was for the salary of the master and his assistants. The pay of the su¬ perintendent was eight pence or at the rate of one-sixth of a penny a week. These figures seem to suggest that the grammar school could not have been on the extensive scale which is predi¬ cated for it on the intellectual output of one of its pupils." Morgan, A Study, etc.. 4th Ed., p. 440. schooi, advantages op the boy wieeiam. 23 accounts or other, was done by a professional class, the scriveners. Mr. Phillipps, I, 33, tells us that "in March, 1565, John Shaksper, with the assistance of his former colleague in the same office, made up the accounts of the Chamberlains of the borough for the year. Neither of these worthies could even write their own names; but nearly all tradesmen reckoned with counters, the results on important occasions being entered by professional scriveners." Of nineteen al¬ dermen and burgesses of Stratford-on-Avon, only six could write their names. (See fac-simile in H.-P., I, 40.) lyee asserts, 5, that "when attesting documents he (John Shaksper) occasionally made his mark, but there is evidence in the Stratford archives that he could write with facility." Mr. I/ce must claim for John the various copies of his name contained in H.-P., and of which I have be¬ fore given several examples. If so, John had as won¬ derful a handwriting as his son "William, whose name is never written twice in the same style. A man who can write does not use a mark in place of his name in attesting documents, or at all. Halliwell-Phillipps personally investigated all the accessible records of Stratford for the period of John Shaksper's residence in that town, and in his volumes has given fac-similes of every mention of John's name, often with a good deal of the context. He de¬ clares positively that John could not write, and that he made his signature with a mark.* Unless Mr. Uee * " There is no reasonable pretense for assuming that, in the time of John Shakespeare, whatever may have been the case at 24 SHAKSPKR NOT SHAKESPEARE. produces satisfactory evidence to the contrary—some¬ thing more than his own mere dictum—^John must be held to have been an illiterate. In 1894, Rolfe ran a series of four papers through the pages of the "Youth's Companion", for the in¬ struction of American young people, entitled ' ' Shake¬ speare, the Boy' ', handsomely illustrated. Of course, as no particulars whatever have come down to this age respecting the boy William Shaksper, except the date- of his baptism, in the Stratford church register, every word of Dr. Rolfe's account is spun from his own im¬ agination, and it consists of what Mr. Fleay calls ' ' fanciful might-have-beens' '. > No. I sets off with a cut of a finely dressed boy of eight or nine years, hands in jacket pocket, chin in air, apparently posing as one absorbed in contemplation of nature. The adjacent text describes at some length the beautiful scenery of Warwickshire. Dr. Rolfe thinks the boy's delight in out-door life (because the plays show that the author of them delighted in that), ' ' may have been intensified by the experience of the house in Henley street, with the reeking pile of filth at the front door' '—the sterquinarium we have before heard of. ' ' His poetry is everywhere full of beáuty and fragrance of the flowers that bloom in and about earlier periods, it was the practice for marks to be used by those who were capable of signing their names. No instance of the kind has ever been discovered among the numerous records of his era that are preserved at Stratford-on-Avon, while even a few rare examples in other districts, if such are to be found, would be insufiScient to countenance a theory that he was able to write. All the known instances point in the opposite direc¬ tion." H-P. II, 369. SCHOOL ADVANTAGES OF THE BOY WILLIAM. 25 Stratford; and the wonderful accuracy of his allusions to them . . . shows how thoroughly at home he was with them, how intensely he loved and studied them." I notice in passing that the worshipers of the Stratford man find it convenient to overlook the fact that the flowers which ' ' bloom in and around Strat¬ ford' ' bloom as well in all the shires of Southern Eng¬ land. "These facts do not prove that he (Shaksper) was ever a botanist or a gardener. Neither are his numerous allusions to wild flowers and plants, not one of which appears to be peculiar to Warwickshire, evi¬ dences". H.