An impartial study of the Shakespeare title, with facsimiles

Dedication

I dedicate this book to the author of the " Promus." I

know her through her works, and they show indubitably

that she has earnestly, learnedly, and enthusiastically

Preface

I have undertaken to present facts to show, first, that William Shaksper, of Stratford-on-Avon, did not write the plays and poems heretofore attributed to him; secondly, that the plays, or at least a great part of them, were originally composed by collaborators; and thirdly, that they in part or in whole were corrected, revised, and added to by a person or persons other than William Shaksper.

But some one may say, "What is all this worth, even if proved? If you displace Shaksper, of what importance really is it to the world, if you discover or aid in discovering the man or men who should be rightfully set up in his place?" If it were merely a matter of fact as between a false and a true claimant, it would make little difference to the world at large; but the true author or authors of the magnificent poems and plays, now going under Shaksper's name, are apparently unknown to the reading public.

There is therefore a grand field of investigation open to the student of English literature.

While I strive to give facts only, and not conjectures, for the benefit of the reader so that he can form his own opinion, based upon those facts, as to the authorship, I have taken the liberty to give my own opinion also, especially upon collateral matters, such for instance as letters, poetical allusions, and written communications

Vlll PREFACE.

which have been misinterpreted for the purpose of bolstering up the false Shaksper claim. I refer especially to Greene's " Groat's-worth of Wit," and Daniel's letter to Egerton, so much quoted and relied upon by Sh'aksperites and, as I remember, not generally controverted by the Baconians. As to the " Groat's-worth of Wit," an able writer, Edwin Reed, in his book entitled "Bacon vs. Shaksper," issued in 1897, takes the correct position, and he is supported by Edward James Castle in his " Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene," published in the same year. I must give credit also to Fleay, a believer in the Shaksper theory, who rejects the Malone guess as to the Shakescene reference. I take the position that the author or authors of the plays can be found without the aid of ciphers, and that no author can go beyond his stock of words and phrases. Every man's words and phrases are limited in number — no more, no less.

I have maintained in this book that the key to the authorship, or at least to the discovery of one of the principal authors, will be found in the elucidation of the authorship of the two poems respectively called Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece. The authorities which I rely upon are such as can not be disputed by Shaksperites; and with the Shaksper fiction out of the way, the truth as to the real authorship will sooner or later reach and convince the popular mind. Investigation in this field marked the closing years of the last century, and it is going on impartially and carefully in the early years of the present century. Men and women do not now cling as they did in the past to ancient superstitions and false opinions because they are ancient and hoary with age. Veritas est magna et prajvalebit.

PREFACE. IX

"Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously to misdoubt her strength; let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew truth put to scorn in a free and open encounter?" So spake John Milton in his essay on the liberty of the press.

Somebody recently reproached Prof. Max Muller for wasting his time on mythology. He replied: "All I can say is that this study gives me intense pleasure, and has been a real joy to me, all my life. I have toiled enough for others; may I not in the evening of my life follow my own taste?"

What I have written in intervals of leisure I trust has

not been a waste of time.

John H. Stotsenburg.

Table Of Contents

PTER PAGE

I. Doubts Raised as to Shaksper's Ability and Learning 1

II. How to Reach the Truth About the Plays and Poems 12

CHAPTER I. DOUBTS RAISED AS TO SHAKSPER's ABILITY AND LEARNING

"Come, go along and see the truth hereof."

—Taming of the Shrew, iv, 5.

THE reading public will probably agree with me that if any one should show to the world by convincing proof, and beyond doubt or cavil, that some one, other than William Shaksper, the son of John and Mary Shaksper, was the author of the plays and poems now attributed to him, they would nevertheless be always called and known, while the world lasts, as the Shakespeare plays and poems. Like the "No-Name Series "or the "Waverley Novels," they would be classified in literature as the original publishers classified them.

How then would the literary world be advantaged, if it could be clearly shown that the real authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems should be rightfully ascribed to one man or to several collaborators, other than Shaksper, who have been hitherto unhonored and unsung?

