Bacon vs. Shakespeare; a brief for plaintiff, by Edwin Reed.

Front matter

ifuillilnllill

THE GIFT OF

MAY TREAT MORRISON

Preface To Second Edition

We may say of improbabilities, as we do of evils, " Choose the least." It is antecedently improbable that the " Shake-speare " plays, for which the whole domain of human knowledge was laid under contribution, were written by William Shakspere of Stratford, for he was uneducated. It is also antecedently improbable that Francis Bacon, whose name for nearly three hundred years has been a synonym for all that is philosophical and profound, who was so great in another and widely different field of labor that he gave a new direction for all future time to the course of human thought, was the author of them. And yet, to one or the other of these two men must we give our suffrage for the crowning honors of humanity.

In the claim for Shakspere, the improbability is so overwhelming that it involves very nearly a violation of the laws of nature. No man ever did, and, it is safe to say, no man ever can acquire knowledge intuitively. One may be a genius, like Burns, and the world be hushed to silence while he sings ; but the injunction, " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat x Preface to Second Edition.

thy bread," is everywhere as true of intellectual as it is of physical life. The fruit of the tree of knowledge can be reached only by hard climbing, the sole instance on record in which it was plucked and handed down to the waiting recipient having proved a failure.

In the case of Bacon, also, the assumption may be said to lie on the very boundary line of credibility. It implies the possession of faculties seemingly inconsistent, if not mutually exclusive ; and yet to a certain degree it is not without precedent. Fortune has more than once emptied a whole cornucopia of gifts at a single birth. What diversity, what beauty, what grandeur in the personality of Leonardo da Vinci ! He was author, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, naturalist, civil engineer, inventor, and in each capacity, almost without exception, eminent above his contemporaries. His great painting, the ' Last Supper,' ranks the third among the products in this branch of modern art, Raphael's ' Madonna di San Sisto,' and Michael Angelo's ' Last Judgment' being respectively, perhaps, first and second. At the same time, he was the pioneer in the study of the anatomy and structural classification of plants ; he founded the science of hydraulics ; he invented the camera obscura; he proclaimed the undulatory theory of light and heat; he investigated the properties of steam, and anticipated by four centuries its use in the propulsion of boats ; and he barely missed the great discovery which immortalized Newton. In-

Preface to Second Edition. xi

deed, we see in Leonardo da Vinci not a mountain only, but a whole range of sky-piercing peaks.

Another illustrious example is Goethe, scarcely inferior to Bacon, whatever the claims made for the latter, in the brilliancy and scope of his powers. As a poet, Goethe was a star of the first magnitude, a blaze of light in the literary heavens. His 'Faust' is one of the six great poems of the world. As a writer of prose fiction he stands in the front rank, his ' Wilhelm Meister ' being a classic, side by side with < The Heart of Mid Lothian,' ' Middlemarch,' and ' The Scarlet Letter.' By a singular coincidence, also, as compared with Bacon, he was one of the master spirits of his age in the sphere of the sciences. An evolutionist before Darwin, he beheld, as in a vision, the application of law to all the phenomena of nature and life. In botany, he made notable additions to the then existing stock of knowledge; and throughout the vast realm of biology he not only developed new methods of inquiry, but spread over it the glow of imagination, without which the path of discovery is always doubly difficult to tread.

In the light of precedents, therefore, the claim made to the authorship of the plays in behalf of Bacon cannot be discredited.

E. R.

Andover, Mass., September i, 1890.

Preface To Fourth Edition

Nothing is more tenacious of life than an old popular belief. It has the force of habit, which the pressure of enlightened opinion, through successive generations, alone can overcome. " O Lord, thou hast taught us," once prayed a good deacon, " that as a twig is bent, the tree 's inclined," — a truth drawn from the Book of Nature, and as indubitable as though the writings of Pope were a part of the sacred canon. Trees that have unnatural and uncomely twists in their branches, even if growing on Mt. Zion, must be permitted to die of old age; the science of arboriculture is powerless to affect them. Intelligent and conscientious scholars among us are still defending the historical verity of the first chapter of Genesis. A personal devil is as potent in the minds of some men to-day as he was formerly in the minds of all. How often one hears in Germany the polite ejaculation Gesundheit uttered when a person sneezes! Even now, many people turn, almost instinctively, to see in which part of the heavens the moon quarters for a forecast of the weather, though it has long been demonstrated that that luminary has no more influence

Preface to Fourth Edition, xiii

in this branch of our local affairs than has the most distant star which the Lick telescope reveals to us.

