The authorship of Shakespeare
>0o W ** $ :4 .v ^ N0 o^ >. ^ CO \0 o o <y #?i /-V \ \ -js # c°Nc«^ a v J¥ %^ 0< .0 o ■V <^% VWOT* .^'v , ,0o % J.'n °0. ^ V mN, BABO DE VERULAM, S^'-flLBANI "VIC"'", SEV KOTIOHIBTTS TITULI3 sciiam^LTM: lumen eacunm i SIC SEDEBAT. THE AUTHOKSHIP OF SHAKESPEABE. BY NATHANIEL HOLMES. To yap aiiTO voelv iariv re aal elvai. — Parmenides. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY HTJRD AND HOUGHTON, 459 Broome Street. 1866. YK xq Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by Hurd and Houghton, the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE HONORABLE THOMAS C. FLETCHER, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI, AS A WORTHY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE CIVIL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS OF THE AGE, WHEREIN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGIOUS CULTURE, ARE TO FIND FREE COURSE AND BE GLORIFIED, THIS HUMBLE CONTRIBUTION TO THE LITERATURE OF THE TIME IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. In these days, perhaps, there needs be no apology for writing a book. But a book without a preface, like a dinner without a grace, would seem to be un- civil. Let us have, at least, " so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter." This book must speak for itself : I did not see any good reason why it should not be printed. It may be, that the belles-letters critics will think little of it, or the trade still less, or the fixed orthodoxies, that it ought never to have been written at all, or the philosophers, that it is no great affair at best. But inasmuch as thought and knowledge among men lie stratified, as it were, like the densities of the ocean, or the air, in grada- tions infinite between the lower deeps and the higher realms, this book, like any other that is thrown into the flowing sea of things, may find its own level and so float somewhere ; howsoever that level should come near to measuring the weight of book, writer, and reader. It does not presume to contain anything that is positively new, or that was unknown before : it claims only to state things in its own way. I have sometimes thought I had hit upon a new idea, or discovered a new fact, but I was pretty sure to find the same thing stated, or glanced at, in a week or so, in some newspaper, or in some book, new or old, and for that matter (it might be) as old as the vi PREFACE. hieroglyphics. If some things in this book should be new to some readers, they will bear in mind the saying of Plato, that " what is strange is the result of ignorance in the case of all " ; and if, to others, some things should appear to be either not new, or, if new, not true, they will, of course, exercise the common privilege and judge for themselves. Doubtless there have been many who could never rest satisfied with the story of William Shakespeare, any more than a Coleridge, or a Schlegel ; nor attain to any clear solution of the problem, that the spon- taneous genius of a born poet, without the help of much learning, should come to see deeper into all the mysteries of God, Nature, and Man, and write better about the universal world, than the most ac- complished scholars, critics, and philosophers, and be himself still unaware that he had done anything re- markable, wholly indifferent to fame (what might be no great wonder), and even (what may be more to the point) utterly heedless of the preservation of works which the author, howsoever he might deem them to be but trifles idly cast from him, could not but know to be " the wanton burthen of the prime " and the best (in that kind) of the age in which he lived, or of many ages : — as if he had been one, " whose hand, Like the base 'Indian, threw a pearl away, Richer than all his tribe " ; — an unparalleled mortal, indeed! — nor of that other problem, that a common under -actor should turn poet, and, rummaging over the hereditary lumber of the play - house, should gather up the best of the traditional material, and through the limbec of his PREFACE. Because we see it; but what we do not see, We tread upon, and never think of it." Meas. for Meets., Act II. Sc. 1. Bacon found it to be just so with the history of Winds ; for, says he, " it is evident, that the dullness of men is such and so infelicitous, that when things are put before their feet, they do not see them, unless admonished, but pass right on." It would stand to reason, that the most precious things would not be strewn abroad thus by a mere swine-herd, if they had not come into his possession in an accidental or some other way, and without his having much knowledge of their real value ; nor by a coney-catch- ing, beer-drinking idler, or a common play-actor, or even a prosperous