I answer that the world is helped when a wrong, literary or otherwise, is righted. Honor to whom honor is due. Whenever the scales of error fall from the eyes of the

I THE SHAKESPEARE TITLE.

literati, the beauties of the great writers, dramatic and poetical, of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, who have been hitherto neglected and lost sight of, will be sought out and appreciated. " Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona multi; sed omnes illacrimabiles urguentur" ; and many good writers nourished in the days of the Eighth Henry, Elizabeth and James, who are now scarcely known, or if known at all, are not properly appreciated by the student of English literature. The Elizabethan era, particularly, was prolific of good poets and dramatists, and if the real facts as to the authorship of the Shakespeare plays could be elicited, the student of English literature would revel in fresh literary fields and pastures new. Let us take for an illustration the jolly, jail-environed Thomas Dekker, of whom Whipple, in his " Literature of the Age of Elizabeth" (alluding to a scene in the Virgin Martyr), says that "it is difficult to understand how a writer capable of such refinements as these should have left no drama which is a part of the classical literature of his country." This great poet is scarcely known by the readers of English poetry.

And there, too, for illustration, is Anthony Monday, whom Meres, in his "Palladis Tamia," eulogizes as " our best plotter" in comedy and tragedy, and who was a great writer of good plays ; and yet his name is almost unknown in the history of English literature.

Not long ago I wrote to a distinguished official of Lincoln Cathedral to learn some facts as to the poet, Thomas Heywood, who was born in Lincolnshire — a man whom I regard as a great writer and prolific dramatist of the Elizabethan age, and whose comedies are avowedly intended to be pictures of contemporary English life, and, to my surprise, this Lincolnshire scholar and dignitary of the church replied that he had never heard of him.

If I shall write very radically about a man whose memory we have mistakenly revered from childhood, it is because I believe as Phillips Brooks did as to the statements of the early fathers, when he said that he revered them because they said so many good things that were true; his contention was not that what they said was true, because they were the fathers of the Church, but that they were the fathers of the Church because what they said was true. He reverenced authority, as expressed to him in an official statement, but he always asked, "Is this statement true, and if true, can it be verified? If it can be verified, then it is its own authority and we want no other. Is this alleged fact, a fact? If so, then it can bid the world defiance. Any number of bishops may fulminate against it, but it can challenge the whole world."

It is no argument against Shaksper's authorship of the poems and plays that he was poor or that he was the son of poor and illiterate parents, or that his occupation in early life was humble, or that while young he was a poacher or deer-stealer, or that he married a woman eight years older than himself, or that he was unkind to her, or that he engaged in occasional sprees, or that he was litigious or licentious. A poor man, a bad man, a drunkard or a debauchee may write good poetry. If Shaksper wrote the plays and poems ascribed to him with all these encumbering faults and disadvantages, he is entitled to the very highest meed of praise. But if he did not write them, why should not this idol be pulled down and broken to pieces, even though it is covered with the gilding of centuries of undeserved praise? Why indeed, unless, as Dr. Holmes says, we like to worship false gods. In the following lines he tells us the exact truth about the mass of mankind:

"An idol? Man was born to worship such. An idol is the image of his thoughts; Sometimes he carves it out of gleaming stone, And sometimes moulds it out of glittering gold, Or rounds it in a mighty frescoed dome, Or lifts it heavenward in a lofty spire, Or shapes it in a cunning frame of words, Or pays his priest to make it, day by day. For sense must have its god as well as soul. The time is racked with birthpangs. Every hour Brings forth some gasping truth ; and truth new born Looks a misshapen and untimely growth; The terror of the household and its shame, A monster coiling in its nurse's lap That some would strangle, some would only starve ; But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand, And suckled at a hundred half clad breasts, Comes slowly to its stature and its form ; Welcomed by all that curst its hour of birth, And folded in the same encircling arms That cast it like a serpent from their hold."

Mortals are credulous; and legends and traditions, particularly those which fabricate miracles which never took place, or which create heavenly agents who never existed, take hold of men's minds with great power, to the exclusion of the truth, and especially so when the person who is to be exalted is of very humble origin.