-P., I, 136. No. 2 describes a grammar school of that day—any one—and gives cuts of the ancient school room of Stratford, and a hom-book. Dr. Rolfe thinks this boy went to school when he was seven years old and left at thirteen, but it is all conjecture, as I have already said. "How William liked going to school we do not know, but if we are to judge from his refer¬ ences to school boys and school masters, he had little taste for it. As Jonson says, Shakespeare had little Latin and less Greek". (This little Latin does not apply very well to the boy who came in manhood to be the author of the Shakespeare plays, for he was a profound Latin scholar, as the plays themselves bear witness, but it will do as applied to the boy Shaksper. ) Nos. 3 and 4 describe the life of a well brought up boy, son of a nobleman or gentleman, and the games and pastimes of boys in general; and a cut is given of an ideal Henley street, swept and garnished, with half a dozen nicely dressed bbys at play, in spruce jackets and turned down linen collars, their faces washed and 26 SHAKSPHR NOT SHAKESPEARE:. noses clean. Needless to say, boy William Sbaksper could not have appeared in that garb, any more than filthy Henley street could have shone with cleanliness. The real boys in 1574, one and all, must have been gutter-snipes, in smock frocks and fustian breeches. I present a cut of the Stratford boy of that age, very likely William Shaksper himself. What makes me think it is the real William is that he seems to be an¬ ticipating his career as a jig dancer, under the instruc¬ tion of Kempe, to be hereafter spoken of. He does not look as if he would develop into "the bard of our admiration." In 1896, Dr. Rolfe published a volume of upwards of 200 pages, with the same title, "Shakespeare the SCHOOL ADVANTAGES OE THE BOY WILLIAM. 27 Boy", made up from the Youth's Companion papers, extended and padded immensely. On the cover and also within are the bogus arms of John Shake¬ speare, which were applied for by player William on two several occasions, under cover of his father's name, with a vast deal of lying, but which were never granted to either John Shaksper or William. The meaning of these (bogus) arms of the father on and in this book, is to make it evident that the boy William came of a race of gentlemen, and was brought up as the son of a 28 SHAKSPKR NOI" SHAKKSP:^AR^. gentleman. The frontispiece represents a beautiful boy of eight or nine years, with a face that never could have grown into the vacuous one of the Droeshout por¬ trait, the only authentic likeness of William Shaksper, and dressed like a young nobleman. I copy this re¬ markable pictùre, w^hich apparently has been composed from the likenesses of John Milton * and Philip Sydney. (See cut, preceding page. ) Dress in the sixteenth century, and the centuries before that, "was the symbol of rank"; and for the son of a "humble tradesman" to be decked in the style of Rolfe's boy was impossible, and no one knows this better than the learned Doctor himself. In another picture this young person is portrayed as standing by the Avon, fishing-pole in hand, not as a Stratford fishing boy, breeches soiled and mouth full of worms, but like a gentleman, in full dress, even to trunk hose—^in fact a lamo edition of the great Earl of Eeicester. The text is as misleading as the plates. To quote the fancies of Charles Knight's "mischievously fertile imagination", borrowing one of Mr. Fleay's phrases again, as fact, when Dr. Rolfe knows, none better, that there is not a particle of fact in them, any more than in the fancies of Sinbad the Sailor, how shall it be characterized? Hear him: " 'He had', says this genial biographer, 'a copy well-thumbed from his first reading days of The Palace of Pleasure, by William Paynter. In this work was set forth 'the * When a boy, Milton was remarkable for beauty, ' 'delicate complexion, clear blue eyes, and light-brown hair flowing down his shoulders." That is the little man Rolfe has captured. SCHOOI, ADVANTAGKS OF THF BOY WIFFIAM. 29 great valiance of noble gentlemen', etc. 'Pleasant little apothegms and short fables were there in the book which the brothers and sisters of William Shake- spear (Shaksper) had heard him tell with marvelous spirit. There was another collection too, which that youth had diligently read—the Gesta Romanorum, old legends," etc., etc. But beyond these our Mammilius had many a tale of spirits and gob¬ lins, etc. But the youth had met with the his¬ tory of the murder of Duncan, the King of Scot¬ land, in a chronicle older than Holinshed,' " etc., ad nauseam. All this in the face of the declarations of Halliwell-Phillipps, whom Dr. Rolfe, p. 217, speaks of as one of the most careful and conservative critics, and who is styled by nearly all of the modem commenta¬ tors or biographers, the one great authority for the facts of William Shaksper's life. Wherein do such misrepresentations of the facts of William Shaksper's boyhood differ from the Ireland forgeries, and the Collier frauds! John Shaksper, "after his marriage, speculated in wool, and dealt in corn and other articles." H.-P. I, 30. Notwithstanding his inability to read and write, he had more or less capacity for business, which, as we shall see, his son William inherited, manifesting it in a greatly increased degree. John "was expert at reckoning with counters", Mr. Phillipps says, I, 33, and was able to ' 'make up the accounts of the Chamber¬ lains of the borough' '. He came in time to fill every office in his town from ale-taster and constable, to chamberlain, alderman and bailiff, the last highest of all, with limited magisterial powers. In a village of 30 SHAKSPi^R NOT SHAKBSP:^AR^. poor cottagers, all alike illiterate, he doubtless sur¬ passed his neighbors in business faculty. Among the blind the one-eyed man is king. At any rate he showed a willingness to serve the public; but he some¬ how so managed his private affairs, that he soon ran through what little property himself and his wife had. He seems also to have been a man fond of litigation, another trait his son William inherited. But John had his pain from this source as well as his pleasure. ' ' His name is very often on the court records, gaining and losing suits". H.