stage-manager. It must be ad- mitted that learning does not come by instinct ; nor can sensible men be made to believe that high phi- losophy can come by fantastic miracle. There never was any royal road to mathematics, though there have been very royal mathematicians. An article appeared in Putnam's Magazine for January 1856 (afterwards known to have been writ- ten by Delia Bacon), in which some general consid- erations were set forth with much eloquence and ability, why William Shakespeare could not have written the plays which have been attributed to him ; and the opinion was also pretty distinctly in- timated, that Lord Bacon was the real author of them, or, at least, that he had had some hand in the work ; but no proofs were then adduced. Being much struck with this idea, and for my own satisfac- tion, I began to look for the evidence on which such a proposition might rest, and finding it very consid- erable, and indeed quite amazing, I had thrown my PREFACE. JX notes into some form, before the publication of Miss Bacon's work in 1857.1 Her book not appearing to have satisfied the critical world of the truth of her theory, much more than the " Letter to Lord Elles- mere," by Mr. William Henry Smith, I have thought it worth while to give them the results of my studies also, which have been considerably extended, since that date ; and if enough be not found herein to settle the question on impregnable grounds, it may at least tend to exculpate them from any supposition of mental aberration in so far as they have ascribed this authorship to Francis Bacon. But I do not at all agree with her opinion that any other person had a hand in the work : on the contrary, I will endeavor to show that the whole genuine canon of Shake- speare was written by this one and the same author. It may be that some persons have been already convinced of this fact : but the critics appear to be agreed in rejecting the theory altogether. More direct and palpable proofs seem to be required ; for this " our Shakespeare " was not to be stripped of the peerless mantle he had worn unquestioned for above two centuries and a half, on mere generalities, how- ever conclusive to the mind of the philosophical thinker. Certainly, if he is to be put on trial for his name and reputation, he has a right to be confronted with the proofs in the high court of criticism ; and his jury, which is the great republic of letters, will require the best and the most ample evidence to be produced, before they will agree to disrobe him of all his honors. On nothing less than proof, the most positive, direct, and complete, will those " foreign 1 Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. By Delia Bacon, with a Preface by Nathaniel Hawthorne. London and Boston, 1857. X PREFACE. nations and next ages," to whom the final appeal was made, now consent (such is the tenacity of long adverse possession) to eject the ass from the lion's skin, and turn over the rich legacy they have so long accepted in his name to the credit of another, though that other be one who considered his name and memory worth bequeathing to them : — " Blanch. 0, well did he become that lion's robe That did disrobe the lion of that robe ! Bast. It lies as sightly on the back of him As great Alcides' shews upon an ass. — But, ass, I '11 take that burthen from your back, Or lay on that shall make your shoulders crack." K. John, Act II. Sc. 1. It should be understood, to what manner of man this authorship belongs ; for it is not only " a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd," but a positive injury done to learning and philosophy, and to every individual scholar and man, who shall be taught to believe the enormous impossibility that such works could be, and were, written by mere genius without learning, or by some more fantasti- cally supernatural inspiration. Does not any honest man feel an unutterable indignation, when he dis- covers (after long years of thought and study, perhaps), that he has been all the while misled by false instruction, and that, consequently, the primest sources of truth have been left lumbering his shelves in neglect, because he could not, or even because he could (for it would be much the same thing with him, if he could) be made to believe that anything more could come from a very common (or indeed a very uncommon) person, than such a man could PREFACE. .XI know, and that he has thus been drawn aside by false shadows from those paths which alone can lead to a comprehensible philosophy of the universe, the real basis at last of his everlasting accountabilities, and been put off and befooled with paltry child's fables ? By the help of the Eternal Power and such abilities as we possess, let the truth and the proof of