Unfortunately, these old beliefs and habitudes linger in some of the noblest minds to the last. The shadow of a solar eclipse, sweeping over the earth, permits the just and the unjust, the wise and the foolish, to emerge into the light behind it indiscriminately. Evil spirits do not always beg the privilege, when they find themselves about to be exorcised, of taking refuge in a herd of swine and leaping over a precipice into the sea. The butcheries of the Salem witchcraft, marking the close of that delusion, were perpetrated by those to whom the love of God was the chief end of man. One of the last judges in England to send a witch to the gallows was Time's noblest offspring, Sir Matthew Hale. The last in that country to manumit their slaves were the clergy. The Garrison mob in Boston wore broadcloth on their backs, and all the current virtues in their hearts. It is, therefore, no criterion of a good cause that men of acknowledged abilities and culture support it, nor of a bad cause that such men denounce it.

Indeed, Truth has a modest way of entering the world like a mendicant, at the back door. Such a guest is seldom admitted, on his first arrival, at the other end of the house. Copernicus stood there, shivering in the cold, thirteen years before he dared even to lift the knocker. Every great religion has sprung up among the poor. Every great reform owes its origin to the oppressed. Every great invenxiv Preface to Fourth Edition.

tion has had, like the founders of Rome, a wolf for a nurse. It is not to be expected that rebellion against a king of poets will find favor among the nobility that surround his throne. The high priests who, with unsandalled feet, minister in a sacred temple, will not be the first to despoil the idol they worship. No captain in that " fleet of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers," to which Carlyle refers, in the most eloquent sentence he ever wrote, will strike his colors or change his outfit so long as the products of his industry under the old regime are bringing him wealth. And what to him are winds and waves or any storm of criticism, whose barque is anchored to the theory of miraculous Inspiration ! Showers of verbal aerolites on the mimic stage, only a product of untaught Nature !

Amid the turmoil of our daily life, if we listen reverently, we may hear voices crying in the wilderness, perhaps the voice of a woman, alone and forsaken, in a strange city.

"No accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world hath ever lost."

From the banks of the Missouri, from the wheatfields of Minnesota, from far-off Melbourne at the antipodes, out of the heart of humanity somewhere, a response in due time is sure to come.

E. R.

Andover, Mass., January i, 1891.

Contents

Page

I. The Author of the " Shake-speare " Plays . i

II. William Shakspere u

I. The Author Of The " Shake-speare " Plays

IT is conceded by all that the author of the " Shakespeare " l Plays was the greatest genius of his age, perhaps of any age, and, with nearly equal unanimity, that he was a man of broad and varied scholarship.

I. He was a linguist, many of the Plays being based on Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Italian productions, some of which had not then been translated into English. Latin and French were especially very familiar to him. It is thus apparent that not less than five foreign languages, living and dead, were included in his repertory.

1 Wherever personal reference is made in this work to William Shakspere of Stratford, the name js so spelled, William Shakspere ; but wherever the reference is to the author of the plays, as such, we treat the name as a pseudonym, spelling it as it was printed on many of the title-pages of the early quartos, William Shake-speare. In all cases of quotation, however, we follow the originals.

Latin. — The ' Comedy of Errors' was founded upon the Menaechmi of Plautus, a comic poet who wrote about 200 B. c. The first translation of the Latin work into English, so far as known, was made in 1595, subsequently to the appearance of the " Shake-speare " play, and without any resemblance to it " in any peculiarity of language, of names, or of any other matter, however slight." — Verplanck.

" His frequent use of Latin derivatives in their radical sense shows a somewhat thoughtful and observant study of that language."— Richard Grant White's Memoirs of William Shakespeare, p. xvi.

" He showed his fundamental knowledge of that language, by using its words in their genuine, original meaning, which they have lost with their adoption into English." — Gervinus' Shakespeare Commentaries,1 p. 26.