-P., II, 217, et seq. This was as early as 1558. But on June 19, 1576, the return made to a suit to distrain goods on his land was that he had nothing that could be distrained. On March 29, 1577, he produced a writ of habeas corpus in the Stratford court of record, which showed that he had been in custody or prison, probably for debt." Fumi- vall, preface to the Teopold Shakespeare. In 1592, he was one of nine persons ' 'who came not to church for fear of prison for debt." H.-P., II, 146. At the time of the habeas corpus matter, the boy William was thirteen years old. H.-P., 5, says: "In all probability, he (John) removed the future drama¬ tist from school when the latter was about thirteen' ' ; and on p. 56, we are told that, "the defective classical education of the poet" {i. e. of player Shaksper), "was really owing to his being removed from school before the usual age, his father requiring his assistance in one of the branches of the Henley street business."— Id. 32. At Stratford-on-Avon, the guide shows to the ad¬ miring stranger the very desk at which boy William SCHOOI, ADVANTAGES OP THE BOY WIEEIAM. 31 Studied. I read in a recent paper: "Of the few genuine relics of Shakspere preserved in his native town, the most interesting are his signet ring and the desk at which he sat in the grammar school. . . ." Per contra, Dr. Rolfe, in the Youth's Companion papers before quoted, on describing the school-room, says: "A desk, said with no authority whatever, to have been used by Shakspere, is preserved in the Henley street house." William Winter, "Shakespeare's England," ed. 1896, p. 137, says of this ring: "Here likewise is shown a gold seal ring found many years ago in a field near Stratford Church, on which delicately en¬ graved appear the letters W. S. It may have belonged to Shakespeare. The conjecture is that it did."* The question is pertinent, who had that ring made and threw it into the field ? There are so many for¬ geries in the cause of William Shaksper, that authen¬ tication is called for, as well in the case of rings as of portraits, signatures, letters, etc. The rule is never to trust an unauthenticated assertion concerning Wil¬ liam Shaksper made by one of his devotees. Whatever the boy may have learned at school, if he really went to school, he did not learn to write his own name, as I shall hereinafter show (Chap. XVI). That William Shaksper, player, manager, proprietor of a theater, and active business man, could at any * Gerald Massey, The Secret Drama of the Shakespeare Sonnets, 1888, p. 86, has no doubt as to this ring. "It is a fact still more interesting that the seal-ring of Shakespeare, now preserved at Stratford, the seal he used to seal his letters with, shows the true lover's knot entwining about his initials, W. S." 2,2 SHAKSPKR NOT SHAKBSPBARB. time in his life use a pen at all, is more than doubtful. Whatever writing was necessary must have been done for him by other hands. That need not be surprising. Writing as we have seen was at that period a rare ac¬ complishment, one rarely found among the class to which William Shaksper belonged. John Shaksper was innocent of the art, and yet he filled successively all the ofiices of the town of Stratford, made up the town accounts, and performed the duties of a magis¬ trate. His writing was done by him by official clerks— scriveners. thí; youth of wiuuiam shakspfr. 33 CHAPTER IV. the) youth of wiuliam shaksper. "All that can be prudently said is that the inclina-, tion of the testimonies leans toward the belief that John Shakspere eventually apprenticed his eldest son to a butcher." H.-P., I, 57. The Stratford tradition, first mentioned by Aubrey (about 1680), was, that "William's father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbors, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe he would do it in a high style, and make a Speech. There was at that time another Butcher's son in this towne that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but dyed young". Ingleby, 383. On this and the rest of Aubrey's account (relating to a later period), H.