it come forth as fast, and spread as wide, as it is possible to make it. There is no danger of its getting too far by any means whatever. The chief object of this work is, to do something toward making the truth of this matter appear, still more clearly, and on other and (if possible) quite unanswerable grounds. It was written under the supposition that no one else would undertake to do the same thing better ; and it is published because it is believed that the duty is not yet sufficiently done (and I know very well how inadequate is this attempt to do it), that sublime duty, which the great testator, by his last will, left to foreign nations and the next ages to perform, whenever they should be able like himself to comprehend "the universal world," and, with Plato, to recognize the Philosopher, the Poet, the Seer, and the Saviour of men, for all one, — justice to his name and memory. For the quotations from the Plays of Shakespeare, I have preferred to make them conform to the text of the edition edited by Richard Grant "White, and published in Boston, in 1859 - 1862, except in a very few instances in which his emendations, or previous readings, appeared to me to be so clearly erroneous that I could not accept them ; and I have done this the more readily, because this edition has Xii PREFACE. evidently been edited with great care, good critical judgment, and excellent scholarship, and especially for the reason that the editor has taken the Folio of 1623 as the basis of his text and his criticism. For the text of Bacon, I have used the edition of his works edited by Basil Montagu (London 1825), and the American republication of it (Philadelphia 1854), and also the excellent edition of Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (since the republication of it in Boston, in 1860-1864), which has been edited with extraordinary learning and ability ; but as the larger part of my work was done before this edition ap- peared, I have not thought it worth while to under- take the labor of making the references conform to either one edition only. Wherever I have discovered an erroneous reading to have been corrected by the later and better edition, I have not failed to profit by it. In making quotations from the Latin works, I have not hesitated to give my own translations, when no better were at hand, but always with especial care to preserve as far as possible the style, manner, and diction of the author, and, at all events, the exact meaning of the original, as it would be ex- pressed in the language of modern philosophy. For the Letters of Bacon, I have had to depend mainly upon the edition of Montagu, but with the valuable assistance of the first two volumes of the " Letters and Life of Lord Bacon " by James Sped- ding (London 1861-2), which contain the letters and occasional works down to the year 1601, carefully edited and explained in chronological order ; and I have regretted exceedingly that the remaining vol- umes of this interesting and important work have inot yet appeared. PREFACE. Xiii The Frontispiece, engraved and brought to life by Mr. Joseph Andrews of Boston, is taken from the engraving (in Montagu's edition) of the white mar- ble monument which was erected to the memory of Lord Bacon by " the care and gratitude " of Sir Thomas Meautys, within the precincts of old Veru- lam, " representing his full portraiture in the posture of studying," says Dr. Rawley, together with a part of the inscription composed by that " rare wit," Sir Henry Wotton. Without more, the work is submitted to the con- sideration and judgment of the general jury of candid readers ; and, as more than one author has said be- fore, if they shall find half the pleasure in reading it that I have had in writing it, they shall be welcome. N. HOLMES. St. Louis, May 21st, 1866. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARIES. — SHAKESPEARE. PAGE § 1. EARLY LIFE 1 § 2. EMPLOYMENTS 5 § 3. MANUSCRIPTS 7 § 4. HIS LEARNING 9 § 5. HIS STUDIES 28 § 6. EARLY PLAYS 31 § 7. DOUBTFUL PLAYS 50 § 8. THE AUTHOR'S ATTAINMENTS .... 56 § 9. THE TRUE ORIGINAL COPIES 65 CHAPTER II. PRELIMINARIES. — BACON. § 1. CONTEMPORANEOUSNESS 81  5. ASSOCIATES 136 CHAPTER HI. FURTHER PROOFS. § 1. PARALLEL "WORKS 148 § 2. BEN JONSON . 165 § 3. MATTHEW'S POSTSCRIPT 172 §4. CONTEMPORARY WRITERS 177 §5. REASONS FOR CONCEALMENT 179 § 6. BACON A POET 184 § 7. GESTA GRAYORUM . 207 § 8. FRAGMENTS 228 XVI CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. MOKE DIRECT PROOES. PAOE § 1. THE RICHARD II 239 § 2. THE HENRY VIII 273 § 3. jhlius CAESAR 286 § 4. THE SOOTHSAYER 290 §5. MACBETH. — VISIONS 295 § 6. PARALLELISMS 303 CHAPTER V. MODELS. § 1. " ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES " 328 § 2. THE AS YOU LIKE IT. — A MODEL ... . 