" After the proofs I have given, it will hardly, I think, be denied that he was quite capable of studying the celebrated story [of ' Venus and Adonis ' ] in the original sources, and that he certainly did so in relation to Ovid's version of it." — Prof. T. S. Bay ties 2 in Eraser's Mag. 1880.

" He knew Latin, we need not doubt, as well as any other man of his time." — Stapfer's Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, p. 100.

" He makes some of his characters [ in ' Love's Labor 's Lost '] use false Latin, that he may show his learning in correcting it." — T. W. White's ' Our English Homer,' p. 195.

Greek. — ' Timon of Athens 'was drawn partly from Plutarch and partly from Lucian, the latter author not having been translated into English earlier than 1638 (White), fifteen years after the publication of the play.

Helena's pathetic lament over a lost friendship in ' A Midsummer Night's Dream' (III. 2) had its prototype in a Greek poem by St. Gregory of Nazianzus, published at Venice in 1504. — Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap, xxvii.

" The likeness between the Clytemnestra of Aeschylus and the

1 " A German professor, Gervinus, is the author of the greatest book ever written on Shakespeare." — Stapfer.

2 Editor Encyclopcedia Britannica, ninth edition.

Author s Attainments. 3

Lady Macbeth is too remarkable to escape notice ; that between the two poets in their choice of epithets is as great, though more difficult of proof. Yet I think an attentive student of Shakespeare cannot fail to be reminded of something familiar to him in such phrases as ' flame-eyed fire,' ' flax-winged ships/ and 'star-neighboring peaks.'

" In the ' Electra ' of Sophocles, which is almost identical in its leading motive with ' Hamlet,' the Chorus consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes in the same commonplace way which Hamlet's uncle tries with him. Shakespeare expatiates somewhat more largely, but the sentiment in both cases is almost verbally identical."1 — Lowell's Among My Books, p. 191.

A passage in ' Troilus and Cressida ' is " inexplicable except on the supposition that Shakespeare was acquainted with what Plato wrote." — Richard Grant White.

Among the presages of death, given by a Greek writer, 400 B. C, and repeated in 'Henry V.," " Shake-speare " mentions one which is peculiar to the people of Greece, and which no translation of the original work, even into Latin, had brought out.

Italian. — An Italian novel, written by Giraldi Cinthio and first printed in 1565, furnished the incidents for the story of

1 Gibbon and Lowell were unfortunately restrained by certain supposed exigencies from acknowledging that the author of the plays must have been familiar with the Greek language. Mr. Lowell, however, feels compelled to ask, rather helplessly, not to say absurdly, —

" Is it incredible that he may have laid hold of an edition of the Greek tragedies, Graece et Latine, and then, with such poor wits as he was master of, contrived to worry some considerable meaning out of them ? "

This state of mind on the part of so distinguished a critic illustrates very forcibly one of the chief causes of the poverty of Shake-spearean criticism. Mr. Steevens, for instance, suffered himself to be driven to the preposterous conclusion that the play of ' Troilus and Cressida ' is not wholly " Shake-speare " 's, because of certain Grecisms in it, of which, he assumed, " Shake-speare " could have had no knowledge.

1 Othello.' The author of the play " read it probably in the original, for no English translation of his time is known." — Gervinus1 Shak. Com. p. 505.

"He was, without doubt, quite able to read Italian." — Richard Gratit White.

" When I ago, distilling his poison into Othello's ears, utters the oft quoted lines : —

'Who steals my purse, steals trash ; 't is something, nothing; 'T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands ; But he that niches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed,' —

he but repeats with little variation a stanza of Berni's ' Orlando Innamorato,' of which poem, to this day, there is no English version." — Ibid. : Memoirs of William Shakespeare, XXIII.

" The great majority of the dramatis personce in his comedies, as well as in some of the tragedies, have Italian names, and many of them are as Italian in nature as in name. The moonlight scene in 'The Merchant of Venice' is southern in every detail and incident. ' Romeo and Juliet ' is Italian throughout, alike in coloring, incident, and passion. In the person of Hamlet, the author appears even as a critic of Italian style." — Prof. Baynes in Encyc. Brit. XXI. 758.