-P. says, preface: "Very meagre, indeed, are the fragments of information to be safely collected from Aubrey, but every word in the next traditional narra¬ tive is to be received with respect as a faithful record of the local belief. That account is preserved in min¬ utes respecting Shakespeare (Shaksper) which were compiled by a traveler who paid a visit to the Church of Stratford-on-Avon in the year 1693. His inform¬ ant was one William Castle, then the parish clerk and sexton, a person who could have had no motive for deception in such matters' '. The account spoken of is found in a letter from the Rev. Mr. Dowdall to 34 SHAKSPKR NOT SHAKESPEARE. Edw. Southwell, and the original was in Halliwell- Phillipps' possession. It is dated April lo, 1693, and runs as follows ( Ingleby ,417): " The first remarkable place in this County that I visited was Stratford super Avon, where I saw the effigies of our English trage¬ dian, Mr. Shakespeare. . . . The clerk that showed me this church is above 80 years old; he says that this Shakespear was formerly in this town bound appren¬ tice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to Eondon, and was there received into the playhouse as a servitour, and by this means had an opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He was the best of his family," etc. Phillipps says (I, 53): "The tradition reported by the parish clerk in 1693 is the only known evidence of Shakespeare's having been an apprentice, but his as¬ sertion that the poet commenced his practical life as a butcher is supported by the earher testimony of Aubrey". This clerk, above 80 years old in 1693, was a child when William Shaksper died,~i6i6; and, living in the parish, of course he had known hundreds of men and women who were personally acquainted with the player, boy and man. The phenomenal Shaksper, who ran away in poverty, and who returned to Stratford the richest man of the town, would be the subject of wonder and gossip in Stratford, not only so long as he lived, but so long as any one lived there who had known him, or so long as any of his de¬ scendants lived there. The clerk's testimony, there¬ fore, is of the utmost importance, and exceeds in value that of any other individual of whom the books speak in connection with the history of young William THB YOUTH OF WIUUIAM SHAKSPFR. 35 Shaksper. He is an unimpeachable witness; his in¬ telligence and respectability are vouched for by his official position. Mr. Dowdall does not speak of Mr. Shakspere, the author of certain famous poems and plays, but the "tragedian"—the player—and plainly the clerk knew Shaksper simply as a player and rich man. There is no getting rid of the butcher business, though it is very distasteful to the Shaksperians. Betterton, in the middle of the seventeenth century (who posed as a natural son of player Shaksper, with¬ out the least authority, the commentators agree), gave out that the boy Shaksper was brought up in the wool business, a thing he personally knew nothing about. But the testimony of the parish clerk, taken together with that of Aubrey, settles the matter. Boy Shak¬ sper was brought up as a butcher. ' 'Although the information at present accessible does not enable us to determine the exact nature of Shakes¬ peare's (Shaksper's) occupations from his fourteenth year to his eighteenth, that is to say, from 1577 to 1582, there can be no doubt that he was mercifully re¬ leased from what, to a spirit like his, must have been the deleterious monotony of a school education. Whether he passed those years as a butcher or a wool dealer does not greatly matter". H.-P., I, 58. And this author goes on to say that in either capacity he was acquiring a more perfect knowledge of the world and human nature than could have been derived from a study of the classics. According to the traditions, he sowed wild oats extensively in those years, and no 36 SHAKSPER NOT SHAKESPEARE. doubt did reap some knowledge of the Stratford world and Stratford human nature. Mr. Phillipps proceeds (6i): "It was the usual custom at Stratford for apprentices to be bound either for seven or ten years, so that if Shakespeare (Shak- sper) were one of them, it is not likely that he was out of his articles at the time of his marriage, which took place in 1582. I^ittle schooling, perhaps none; illiterate family, bo¬ vine neighbors; bookless town; the five best years of his life devoted to getting a knowledge of the world and of human nature as a butcher,—a more perfect knowledge, Phillipps thinks, than could have been de¬ rived from a study of the classics,—no wonder this youth speedily came to grief. His marriage took place 28th November, 1582, when he was 18 years old: married to Ann Whately, age 27. The day before, or on 27th November, in the Con¬ sistory Court, at Worcester, in the Marriage Register, there is an entry in these terms: "1582, Nov. 27th, William Shaxper and Ann Whateley, of Temple Grafton; and on the 28th, a bond is given to the Bishop of Worcester to hold him harmless for licens¬ ing, etc., the marriage of William Shagspere and Ann Hathaway." Donnelly, 829. Mr. Donnelly gives a plausible explanation of the mystery: "Ann had been married to one Whately, and when the bride her¬ self gave her name for the marriage license, 27th No¬ vember, she gave it correctly, and she was married by that name; but the next day, when her farmer friends were called upon to furnish the bond, they gave the lawyer who drew it the name by which, in the careless THK YOUTH OF WIUUIAM SHAKSPKR. 