344 § 3. THE TIMON OF ATHENS. — A MODEL . . . 354 CHAPTER VI. PHILOSOPHICAL EVIDENCES. § 1. BACON A PHILOSOPHER 379 § 2. THE PHILOSOPHER A POET 393 § 3. UNIVERSALS 398 § 4. CUPID AND NEMESIS . 409 § 5. SCIENCE OF MATTER 415 § 6. SCIENCE OF SOUL . 426 § 7. ALL SCIENCE 438 § 8. SCIENCE IN POETRY 444 § 9. REMEMBRANCE AND OBLIVION .... 452 § 10. MIRACLES AND IMMORTALITY .... 464 CHAPTER VII. SPIRITUAL ILLUMINATION. § 1. THE TRUE RELIGION 479 § 2. DESTINY 496 § 3. THE GREATER PROVIDENCE 523 §4. THE LESSER PROVIDENCE 53 7 § 5. REVERENCE AND DEGREE 558 CHAPTER VIII. CONCLUSION. § 1. REFORMATION OF ABUSES 576 § 2. PHILOSOPHER AND POET 589 AUTHORSHIP OF SHAKESPEARE CHAPTER I. PEELIMINAEIES. — SHAKESPEARE. " Do not inflate plain things into marvels, but reduce marvels to plain things." Bacon. § 1. EARLY LIFE. The biography of William Shakespeare may now be considered as in the main settled and fixed for all time. Modern research has explored every forgotten corner in search of new facts ; all discoverable archives and dusty repositories of lost books and derelict papers have been ransacked ; every known record, monument, and relic, of the age in which he lived, has been thoroughly questioned, even to the last trace and tradition of his name and family ; and, failing any further genuine data, the most ingenious and consummate forgeries have been attempted. And if all honest inquiry be not yet exhausted, it has been made sufficiently clear, at least, that but little more can be added hereafter to what is already known of his personal history, and nothing that can be expected materially to change the general scope and character of the latest received account of his life. He is thus delivered down to us as essentially an uneducated man, whether we are to speak of education in the sense of modern times, or of the sixteenth century, or of the ancient schools. True, there have been great self-educated men in all times ; as, indeed, who is not, at last, in one sense, a self-educated man ? That there is a 2 EARLY LIFE. vast difference, however, between the learning and philoso- phy which the same genius will attain to, in a given time, in any age, with the aid of all existing helps, and that which he may reach without such aid, no man needs to be informed. School, or no school, without books and studies, we know that learning is impossible. Beyond that primary instruction which could be obtained at the free grammar-school of Stratford-on-Avon, in which Latin was taught by one master, nearly three centuries ago, it is pretty certain that William Shakespeare had no learning from public institutions, or from private tuition. His father, John Shakespeare, a glover by trade, sometime wool-stapler and butcher, at different times constable, high bailiff, and alderman of Stratford-on-Avon, and, at last, a gentleman, by grant of a coat-of-arms from the Herald's College, in 1599, at the instance of his son William, when he had attained to prosperity, was no doubt a respectable burgher of that place, but certainly so illiterate that he could not write his own name, and executed written instru- ments by making his mark ; and the same was the case with his mother, notwithstanding that she was descended of an ancient family of goodly estate. From the manner in which the name was written by members of the family in Warwickshire, it is evident that it was usually pro- nounced Shaxper, though it seems to have had no fixed spelling among them, not even with William himself, for his autographic signatures to his will appear to have it both Shahspere and Shakspeare ; but it was printed in his life- time, and in the Folio of 1623, and passed into the con- temporary literature, as Shakespeare ; and so let it remain.1 William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, on the 23d day of April, 1564, and according to what is known of his early life, he attended the free grammar-school of that place for some few years and until about the year 1578, when he was taken from school, his assistance being 1 Halliwell's Life of William Shakespeare, London, 1848. EARLY LIFE. 3 required by his father in his business at home. The occu- pations in which his father appears to have been engaged, at this time, were those of an ordinary yeoman, including the business of a glover, a wool-stapler, and, as some say, a butcher also ; and he was, at the same time, and down to the year 1586, an alderman of the corporation of Stratford. On the 28th day of November, 1582, the son William was married, at the age of eighteen, to Ann Hathaway, some years older than himself, and the daughter of a neighbor- ing farmer. Their eldest daughter, Susanna, was born in May following ; but his latest biographer thinks there