French. — One entire scene and parts of others in ' Henry V.' are in French.

Plowden's French ' Commentaries,' containing the celebrated case of Hales vs. Petit, which was satirized by the grave-diggers in ' Hamlet,' were translated into English for the first time more than half a century after the play was written.

" The author shows his knowledge of even the most delicate peculiarities of the French tongue." — Richard Grant White's Shakespeare's Works, II. 206.

" A brilliant proof that the author of the plays was familiar with the French language is the masterly way in which he makes Dr. Caius, in 'The Merry' Wives of Windsor,' murder the Queen's English. Those who have ever heard a Frenchman utter this jargon will not hesitate to admit that the poet has

Author s Attainments. 5

grasped and reproduced it with inimitable truth and in the wittiest manner." — Else's William Shakespeare, p. 382.

" The evidence of his knowledge of French is more abundant and decisive, so much so as hardly to need express illustration."— Prof. Baynes in Encyc. Brit. art. "Shakespeare."

Spanish. — The poet drew some of his materials for the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' from the Spanish romance of Montemayor, entitled the ' Diana,' which was translated into English in 1582, the translation, however, not being printed till 1598. "The resemblances are too minute to be accidental." [Halliwell-Phillipps.]

" Could there be anything more to the point than the description he gives in ' Love's Labor 's Lost ' of the Spanish language? Can one who describes the character of a language with such clearness and insight be unacquainted with it?" — Else's Shakespeare, p. 385.

Gervinus calls attention to two of the Comedies in which Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian words and sentences abound, and ventures to suggest a desire, on the part of the author, to exhibit in them his knowledge of foreign languages.

II. He had intimate acquaintance with ancient and modern literature, numerous authors, from the age of Homer down to his own, being drawn upon for illustration and imagery in the composition of these works.

" The writer was a classical scholar. Rowe found traces in him of the 'Electra' of Sophocles; Colman, of Ovid ; Pope, of Dares Phrygius and other Greek authors; Farmer, of Horace and Virgil; Malone, of Lucretius, Statius, Catullus, Seneca, Sophocles, and Euripides; Steevens, of Plautus ; Knight, of the 'Antigone' of Sophocles; White, of the 'Alcestis1 of Euripides." — Nathaniel Holmes' Authorship of Shakespeare, p. 57.

" The early plays exhibit the poet not far removed from school and its pursuits ; in none of his later dramas does he plunge so deeply into the remembrances of antiquity, his head overflowing with its images, legends, and characters. The 1 Taming of the Shrew,' especially, may be compared with the ' First Part of Henry VI.' ' in the manifold ostentation of booklearning. ' " — Gervinus' Shak. Com. p. 145.

"A mind fresh from academic studies." — R. G. White's Essay on Shakespeare's Genius, p. ccxxiv.

"In that play, so marvellously full of thought, ' Troilus and Cressida,' Ulysses rises to the full height of our idea of the wandering Ithacan. Whence came this Ulysses ? Not from Homer's brain ; for, although Homer tells us that the King of Ithaca was 'divine,' and 'spear-renowned,' and 'well skilled in various enterprise and counsel,' the deeds and words of the hero, as represented by the Greek poet, hardly justify these epithets. Here we see that Shakespeare was even wiser than the Homeric ideal of human wisdom. He made our Ulysses. ' — Ibid.

kk The early plays mark the productions of a fresh collegian. His familiar acquaintance with college terms and usages makes for the conclusion that he enjoyed the privileges of a university education." — Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke.

" The very earliest writings of Shakespeare are imbued with a spirit of classical antiquity." — Charles Knight.

" His habits had been scholastic and those of a student. A young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits." — Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare, p. 287.

" The immaturity [of his mind in the early plays] is seen in the extent to which the smell of the lamp mingles with the freshness and vigor of poetic feeling. The wide circle of references to Greek fable and Roman story suggests that the writer had come recently from his books, and was not unwilling to display his acquaintance with them." — Prof. Baynes in Eraser's Mag. 1880.