I have no harsh words for the great mass of the Shaksper idolaters. Having neither the time nor the desire perhaps to investigate for themselves, they rely on the honesty of the Jaggard, Blount, Smithweeke, and Ashley syndicate of publishers, supplemented by the statements of Heminge and Condell and the superserviceable encomiums of Ben Jonson, supported also as they likewise are by the conjectures and guesses of Malone and his blind followers. As to these idolaters, I apply the language of a great writer belonging to the century just closed, who said, with reference to this idol worship, "The negroes in the service of Mumbo Jumbo tattoo and drill themselves with burning skewers with great fortitude; and we read that the priests in the service of Baal gashed themselves and bled freely. You, who can smash the idols, do so with a good courage; but do not be too fierce with the idolaters — they worship the best thing they know."

And so I say to the searchers after the truth, whether they are known as anti-Shaksperites, Baconians, or by any other name, "Be sure and smash the idol, Shaksper, if you can, with the powerful weapons of fact, before you attempt to set up any poetical divinity in his place."

The first writer who, without intending to do so, actually cast a doubt about the Shaksper claim, was Richard Farmer, who, in 1767, wrote an essay on the learning of Shakespeare. He said in his preface: "It is indeed strange that any real friends of our immortal poet should be still willing to force him into a situation which is not tenable; treat him as a learned man, and what shall excuse the most gross violations of history, chronology and geography ? » Thereupon he undertakes to prove that Shaksper, although not a learned man nor skilled in languages, was able to borrow from translations of Greek and Latin authors.

If Dr. Farmer had been an expert in chirography, and if his attention had been called to the wretched handwriting of Shaksper, as displayed in his signature to his mortgage, his deed and last will, he never would have attempted to show that a man with little or rather no learning could have ever used books containing translations into English from the dead or foreign languages. It may be said in this connection that it is remarkable that no notice whatever had been taken by the literary world of the illiteracy clearly manifested in the autographs of Shaksper until William Henry Smith of London, England, and William H. Burr of Washington, D. C, invited public attention to it.

The next writer who brought in plain and lucid language before the world the question of the right of William Shaksper to the authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems, was Joseph C. Hart. He was the first public disputer and denier of the Shaksper title.

In the year 1848, Harper and Brothers published a book called "The Romance of Yachting," written, as stated therein, by Joseph C. Hart, the author of " Miriam Coffin," in which he maintained that William Shaksper of Stratford-on-Avon did not write the plays, and that he was merely the owner of all the properties of the theatre which included the plays possessed by the establishment, and that the plays were written by poorly paid collaborators. I have not been able to find a copy of Hart's book, but I give an extract from it, transcribed from a pamphlet issued in 1888 and written by General J. Watts de Peyster, entitled, "Was the Shakespeare after all a Myth ?":

"Of Shaksper's youth, we know nothing, says one commentator. Of Shaksper's last years, we know absolutely nothing, says another commentator. The whole, however, says Chalmers, commenting upon the labored attempts of Rowe, Malone and Steevens to follow Shaksper in his career, is unsatisfactory. Shaksper, in his private character, in his friendship, in his amusements, in his closet, in his family, is nowhere before us.

"Yet, notwithstanding all this mystery and the absence of any positive information, learned and voluminous commentators and biographers, in great numbers, have been led to suppose and assert a thousand things in regard to Shaksper's history, pursuits and attainments, which can not be substantiated by a particle of proof. Among these is the authorship of the plays grouped under his name which they assume as his for a certainty and beyond dispute. This egregious folly is beginning to re-act upon those who have been engaged in it, and some of them are placed in a very ridiculous position.