37 fashion of such people, she was generally known". Their first child was bom within six months after, and twin children were baptized 1585, 2d July. "Some biographers have taken the ground that the smart young woman of twenty-six entrapped the boy of eighteen into this match, . . . but I fancy that the boy himself would have disdained to urge any such excuse for his conduct. William Shaksper at eighteen was not the guileless and unsophisticated country youth that the theory assumes; and I suspect that he was more to blame for the hurried match than was Ann Hathaway." Dr. W. J. Rolfe, leadles' Home Jonrnal, XII, No. 4, p. 2, 1895 (paper on Mrs. Shak- spere). The fact undoubtedly was that this lad "of spirit' ', having, as Phillipps suggests, been engaged in acquiring a knowledge of the world and of human na¬ ture, when he should have been at his books, had developed into a Stratford Dothario,—a homespun Don Juan. "The general tradition among the mstics of the neighborhood was that the poet was wild in his younger days". H.-P., I, 71. "Three or four years after his union with Ann Hathaway (Whately), he had, observes Rowe, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company; and amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Ducy, of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by this gentleman, etc. ; . . . it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family 38 SHAKSPBR NOT SHAKKSPKARB. for some time, and shelter himself in lyondon' '. H. -P., I, 67. In plain English, he deserted his wife and babies, and it was many a long year before he came back to them. ' 'Another version of the narrative has been recorded by Archdeacon Davies, who was the vicar of Sapperton, in the neighboring county of Gloucester, and who died there in the year 1708"—or ninety-two years after the death of the player. ' 'According to this author¬ ity, the future great dramatist was 'much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir William Eucy, who had him oft whipped, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement'.... It is evident therefore from the independent testimonies of Rowe and Davies that the deer-stealing history was accepted in the poet's native town, and in the neighborhood during the latter part of the seventeenth century. That it has a solid basis of fact cannot admit of a reasonable doubt. , . . The impressive story of the penniless fugitive who afterwards became a leading inhabitant of Stratford, and the owner of New Place, was one likely to be handed down with passable fidelity to the grandchildren of his contemporaries". H.-P. I, 69. ' 'That he was also nearly, if not quite moneyless, is to be inferred from tradition, the latter supported by the ascertained facts of the adverse circumstances of his father at the time rendering it impossible for him to have received effectual assistance from his parents; nor is there any reason for believing that he was likely THE YOUTH OF WIUUIAM SHAKSPER. 39 to have obtained substantial aid from the relatives of his wife". Id. I, 79. "His father was bankrupt; his own family rapidly increasing; his home was dirty, bookless and miser¬ able; his companions degraded; his pursuits low; he had been whipped and imprisoned, and he fled penni¬ less to the great city." Donnelly, 40. A bright young fellow, of scanty education and in¬ different morals. He has seen all he cares to of pov¬ erty and its attendant miseries, and if he can flnd any¬ thing to turn his hand to, he will strive for money. That is the goal he has set his heart on, and it will be found he reaches it—money, heaps of it. "It was natural that the poet (Shaksper), having not only himself bitterly felt the want of resources not so many years previously, but seen so much incon¬ venience arising from a similar deficiency in his fa¬ ther's household, should now be determined to avoid the chance of a recurrence of the infliction." H.-P. I, 163. Wendell says, 423: "The son of a ruined country tradesman, and saddled with a wife and three children, his business at twenty-three was to conduct his life so that he might end it, not as a laborer, but as a gen¬ tleman. After five and twenty years of steady work, this end had been accomplished." Accomplished, as to the money getting, but as to the "gentleman", that is another matter. 40 SHAKSPKR NOT SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER V. WHITHER? In view of the history of the boy and young man to his twenty-second year, as gathered from the most painstaking and trustworthy Shaksperean authorities, let us see if we can make out the sort of individual he necessarily must have been. We have seen that the hereditary set of the brain in the Shaksper family was in any direction but that of mental cultivation; that they were a line of illite¬ rate peasants, or at best inferior yeomen, the last mem¬ ber of it a humble tradesman; en masse, unable to read and write, and therefore without book knowl¬ edge. We are told by Phillipps that the population of Stratford "was a conversational and stagnant" one; that "the large majority of the inhabitants had never in their lives traveled beyond twenty or thirty miles from their homes' ' ; that ' 'outside bibles, and the few elementary Latin books, there were not more than two or three dozen books in the town' '. We know that the only language spoken and heard was the limited patois of Warwickshire, as unintelligible to a Londoner as that of Yorkshire or Dorsetshire; we have seen the squalid environment in which the boy was bom and reared; the narrow limits of his schooling, if there was any schooling at all; we have seen the butcher's apprentice and learned of his disorderly habits; of his WHITHKR ? 