must have been some preliminary espousals, in accordance with a frequent custom of the time, as early as the summer of 1582.1 After this date, his father appears to have fallen into embarrassed circumstances. He was superseded in his office of alderman, in 1586, for non-attendance, and was presented as a recusant, in 1592, " for not coming to church for feare of process for debt." There is indubitable evi- dence that, for several years prior to 1587, different theat- rical companies from London occasionally visited Stratford- on-Avon (the native place of some of the actors), in some instances, under the patronage of John Shakespeare and other aldermen ; and it is highly probable that the son William would be attracted to their company. There are uncertain traditions also that, during this period, he had been in the habit of drinking beer with the pot-house clubs, hunting coneys for amusement, and poaching on the neighboring deer-parks by way of romance, until he was driven away from Stratford by the persecution of Sir Thomas Lucy ; but whether from this cause, or driven by stress of poverty, or merely drawn by the attractions of the theatre, it appears that, about the year 1587, he went up to London, carrying with him but a small stock of learning, and became attached to the theatre in a very humble capac- ity. Ben Jonson informs us that he had " but small Latin i HalliwelL 4 EARLY LIFE. and less Greek " ; and " rare Ben " must certainly have known the truth of the matter. Indeed, it is plain his learning must have been little enough, however obtained ; and in this, all the traditions concur. } Precisely how his time was employed, during these nine years after leaving the grammar-school, of course we cannot certainly know ; but there is no intimation in anything that has come down to us, that he was at all given to books, or to studies of any kind./ The employments in which it would seem to be almost certain he must have been engaged, the circum- stances which surrounded him, and the few details of his life which have been preserved, would all go to exclude the hypothesis of his having given any considerable attention to letters or studies, in this period. There is no written composition of his in existence, belonging to this time, and no proof that there ever was any, except a mere tradition of a lampoon upon Sir Thomas Lucy, of which no scrap has been authentically preserved. The verses which later traditions have attributed to him, whether as fragments of this supposed lampoon, or as epitaphs and epigrams written towards the close of his career, are, as any one may see, but miserable doggerel at best, and might have been writ- ten by the sorriest poetaster. With Halliwell and other critics, though immaterial to our purpose, we may safely reject them all as having no reliable basis of authenticity, and as necessarily implying, on the supposition of such basis, "a deterioration of power for which no one has assigned a sufficient reason." 1 The critic who would find a trace of the great poet in these performances, should remember Bacon's caution to the interpreter of nature : " If the sow with her snout should happen to imprint the letter A upon the ground, wouldst thou, therefore, imagine she could write out a whole tragedy as one letter ? " 2 1 Halliwell, 270. 2 Interp. of Nat, Works, by Montagu, (London), XV., 101; Temporis Partus Mas., Works, by Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, (Boston), VII., 30. EMPLOYMENTS. § 2. EMPLOYMENTS. That his first employment, on coming to London, was that of a link-boy, holding horses at the door of the theatre, as some traditions represent, would seem to be very ques- tionable ; but that it was not in any capacity above that of a mere " servitor," or under-actor, his most careful biogra- phers seem to admit as highly probable, if not quite cer- tain. The first certain knowledge that we have of him in London, however, is of the date of 1592, when there seems to have been a distinct allusion to his name in Greene's " Groatsworth of Wit," in which, apparently speaking for himself and other writers for the stage against the actors, " those Anticks garnisht in our colours," Greene says : " Yes, trust them not ; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart, wrapt in a players hyde, supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you ; and beeing an absolute Johannes factotum, is, in his owne conceyt, the only Shake-scene in a countrey." * From this it may be inferred that he was beginning to have some kind of repu- tation as an author of plays, and, in 1593-4, the " Venus and Adonis " and the " Rape of Lucrece " are dedicated to the Earl of Southampton under his name. From this time forward a few scattered notices of him have been gathered up from contemporary records and documents relating to purchases of lands, his money dealings with his neighbors, and ordinary business transactions ; but, abating all merely mythical traditions of uncertain origin, and the impudent forgeries of these later times, no further authen- tic reference to his position in the theatre occurs until 1598, when his name is mentioned by Meres as the reputed author of several of these plays, and two of them are printed with his name as author on the title-page, in that year. That he was one of the inhabitants of Southwark, l See Halliwell's Life, 144. 