Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown Part 11

Why are we to believe that Dugdale's artist was merely fantastic in his design of the children (and also remote from Jacobean taste in every detail), and yet to credit him with "substantial accuracy" in his half-length of a gloomy creature clutching a cus.h.i.+on to his stomach? With his inaccuracies as to the Carew monument, why are we to accept him as accurate in his representation of the bust?

Moreover, other evidence is not wanting. It is positively certain that the monument existing in 1748, was then known as "the original monument," and that no other monument was put in its place, at that date or later.

Now Mrs. Stopes {180b} argues that in 1748 the monument was "entirely reconstructed," and so must have become no longer what Dugdale's man drew, but what we see to-day. It is positively certain that her opinion is erroneous.

If ever what we see to-day was subst.i.tuted for anything like what Dugdale's man drew, the date of the subst.i.tution is unknown.

Mrs. Stopes herself discovered the doc.u.ments which disprove her theory. They were known to Halliwell-Phillipps, who quotes an unnamed "contemporary account." {181a} This account Mrs. Stopes, with her tireless industry, found in the Wheler ma.n.u.scripts, among papers of the Rev. Joseph Greene, in 1746 Head Master of the Grammar School. In one paper of September 1740 "the original monument" is said to be "much impaired and decayed." There was a scheme for making "a new monument" in Westminster Abbey. THAT, I venture to think, would have been in Hanoverian, not in Jacobean taste and style. But there was no money for a new monument. Mrs. Stopes also found a paper of November 20, 1748, showing that in September 1746, Mr. Ward (grandfather of Mrs. Siddons) was at Stratford with "a cry of players." He devoted the proceeds of a performance of Oth.e.l.lo to the reparation of the then existing monument. The amount was twelve pounds ten s.h.i.+llings. The affair dragged on, one of the Church- wardens, a blacksmith, held the 12 pounds, 10s., and was troublesome.

The doc.u.ment of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be signed, but was not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly concerned in the matter. It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or painter, is to "take care, according to his ability, that the monument shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected." This appears to have been the idea of Mr. Greene. Another form of words was later adopted, directing Mr. Hall, the painter, "to repair and beautify, or to have the direction of repairing and beautifying, THE ORIGINAL MONUMENT of Shakespeare the poet." Mrs. Stopes infers, justly in my opinion, that Hall "would fill up the gaps, restore what was amissing as he thought it ought to be, and finally repaint it according to the original colours, traces of which he might still be able to see." In his History and Antiquities of Stratford-on-Avon, {182a} Mr. Wheler tells us that this was what Hall did. "In the year 1748 the monument was carefully repaired, and the original colours of the bust, &c., as much as possible preserved by Mr. John Hall, limner, of Stratford."

It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the painting is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 "painted in white," to please Malone. It was repainted in 1861.

Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told to do, and what, according to Wheler, he did. She writes: "It would only be giving good value for his money" (12 pounds, 10s.) "to his churchwardens if Hall added (sic) a cloak, a pen, and ma.n.u.script."

He "could not help changing" the face, and so on.

Now it was physically impossible to ADD a cloak, a pen, and ma.n.u.script to such a stone bust as Dugdale's man shows; to take away the cus.h.i.+on pressed to the stomach, and to alter the head. Mr. Hall, if he was to give us the present bust, had to make an entirely new bust, and, to give us the present monument in place of that shown in Dugdale's print, had to construct an entirely new monument. Now Hall was a painter, not (like Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor. Pour tout potage he had but 12 pounds, 10s. He could not do, and he did not do these things! he did not destroy "the original monument" and make a new monument in Jacobean style. He was straitly ordered to "repair and beautify the original monument"; he did repair it, and repainted the colours. That is all. I do not quote what Halliwell-Phillipps tells us {183a} about the repairing of the forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and the pen; work which, he says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of Oxford in 1790. He gives no authority, and Baconians may say that he was hoaxed, or "lied with circ.u.mstance."