41 early and discreditable marriage, wbich insured his poverty, and bound him to evil companions, and to untoward conditions of every sort; and, finally, of his flight before the constable to lyondon. In the next chapter we shall discover that on reaching Lon¬ don, he was at once attracted towards the public the¬ ater, the vilest place of amusement, and soon after associated himself with the players, who, in that age, were regarded as disreputable, and by the law were held to be no better than rogues and vagabonds, and who spent the greater part of every year in strolling through England. What must be the future, intellectually and morally, of a boy and youth so reared and at last sunk into that sort of companionship? Dr. Holmes tells us that a child's training begins a hundred years before he is born; Herbert Spencer, that the great man ' 'is a resultant of an enormous ag¬ gregate of forces that have been co-operating for ages' ' ; that we need not expect the child to be radi¬ cally different from the parents, a mathematician from one who has no sense of numbers, or a poet from one who has no ideality in his composition. Galton begins his volume on heredity with the words: "I propose to show that a man's natural abili¬ ties are derived by inheritance." He tells us that "ability in the long run does not start into existence and disappear with equal abruptness, but rather it rises on a gradual and regular curve out of the ordi¬ nary level of family life' '. "Whatever may be the natural capacity the future of the child in youth will be determined by the influ¬ ences which surround him from the cradle onward. " 42 shakspkr not shakbspkar:^. Or, as Carlyle puts it, ' 'early culture and nurture de¬ cide whether there shall be a doddered, 4warf bush, or a high towering, wide-spreading tree." And again, "The history of a man's childhood is the description of his parents and environment". Dr. Weisman declares of musical genius, that "with¬ out early stimulus, and a constant opportunity of hear¬ ing and being instructed in the highest music, even the greatest genius must remain undeveloped' '. This is as true of literature as of music; no matter what the natural capacity may be, if there is no early stim¬ ulus, no reading of books, no training, no contact with intellectual and cultivated people, the mind will and must necessarily remain undeveloped. Does it look as if the capitalized experience of the tribe of Shaksper was of a character and volume to make this underling at the public theater become the flower of the English race, a prodigy of learning ac¬ quired from books, as well as knowledge from obser¬ vation and wisdom by introspection; the "best head in the Universe", according to Emerson; "the fullest head of which there is any record", according to Eowell; the greatest of England's poets. The thing is absolutely impossible. No child in the world's his¬ tory, with such antecedents and with such conditions, the formative period of his life lost, intellectual facts and habits not acquired before manhood, ever did blossom forth as a great poet or prose writer, or liter¬ ary man of any mark whatever. Youth is the only period in which intellectual habits can be formed; and that wasted, there is no remedy. Shakespeare tells us; WHITHBR ? 43 "This -Horning, like the spirit of a youth That means to be of note, begins betimes". Whoever heard of William Shaksper, in his irre¬ pressible ardor for learning, as out of bed at night studying by candle light, or by the kitchen fire, like Abraham I^incoln; or up in the early morning, poring over his books ? There were no books, the town was bookless. A bookless neighborhood! The future of the boy may be predicted from those two words. He may become a successful business man, a rich man, for he shares the faculty of accumulation with rats and rodents, magpies and crows, and besides he has inher¬ ited what business capacity his father and grandfather were possessed of, but a literary man of mark, never! "No matter how poor I am ... if the writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof . I shall not want for intellectual companion¬ ship, and I may become a cultivated man. ' ' But to the unlettered boy in a bookless neighborhood, there is no such future. The converse of Dr. Channing's proposition is true: If the writers do not enter, etc., I may not become a cultivated man. Burns had humble beginnings, and his case has been said to run on all fours with William Shaksper's. But that is a mis¬ take. Burns "was taught English well, and by the time he was