" ' Love's Labor 's Lost,' one of the earliest of the plays, is so learned, so academic, so scholastic in expression and allusion, that it is unfit for popular representation." — O'Connor's Hamlet's Note-Book.

Stapfer,1 a distinguished French critic, intimates that in his

1 It may be well to remark that Stapfer, Baynes, and White are unfriendly witnesses, and that Gervinus and Verplanck wrote before

Authors Attainments. 7

judgment some of the plays are u over-cumbered with learning, not to say pedantic"

III. He was a jurist, and his fondness for legal phrases is remarkable.

He had " a deep technical knowledge of the law," and an easy familiarity with " some of the most abstruse proceedings in English jurisprudence." — Lord Chief Justice Campbell.

" Whenever he indulges this propensity, he uniformly lays down good law." — Ibid.

One of the sonnets [46] is so intensely technical in its phraseology that " without a considerable knowledge of English forensic procedure, it cannot be fully understood." x — Ibid.

"In an age when it was the common practice for young lawyers to write plays, one playwright left upon his works a stronger, sharper legal stamp than appears upon those of any of his contemporaries ; and the characters of this stamp are those of the

this controversy began. Judge Holmes is our senior counsel, but we claim the right at this hearing to put him also on the witness stand. His work on the ' Authorship of Shakespeare ' is as temperate in its judgments as it is philosophical and profound in its general treatment of the subject.

1 " Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war, How to divide the conquest of thy sight ; Mine eye my heart thy picture's sight would bar, Myiieart mine eye the freedom of that right. My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie, — A closet never pierced with crystal eyes, — But the defendant doth that plea deny, And says in him thy fair appearance lbs.

To 'cide this title is impanneled A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart ; And by their verdict is determined The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part : As thus, — mine eye's due is thy outward part, And my heart's right thy inward love of heart."

Sonnet XL VI.

complicated law of real property." — Richard Grant White's Memoirs of William Shakespeare, p. xlvii.

"His knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill." — Edmund M alone.

" The marvellous intimacy which he displays with legal terms, his frequent adoption of them in illustration, and his curiously technical knowledge of their form and force." — Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke.

"In one scene the lover, wishing a kiss, prays for a grant of pasture on his mistress' lips. This suggests the law of pasture ; and she replies that her lips are "no common." This again suggests the distinction between tenancy in common and tenancy in severalty, and she adds, "though several they be.' " — Davis'' Law in Shakespeare.

" Among these [legal terms], there are some which few but a lawyer would, and some even which none but a lawyer could, have written." — Franklin Fiske Heard's Shakespeare as a Lawyer.

" In the ' Second Part of Henry IV. [V. 5], Pistol uses the term, absque hoc, which is technical in the last degree. This was a species of traverse, used by special pleaders when the record was in Latin, known by the denomination of a special traverse. The subtlety of its texture, and the total dearth of explanation in all the reports and treatises extant in the time of Shakespeare with respect to its principle, seem to justify the conclusion that he must have obtained a knowledge of it from actual practice.1 — Ibid.

IV. He was a philosopher.

"In the constructing of Shakespeare's Dramas there is an understanding manifested, equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum." — Carlyle.

" He is inconceivably wise ; the others, conceivably." — Emerson.

1 Italics our own.

Author s Attainments. 9

" From his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence." — Dr. Johnson.

"He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher." — Coleridge.

"In some of his [Falstaff's] reflections we have a clear, though brief, view of the profound philosopher underlying the profligate humorist and makesport: for he there discovers a breadth and sharpness of observation and a depth of practical sagacity such as might have placed him in the front rank of statesmen and sages." — Hudson' *s Shakespeare. His Art and Life, II. 94.

Thus was the author's mind not only a fountain of inspiration from its own illimitable depths, but enriched in large measure with the stores of knowledge which the world had then accumulated.

" There is the clearest evidence that his mind was richly stored with knowledge of all kinds." — Prof. Baynes in Fraser's Mag., 1880.

"The range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later parallel." — Lowell's Among My Books, P- 167.

"An amazing genius, which could pervade all nature at a glance, and to whom nothing within the limits of the universe appeared to be unknown." — Whalley.

" Shakespeare had in his time few equals in the range of his manifold knowledge." — Gervinus"1 Commentaries, p. 25.