Mr. Greenwood {183b} quotes Halliwell-Phillipps's Works of Shakespeare (1853), in which he says that the design in Dugdale's book "is evidently too inaccurate to be of any authority; the probability being that it was not taken from the monument itself."

Indeed the designer is so inaccurate that he gives the first word of the Latin inscription as "Judicyo," just as Oudry blunders in the Latin inscription of a portrait of Mary Stuart which he copied badly.

Mr. Greenwood proceeds: "In his Outlines Halliwell simply ignores Dugdale. His engraving was doubtless too inconvenient to be brought to public notice!" Here Halliwell is accused of suppressing the truth; if he invented his minute details about the repeated reparation of the writing hand,--not represented in Dugdale's design,--he also lied with circ.u.mstance. But he certainly quoted a genuine "contemporary account" of the orders for repairing and beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that he also had records for what he says about reparations of the hand and pen.

He speaks, too, of subst.i.tutions for decayed alabaster parts of the monument, though not in his Outlines; and I observe that, in Mrs.

Stopes's papers, there is record of a meeting on December 20, 1748, at which mention was made of "the materials" which Hall was to use for repairs.

To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both monument and bust speaks so loudly for their accepted date (1616-23) and against the Georgian date of 1748, that I need no other evidence; nor do I suppose that any one familiar with the monumental style of 1590-1620 can be of a different opinion. In the same way I do not expect any artist or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe's Shakespeare (1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made a plaisir. In Pope's edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with some approach to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of the bust presents a top-heavy and sculpturally impossible face borrowed from "the Chandos portrait," which, in my opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait of Shakespeare. None of them, I conceive, was painted from the life.

The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust, copied in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not waste words over this speculation. Mr. Greenwood writes that "if I should be told that Dugdale's effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring an exceptionally bad harvest, 'I should not feel it to be strange!' Neither should I feel it at all strange if I were told that it was the presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who had fallen from high estate and recognised that all things are but vanity."

"_I_ should not feel it to be strange" if a Baconian told me that the effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the monument of the dead Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration was made, I were asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood's words, "Was Dugdale's bust thought to bear too much resemblance to one who was not Shakspere of Stratford? Or was it thought that the presence of a woolsack" (the cus.h.i.+on) "might be taken as indicating that Shakspere of Stratford was indebted for support to a certain Lord Chancellor?" {186a} Such, indeed, are the things that Baconians might readily say: do say, I believe.

Dugdale's engraving reproduces the first words of a Latin inscription, still on the monument:

Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet:

"Earth covers, Olympus" (heaven? or the Muses' Hill?) "holds him who was a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art, a Virgil; a Socrates for his Daemon" ("Genius"). As for the "Genius," or daemon of Socrates, and the permitted false quant.i.ty in making the first syllable of Socrates short; and the use of Olympus for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient to consult the learning of Mr. Elton. {186b} The poet who made such notable false quant.i.ties in his plays had no cause to object to another on his monument. We do not know who erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) "a clayver man."

The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare's daughter and son- in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall. They exhibit a taste for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription. Mrs. Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. {187a} It opens like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of Christian mysticism. Mr.

Hall possesses, perhaps arranged for himself, a few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph.

The famous "Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear," and so on, on the stone in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first of "the last lines written, we are told,"

{187b} "by the author of Hamlet." Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel? Is it conceivable that the authority for Shakespeare's authors.h.i.+p of the doggerel is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen's in 1693, from a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says,--criticism makes the clerk twenty years younger. {187c} For Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William Shakspere of Stratford.

Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will's daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father's intelligence.

"Witty above her s.e.x, but that's not all, Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in THAT, but THIS Wholly of Him with whom she's now in bliss." {187d}

Thirty-three years after Shakespeare's death he was still thought "witty" in Stratford. But what could Stratford know? Milton and Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of the generation after Shakespeare. But they did not know, how should they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the plays and poems. The secret, perhaps, so widely spread among "the friends of the Muses" in 1616, was singularly well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a general rule.