6 EMPLOYMENTS. dwelling near the Bear Garden in 1596, seems to rest upon very questionable authority; but, in 1597, he had purchased New Place, in Stratford-on-Avon, where his family contin- ued to reside until his death. In 1598, we find him lend- ing money to his neighbors, and performing his part on the stage ; and in 1599, he had succeeded in obtaining for his father the grant of a coat of arms from the Herald's Col- lege, which descended to himself in 1601. And in 1604, when the perfected " Hamlet " had been produced, he had become a leading manager and sharer in the Globe and Blackfriars, and his name stood second only in the list of patentees, " His Majesty's Servants." From this date until 1613, the personal notices that remain to us exhibit him as being always very attentive to matters of business, rapidly growing in estate, purchasing farms, houses, and tythes in Stratford, bringing suits for small sums against various persons for malt delivered, money loaned, and the like, carrying on agricultural pursuits and other kinds of traffic, with " a good grip o' the siller," and executing business commissions in London for his Stratford neighbors, while we are to suppose he was, at the same time, producing such plays as the " Hamlet," the " Macbeth," the " Othello," the " Lear," and the " Julius Caesar " ; whence it might cer- tainly be concluded, that he had an excellent capacity for business in addition to his other arts and superhuman gifts ; but there is nowhere the slightest note or trace of his liter- ary occupations. He had now acquired a brilliant reputation and an ample estate. It seems probable that he quit acting upon the stage about the year 1608, and that, in 1610, he finally retired from any active participation in the affairs of the theatre, though he may have still continued to receive for a time his share of the income as one of the largest proprie- tors ; but how long, it is not certainly known. It would seem probable, however, that he had parted with his inter- est in the theatres sometime before the 30th of June, 1613, MANUSCRIPTS. 7 when the Globe theatre was destroyed by fire. It is known that as late as March, 1613, he made the purchase of a house in the Blackfriars ; and this is the last transaction in which he is positively ascertained to have been concerned in London. After this date, we hear of him only at Strat- ford-on-Avon, attending to business and the ordinary affairs of life, leisurely enjoying the social intercourse of his neigh- bors and his family, until his death in 1616. Indeed, throughout his life (as his most zealous biographer is obliged to confess), "the best evidence we can produce exhibits him as paying more regard to his social affairs than to his profession." 1 And so, it would seem to be true, as some still think, that, in the words of Pope, — " Shakespeare, whom you and every playhouse-bill Style the divine, matchless, what you will, For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despight." § 3. MANUSCRIPTS. No original manuscript of any play, or poem, letter, or other prose composition, in the handwriting of William Shakespeare, has ever been discovered : none is known to have been preserved within the reach of the remotest defi- nite tradition. It does not appear by any direct proof that the original manuscript of any one of the plays or poems was ever seen, even in his own time, in his own handwrit- ing, under such circumstances as to afford any conclusive evidence, however probable, that he was the original author. " I remember," says Ben Jonson, " the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writ- ing (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never blotted out line." "We have only to suppose for a moment that the manu- scripts may have been copied by him from some unknown complete and finished originals, which were kept a secret from the world, and this wonder of the players would be i Halliwell, 194. 