ten or twelve years of age, he was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. He had a few books, among which were the Spectator, Pope's Works, Allan Ramsay, and a collection of English songs. . . . At about twenty-three, his reading enlarged. , , . What books he had, he read and studied 44 SHAKSPKR NOT SHAKESPEARE. thoroughly." So Chambers tells us. Bums warbled his native wood notes wild in the simple language of his district, but not in I^atin and Greek, in French and Italian; nor did he warble of all the sciences, and of all the philosophies, as the author of the Shake¬ speare plays did. I read in the "Outlook" for 25th July, 1896, called forth by the recent Burns Centennial: "Another erro¬ neous impression about Burns, which has been set right by time, is the once widely held belief that he was utterly without education. The 'inspired plough¬ man', untutored and untrained, was supposed to have sung as the bird sings or the flower grows. Those who know anything about the conditions under which strong men come to the mastery of their strength, and men of genius to the possession of their power, know that nothing is achieved without preparation; that the very artlessness and simplicity through which the heart speaks in entire unconsciousness is won at the end of trainings not at the beginning. Kvery great artist became great by the development of the quality which is in him; he does not become great by acci¬ dent." This applies to Shakespeare, the writer of the plays, as well as to Bums; neither of them became great by accident, and neither did anything great that was not achieved by preparation. Untutored and un¬ trained genuises accomplish nothing. John Bunyan was the son of a tinker, but he was taught in childhood to read and write, and al¬ though he at one time led a vagrant life, yet we find him at the age of 27 spoken of as a zealous preacher, WHITHKR ? 45 and for five years he pursued this calling before he was thrown into Bedford jail. There he wrote his im¬ mortal work, not in Greek and Tatin, under immediate inspiration, but "in current English, the vernacular of his age,"—the only language William Shaksper could have written in, had he written at all. Also John Bunyan was thoroughly educated in the Bible, as any one could see ; and such an education is second only to that in Homer. Morse, in his Eife of Eincoln, II, 356, brackets Lincoln and Shakespeare (of course he means the author of the Shakespeare plays, whoever he was) together, in that both seem to ' 'run through the whole gamut of human nature". Lincoln was descended from Massachusetts Puritans, though for two genera¬ tions his family, as pioneers in the wilderness, were subject to enforced illiteracy. "He did not come of a trifling, silly or stupid family", Mr. Charles A. Dana said, in his lecture on Lincoln, at New Haven. The boy Abraham had a burning thirst for knowledge. He taught himself to read all the books he could get— the Bible, Bunyan, and*.¿Esop's Fables. "Lincoln learned to read from the spelling book and the Bible ; then he borrowed Pilgrim's Progress, and iBsop's Fables ; and would sit up half the night reading them by the blaze of the logs his own axe had split. ' ' Montgomery's History U. S., 279. Later he got possession of an English Grammar, and still later of law books. He was always striving to improve him¬ self, and his natural ability as a thinker with practice made him a clear-headed lawyer. Mr. Dana says : "He rose by hard work and by genius to become one 46 SHAKSP^R NOl" SHAKESPEARE. of the leading lawyers of the Illinois bar." It is always "hard work" that accomplishes anything, genius or no genius. But lyincoln did not talk and think in L^atin, as the unlettered, idle boy, William Shaksper, is imagined by some of his unreflecting admirers to have been inspired to do. Mrs. Dall (26) says: "A great deal has been said about Shakespeare's deficient education ; but he had more education than many eminent men in America. One of the most widely read men I ever knew in many languages had only one six weeks schooling in his life¬ time. . . . The stories of the learned blacksmith (Klihu Burritt) and of Robert Collier are familiar to this generation. ' ' But Burritt was far from being the child of unlettered parents and grandparents, in an ignorant and bookless neighborhood. He himself said, in an autobiographical letter in the Worcester Spy, of December i, 1841 : "My means of education were limited to the advantages of a district school," which ended when he was fifteen years of age, on the death of his father. He then had to go to work, and apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in his native village (New Britain, Conn.). Thither I carried an indomitahle taste for readings which I had previously ac¬ quired through the medium of the social library. I suddenly conceived the idea of studying Tatin. Through the assistance of an elder brother, who had himself obtained a collegiate education, I completed my Virgil during the evenings of one winter", etc., etc. I fail to see anywhere resemblance between the environment of Burritt and that of Shaksper. Bur- ritt's great lecture, delivered sixty times in the cities WHiTHBR? 