I confess to be pa.s.sing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about his monument and his grave, and asks if he "died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might MOVE HIS BONES? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!" {188a} And the authority for the circ.u.mstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon his lips?

About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost after Shakespeare's death, W. Hall, a Queen's man, Oxford (the W.

Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare's signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford, and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow of Queen's. Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author of the mean and vulgar curse. He adds that there was a great ossuary or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug up were piled, "they would load a great number of waggons." Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style intelligible to clerks and s.e.xtons, "for the most part a very ignorant sort of people."

If Shakespeare DID, that accommodation of himself to his audience was the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. {189a} Of course there is no evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse: that he did is only the pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.

Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot enter. Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio, but Ben, as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio "a good send-off." The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait, if from any, it was executed. Richard Burbage is known to have amused himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand on a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor. If so, he may have succeeded no better than Mary Stuart's embroiderer, Oudry, in his copy of the portrait of her Majesty.

That Ben Jonson was painted by Honthorst and others, while Shakespeare, as far as we know, was not, has nothing to do with the authors.h.i.+p of the plays. Ben was a scholar, the darling of both Universities; constantly employed about the Court in arranging Masques; his learning and his Scottish blood may have led James I to notice him. Ben, in his later years, was much in society; fas.h.i.+onable and literary. He was the father of the literary "tribe of Ben." Thus he naturally sat for his portrait. In the same way George Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of Knox. But as a scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court as tutor of his King, and was the "good pen" of the anti-Marian n.o.bles, Murray, Morton, and the rest. Therefore Buchanan's portrait was painted, while of Knox we have only a woodcut, done, apparently, after his death, from descriptions, for Beza's Icones. The Folio engraving may have no better source. Without much minute research it is hard to find authentic portraits of Mary Stuart, and, just as in Shakespeare's case, {190a} the market, in her own day and in the eighteenth century, was flooded with "mock-originals," not even derived (in any case known to me) from genuine and authentic contemporary works.

One thing is certain about the Stratford bust. Baconians will believe that Dugdale's man correctly represented the bust as it was in his time; and that the actual bust is of 1748, in spite of proofs of Dugdale's man's fantastic inaccuracy; in spite of the evidence of style; and in spite of doc.u.mentary evidence that "the original monument" was not to be destroyed and replaced by the actual monument, but was merely "repaired and beautified" (painted afresh) by a local painter.

CHAPTER X: "THE TRADITIONAL SHAKSPERE"

In perusing the copious arguments of the Anti-Shakesperean but Non- Baconian Mr. Greenwood, I am often tempted, in Socratic phrase, to address him thus: Best of men, let me implore you, first, to keep in memory these statements on which you have most eloquently and abundantly insisted, namely, that society in Stratford was not only not literary, but was illiterate. Next pardon me for asking you to remember that the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century did not resemble our fortunate age. Some people read Shakespeare's, Beaumont's, and Fletcher's plays. This exercise is now very rarely practised. But n.o.body cared to chronicle literary gossip about the private lives and personal traits of these and several other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, in the modern manner. Of Shakespeare (pardon, I mean Shakspere), the actor, there is one contemporary anecdote, in my poor opinion a baseless waggery. Of Beaumont there is none. Of a hand-maid of Fletcher, who drank sack in a tumbler, one anecdote appears at the end of the seventeenth century,--nothing better. Meanwhile of Shakspere the "traditions"

must be sought either at Stratford or in connection with the London Stage; and in both cases the traditions began to be in demand very late.

As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate, any traditions that survived cannot conceivably have been literary. That is absolutely certain. Natives at Stratford had, by your own hypothesis, scant interest in literary anecdote. Fifty years after Shakespeare's death, no native was likely to cherish tales of any sprouts of wit (though it was remembered in 1649, that he was "witty"), or any "wood-notes wild," which he may have displayed or chirped at an early age.