8 MANUSCRIPTS. at once explained. Meres, in 1598, speaks of " his sugred sonnets among his private friends," as if they had been cir- culated in manuscript ; but even this does not exclude the possibility of another having been the author, in the same way, though in itself highly improbable at first view. / That he was universally reputed to be the author of these works, in his own time, not merely by the public in general, but by contemporary writers, his fellows of the theatre, the printers and publishers, and some great personages, and that the fact was never publicly questioned, in that age, nor indeed until a very recent date, must be admitted, though some evidence may be adduced herein, tending to show that the contrary was known, or at least strongly suspected, by some few persons at that day.; It is enough here to remark, that this reputation alone is not absolutely conclu- sive of the question. No more is that other very pregnant circumstance, the fact that the " Venus and Adonis " and the " Rape of Lucrece " were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton under the name of William Shakespeare ; for it is clearly possible, however improbable at first view, that even this may have been arranged and designed as a cover for the real author. In short, there is no positive and direct evidence in any contemporary record, fact, circum- stance, or event, relating to Shakespeare, which is in itself of such a nature that it must be accepted in his favor as conclusive of the question of this authorship. He makes no mention of his manuscripts, or literary property, in his will ; nor is there a trace of evidence that they ever came into the possession of his executors, or of any member of his family. But for this there may have been the less occa- sion, if we assume that the manuscript copies had all been sold to the theatre, and that not a single duplicate copy had ever been retained in his own possession. It might be possible, indeed, that some of them may have been burnt with the Globe theatre in 1613:/ when the Fortune was burnt, in 1621, we know the play-books were all lost. It is HIS LEARNING. § 4. HIS LEARNING. For the learning of Shakespeare, his knowledge of his- tory and of the manners, customs, and literature of the ancients, his acquaintance with foreign languages, his nat- ural science and metaphysical philosophy, his skill in the medical lore of his time, as also in the laws of England, his familiarity with the manners of the Court and high society, the vast range of his observation in all the realms of nature and art, as well as in all that pertains to the civil state, or to the affairs of private life, or to the characters, passions, and affections of men and women, or to human life and destiny, the subtle profundity of his intellect, and his extraordinary insight into all the relations of things, — all this, and much more than can be stated, must wholly depend upon the argument to be drawn from the internal evidence contained in the writings themselves, not only unsupported in any adequate manner, but for the most part absolutely contradicted by the known facts of his personal history It is apparent that this argument can have no weight whatever in favor of William Shakespeare, until the 10 HIS LEARNING. fact be established that he was really the autnor of these works ; and this is the very question we have in hand. The learning and philosophy of these plays of Shake- speare, especially since the feeble attempt of Dr. Farmer to make them appear to be possible for the supposed author, have been a matter of wonder to editorial critics, and a stumbling-block to all great writers, who have treated of the subject. Even Dr. Johnson was willing to admit he must have had " Latin enough to grammaticize his Eng- lish," while conceding that Ben Jonson must have known, and " ought to decide the controversy." 1 Pope, knowing well enough that there was " certainly a vast difference between learning and languages, thought it was " plain he had much reading, at least," but was obliged, at last, to declare that " he seems to have known the world by intui- tion, to have looked through human nature at one glance, and to be the only author that gives ground for a very new opinion, that the philosopher and even the man of the world may be born, as well as the poet." 2 Steevens and Malone, after laborious research, undertook to produce a list of the translations of ancient authors, known to have existed in English in the time of Shakespeare, as the source of all his classical erudition ; but it falls far short of furnishing a satisfactory explanation of the matter, in our day, and in the face of numerous instances to the contrary, scarcely less decisive than this one, that the " Timon of Athens " turns out to have been founded in great part upon the untranslated Greek of Lucian ; 3 besides that it is now clear enough to the attentive scholar, that this author drew materials, ideas, and even expressions, from the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and even from Plato, no less than from the Latin of Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, and Tacitus, not to mention numerous others of the ancient 1 Johnson's Preface. 