" It is childish to discuss the amount of learning possessed by an author who has taught the whole world." — Staffer's Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, p. 106.

" The great master who knew everything." — Charles Dickens.

" Let it be accepted as a truth past all debate, that among the great ones of the earth Shakespeare stands alone, in unapproachable majesty. What was the secret of his power ; from whence derived this marvellous insight into human nature under all circumstances, ages, and climes, this accurate knowledge of sciences, arts, governments, morals, manners, philosophies,

IO

Bacon vs. Shakspere.

and codes, this exquisite command of language, never wielded with such skill before or since, by which each character, event, or thought is drawn in lines of living light ? This, the greatest of all human mysteries which we have received from our fathers, we must transmit, deepened and heightened rather than lessened by our labors, to our children." — Allibone's Dictionary of Authors, II. 2050.

Note. — The authorities cited in this chapter give us the best and ripest results of modern scholarship. Nearly all of them are of the latter half of the current century.

II. William Shakspere

I. THE family of William Shakspere, the actor, was grossly illiterate. His father and mother made their signatures with a cross. Of his two children, Judith, at the age of twenty-seven, was also unable to write her name ; Susanna could not read her husband's manuscript, nor even identify it by sight among others. The little we know of his own youth and early manhood affords presumptive proof of the strongest kind that he was uneducated.

" Nature only helped him." — Leonard Digges, 1640. " His learning was very little." — Thomas Fuller's Worthies, 1662.

" Old Mother-wit and Nature gave Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have."

Sir John Denham, 1668.

" Shakespeare said all that Nature could impart." — Chetwood, 1684.

" Never any scholar, as our Shakespeare, if alive, would confess himself." — Winstanley, 1684.

" He was as much a stranger to French as Latin." — Gerard Langbaine, 1691.

" The clerk that showed me this church is above eighty years old. He says that this Shakespeare was formerly bound in this town to a butcher, but that he ran away from his master to London." — Letter from Dowdall, visiting Stratford, 1693.

philosophy, without knowing that he ever studied them." — Dry den.

•- Without any instruction either from the world or from books." — Hume's History of England. III. no.

•• The constant criticism which his contemporaries, from Greene to Ben Jonson. passed on him was that he was ignorant of language and no scholar.*' — Richard Simpsons School of Shakspere. II. 398.

•Where this wonderful creator gained the knowledge of human nature and experience of human motives which have presented him to posterity rather as something divine than a mere mortal artist, it is impossible to learn." — Prof. Shaw's English Literature, p. [21.

" And thou, who did'st the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd. self-scann'd, self-honord, self-secure, Didst stand on earth unguess'd at."

Matt hew Arnolds Sonnet to Shakespeare.

•• 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.*' — Alexander Pope.

>: The untaught son of a Stratford yeoman."1 — Richard Grant White.

II. The Shakspere family, like many others of that period, had no settled or uniform method of spelling their name.2 More than thirty different forms have been found among their papers, on their

1 No reference to Shakspere personally, made in his lifetime or within a hundred years after his death, in contradiction of the above, can be produced. The only possible exception is Jonson's well-known jest relating to his " small Latin and less Greek," for which see p. 102.

- English orthography was then in a plastic state, as orthography always is before the formation of a national literature. Bacon once wrote his own name Bakcm, with the evident intention, entirely characteristic of him, to simplify our alphabet by substituting for the hard sound of c the letter k, after the manner of the Greek and primitive Roman languages.

tombstones, and in contemporaneous public records. How William wrote it, it is impossible to say; according to Dr. Johnson, each time differently in the three signatures to his will.1

In the registry of his baptism and of his burial, it is Shakspere ; in his marriage bond, Shagspere ; under the bust at Stratford, Shakspeare. Among other forms discovered in the records of the family are the following: Shaxpur, Chacksper, Sckakespeire, Chacsper, Shexpere, Shaekspire, Shakispere, Shaxberd, Shakaspeare, Shaykspere, and Schakespayr? Patronymics often varied at that time, as they do now, in different families and in different sections of the country; but here the variations in the same household were unusually numerous, and to all appearances at hap-hazard.