Such things were of no interest to Stratford. If he made a speech when he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town, the circ.u.mstance might descend from one gaffer to another; he might even be remembered as "the best of his family,"--the least inefficient.

Given your non-literary and illiterate Stratford, and you can expect nothing more, and nothing better, than we receive.

Let me ill.u.s.trate by a modern example. In 1866 I was an undergraduate of a year's standing at Balliol College, Oxford, certainly not an unlettered academy. In that year, the early and the best poems of a considerable Balliol poet were published: he had "gone down" some eight years before. Being young and green I eagerly sought for traditions about Mr. Swinburne. One of his contemporaries, who took a First in the final Cla.s.sical Schools, told me that "he was a smug." Another, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his friend (later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers, they proposed that they should combine to pay but a single subscription to the Cricket Club. A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a moralist and metaphysician, merely smiled at my early enthusiasm,-- and told me nothing. A white-haired College servant said that "Mr.

Swinburne was a very quiet gentleman."

Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty years after Shakspere's death,--a Civil War and the Reign of the Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having intervened,--and ask us to be surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere's early brilliance, a century before, survived at Stratford.

A very humble parallel may follow. Some foolish person went seeking early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick.

From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and interesting about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and dogs, hunted, shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them bowled for Gloucesters.h.i.+re and Oxford. But about me the inquiring literary snipe only heard that "Andra was aye the stupid ane o' the fam'ly." Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local club, non sine gloria! Even THAT was forgotten.

Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow townsman's youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from sixty to a hundred years after date. It is not in human nature that what was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by the grandson. Go to "Thrums" and ask for literary memories of the youth of Mr. Barrie.

Yet {198a} the learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of Shakespeare but the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a fever after drink taken (WHERE, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton, was remembered, so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty ignorant places. Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton and Ben? Remember that we are dealing with human nature, in a peculiarly malodorous and densely ignorant bourgade, where, however, the "wit" of Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649.

See the epithet on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.

You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford (1661-3), who has heard that the actor was "a natural wit," and contracted and died of a fever, after a bout with Drayton and Ben. I can scarcely believe that THESE were local traditions. How could these rustauds have an opinion about "natural wit," how could they have known the names of Ben and Drayton?

When you come to Aubrey, publis.h.i.+ng in 1680, sixty years after Shakespeare's death, you neglect to trace the steps in the descent of his tradition. As has been stated, Beeston, "the chronicle of the Stage" (died 1682), gave him the story of the school-mastering; Beeston being the son of a servitor of Phillips, an actor and friend of Shakespeare, who died eleven years before that player. The story of the school-mastering and of Shakespeare "knowing Latin pretty well," is of no value to me. I think that he had some knowledge of Latin, as he must have had, if he were what I fancy him to have been, and if (which is mere hypothesis) he went for four years to a Latin School. But the story does not suit you, and you call it "a mere myth," which, "of course, will be believed by those who wish to believe it." But, most excellent of mortals, will it not, by parity of reasoning, "of course be disbelieved by those who do NOT wish to believe it"?

And do you want to believe it?

To several stage anecdotes of the actor as an excellent instructor of younger players, you refer slightingly. They do not weigh with me: still, the Stage would remember Shakspere (or Shakespeare) best in stage affairs. In reference to a very elliptic statement that, "in Hamlet Betterton benefited by Shakespeare's coaching," you write, "This is astonis.h.i.+ng, seeing that Shakspere had been in his grave nearly twenty years when Betterton was born. The explanation is that Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, was, according to Sir William Davenant, instructed by Shakspere, and Davenant, who had seen Taylor act, according to Downes, instructed Betterton. There is a similar story about Betterton playing King Henry VIII. Betterton was said to have been instructed by Sir William, who was instructed by Lowen, who was instructed by Shakspere!" {200a}

Why a note of exclamation? Who was Downes, and what were his opportunities of acquiring information? He "was for many years book- keeper in the Duke's Company, first under Davenant in the old house .