2 Pope's Preface. 3 Knight's Stud, of Shaks., 71; Luc. Opera (ed. Dindorf, Lipsise, 1858), I. 30-51. HIS LEARNING. 11 classics, and apparently with the utmost indifference to the question whether they had ever been translated into Eng- lish or not. Indeed, his learning took the widest range. Mr. Collier, profoundly impressed by a certain frequency of legal terms ' and expressions in the plays, is ready, thereupon, to add an entire new passage to the known biography of William Shakespeare, to the effect that, in his youth, he had studied law in the office of an attorney, or, at least, a bailiff, at Stratford ; and the learned essay of Lord Chief Justice Campbell,1 addressed to him upon the subject, comes to this conclusion upon Shakespeare's juridical phrases and forensic allusions : " On the retrospect I am amazed," says his Lordship, " not only by their number, but by the accu- racy and propriety with which they are uniformly intro- duced." And he adds : " There is nothing so dangerous as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry." He thought we might be "justified in believing the fact that he was a clerk in an attorney's office at Stratford with- out any direct proof of the fact," mainly relying, with Mr. Collier, upon " the seemingly utter impossibility of Shake- speare having acquired, on any other theory, the wonderful knowledge of law which he- undoubtedly displays." Never- theless, his Lordship was constrained to warn his friend, that he had not " really become an absolute convert " to his side of the question ; nor did he fail to remark, that the theory required us " implicitly to believe a fact, which, were it true, positive and irrefragable evidence, in Shakespeare's own handwriting " in the records of the courts, or in deeds and wills written or witnessed by him, and preserved in the archives at Stratford-on-Avon, might have been forthcom- ing to establish it ; but, " after diligent search," none such had been, or could be, discovered. The argument might justify, but does not require, an examination here into the special learning of this author in 1 Sliahespeare' 's Legal Acquirements (N. York, 1859), p. 132. 12 HIS LEARNING. matters of law, or medicine. This work has already been so far accomplished by distinguished members of these pro- fessions as to convince them, if not the critical world, that he had a very wonderful acquaintance with both. Let it suffice to notice a single instance (cited by Lord Camp- bell *) of his familiarity with Plowden, whose preface was dated from the Middle Temple, in 1578, the same year in which William Shakespeare is said to have been taken from school by his father, at the age of fourteen. The dis- cussion of the grave-diggers in the " Hamlet," as to whether the drowned Ophelia was entitled to Christian burial, " proves," says his Lordship, " that Shakespeare [he meant, of course, the author of the play] had read and studied Plowden's Report of the celebrated case of Hales v. Petit.2 Sir James Hales, a Judge of the Common Pleas, having been imprisoned for being concerned in the plot to place Lady Jane Grey upon the throne, and afterwards pardoned, was so affected in mind as to commit suicide by drowning himself in a river. The coroner's inquest found a verdict of felo de se, under which his body was to be buried at a cross-road, with a stake thrust through it, and his goods and estates were forfeited to the crown. A knotty ques- tion arose upon the suit of his widow for an estate by sur- vivorship in joint-tenancy, whether the forfeiture could be considered as having taken place in the lifetime of Sir James Hales ; for, if it did not, she took the estate by sur- vivorship. Sergeant Southcote argued for the lady, that as long as he was alive he had not killed himself, and the moment that he died, the estate vested in the plaintiff. " The felony of the husband shall not take away her title by survivor- ship, for in this manner of felony two things are to be con- sidered : First, the cause of the death ; secondly, the death ensuing the cause ; and these two make the felony, and without both of them the felony is not consummate. And i Shakes. Leg. Acq., p. 104. 2 Plowden's Rep., 256-9. HIS LEARNING. 13 the cause of the death is the act done in the party's life- time, which makes the death to follow. And the act which brought on the death here was the throwing himself volun- tarily into the water, for this was the cause of his death. 