47 and towns of the northern U. S., during the winter of 1841, was on ''Application and Genius", and his argument was that genius consists in the capacity for hard work, and that nothing great is done without labor. The only man known to history who became great without study, or preparation, is this William Shaksper, as his admirers love to picture him. The suggestion of Burritt is as infelicitous as was that of Bums, or of Bunyan, or of Tincoln. It will be well to notice here the testimony of John Milton respecting his own education, and surround¬ ings, and habits, and dispositions, as he came close after Shaksper. Could we read such testimony of the player there would be no need of the immediate inspi¬ ration theory to account for his omniscience: "For after I had from my first years, by the ceaseless dili¬ gence and care of my father, been exercised to the tongues and some sciences, as my age could suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, it was found that whether aught was imposed upon me by them or be¬ taken to be of my own choice, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live; but much lateher, in the private academies of Italy, perceiving that some trifies which I had in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabouts, met with acceptance above what was looked for; I began thus far to assent to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that hy labor and incessant study, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. ' ' Whoever was the author of the 48 SHAKSPKR NOT SHAKBSPißARE. Shakespeare plays, he was undoubtedly trained after the manner in which Milton was trained, even to the schooling in Italy.* Early training at home, masters and teachers, study in Italy, and "labor and incessant study" always! Whenever the real author of these plays is found, that will have been his history. * Italy in Elizabeth's age was the center of art and learning, and students from all western Europe flocked to her schools. WlIvlylAM SHAKSP:^R on EJNI'RRINO I^ONDON. 49 CHAPTER VI. THE LIFE OF WIEEIAM SHAKSPER ON ENTERING EONDON. "It is important to observe that all the early tradi¬ tions to which any value can be attached concur in the belief that Shakespeare" (Shaksper) "did not leave his native town with histrionic intentions. It is extremely unlikely that, at the age of twenty-one, he would, voluntarily, have left a wife and three children in Warwickshire, for the sake of obtaining a miserable position on the Eondon boards." H.-P., I, 82. R. G. White says, (Shakespeare Studies): "When at twenty-two years of age he fled from Stratford to Eondon, we may be sure that he had never seen half a dozen books other than his horn book, his Eatin Accidence, and a Bible; probably there were not half a dozen others in all Stratford. ' ' As is seen, Mr. Phillipps makes Shaksper leave home at 21 years of age, or in 1585; Mr. White at 22 years, in 1586. On the other hand, Mr. Fleay brings him to Eondon at 23 years, in 1587: "Dr. Johnson (in 1765) no doubt accurately reported the tradition of his day, when he stated that Shakspere came to Eondon a needy adventurer, and lived for a time by very mean employments. To the same effect is the testimony given by the author of Ratsie's Ghost, 1605, where the strolling player, in a passage 50 SHAKSPER NO^ SHAKESPEARE. reasonably believed to refer to the great dramatist, ob¬ serves in reference to actors: 'I have heard, indeed, of some that have gone to lyondon very meanly, and have come in time to be exceedingly wealthy'. The author of the last named tract was evidently well acquainted with the theatrical gossip of his day, so that his nearly contemporary evidence on the subject may be fairly accepted as a truthful record of the current belief." H.-P., I, 79. Dr. Johnson says: "When Shakspere fled to Don- don from the terror of a criminal prosecution, his first expedient was to wait at the door of the play-house, and hold the horses of those who had no servants, that they might be ready again after the performance; in this office he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness, that in a short time every man, as he alighted, called for Will Shakspere, and scarcely any other waiter was trusted with a horse while Will Shakspere was to be had. This was the first dawn of better fortune. Shakspere, finding more horses put into his hands than he could hold, hired boys to wait under his inspection, who, when Will Shakspere was summoned, were to immediately present themselves, T am Shakspere's boy, sir' ; in time Shakspere found higher employment' '. Dr. Johnson received this anec¬ dote from Pope, to whom it had been communicated by Rowe; and it appears to have reached Rowe through Betterton and Davenant" (actors in the last half of the seventeenth century). H.-P., I, 80. "Nothing has been discovered respecting the history of Shakspere's early theatrical life." H.-P., I, 89. ' 'The actors . . . were as a rule individual wan- wii