"A writer in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia undertakes to give us the history of his family, from which I gather that John Shaksper, the father of William, was very poor and very illiterate, notwithstanding what the ambitious commentators may say to the contrary. So says Lardner, and he proves it beyond dispute. The coat of arms and the heraldry obtained for the family afterwards, was procured by fraud, and was pronounced discreditable to the so-called bard, who had a hand in it. But the poverty of the family is nothing in this case except to show that William Shaksper must necessarily have been an uneducated boy. He grew up in ignorance and viciousness and became a common poacher. And the latter title, in literary matters, he carried to his grave. He was not the mate of the literary characters of the day, and no one knew it better than himself. It is a fraud upon the world to thrust his surreptitious fame upon us. He had none that was worthy of being transmitted. The inquiry will be, Who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him ? "

In commenting on Hart's statement, de Peyster aptly says: "Conceding that Shaksper was a miracle of intuitive force, such a gift would not have conferred knowledge or science, the inevitable result of studies and opportunities, which latter did not then exist. It almost seems ridiculous to talk about the writings of any man, when not a line of his has come down to us, and not a word, except his own signature. Is it a matter of possibility or probability that if Shaksper wrote so well in every sense of the word and such a vast amount, that no manuscript of his, good, bad or indifferent, has been preserved, when the writings of so many men of far lesser note, conceding any greatness to Shaksper, should not only exist but abound ?

" In the works reputed to Shaksper are thoughts almost actually, textually taken from Chaucer, Sidney, Lord Vere (notably the gravedigger's song in Hamlet), Beaumont and Fletcher (the witches' incantation in Macbeth), Montaigne, Bacon, Marlowe and others."

If any writer, devoid of bias and free from prejudice, possessed of sufficient means and pleasant manners, with proper introductions, leisure and power of investigation and analysis, the master of a clear and agreeable style, would go to England and examine every source of information and authority, and then communicate nothing else but facts to the world, then indeed those interested in the subject might have something worthy of the title of a biography of the real Shakespeare. As it is, the actuality of the Shakespearean story holds the same proportion to legend or tradition, sentiment, gush, probability or possibility, that Falstaff's half penny worth of bread did to the two gallons of sack, the capon sauce and anchovies after a supper costing 10 s 10 d, which led Prince Henry to exclaim, " monstrous ! but one half penny worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack."

Following Hart, two writers entered the field of discussion, each claiming that Francis Bacon was the author of the plays.

One of them, William Henry Smith, in his book entitled " Bacon and Shakespeare," says that " prior to the year 1611, a number of plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, of various degrees of merit, were produced of which William Shakespeare was reported to be the author, and which undoubtedly were, in some way, the property of the company of actors of which he was an active member. Not one single manuscript has ever been found to identify Shaksper as the author of these productions ; nor is there, among all the records and traditions handed down to us, any statement that he was ever seen writing or producing a manuscript; nor that he ever claimed as his own any of the excellent, or repudiated (as unworthy of him) any of the worthless productions presented to the public in his name. He seems at no time to have had any personal or peculiar interest in them; both during and after his life they seem to have been the property of the stage and published by the players, doubtless according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants of the theatre."

The other writer, Delia Bacon, claimed that the plays were imbued with the letter and spirit of the Baconian philosophy.

After these came Appleton Morgan, a gifted and careful writer, who, in his "Shakespearean Myth," has sent out a pressing summons to scholars and students of literature to examine disinterestedly and judicially the Shaksper claim. His work is an attempt (and a very learned and powerful attempt) to examine from purely external evidence a question which, dating only within the last twenty-five years, is constantly recurring to confront investigation and which, like Banquo's shade, seems altogether indisposed to down.

One of the most learned doubters, who if he had confined himself to the discussion of the single issue of the validity or invalidity of the Shaksper claim, would have excited an immense influence upon public opinion in favor of his theory, was the late Ignatius Donnelly. His argument against the ability of William Shaksper to write the plays, contained in the first part of his work, called the Cryptogram, is very powerful, clear, and convincing.

I must also include Richard Grant White in the list of doubters, for although he was an advocate for Shaksper, yet he was uncertain and unsettled in his opinion. Who but a doubter could have written the following:

" Unlike Dante, unlike Milton, unlike Goethe, unlike the great poets and tragedians of Greece and Rome, Shakespeare left no trace upon the political or even the social life of his era. Of his eminent countrymen, Raleigh, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Walton, Wotton, and Donne may be properly reckoned as his contemporaries; and yet there is no proof whatever that he was personally known to either of these men or to any others of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers and artists of his day."

Such a statement justifies me in classing White among the doubters.

When I began at short intervals of leisure to examine the subject, it seemed to me that the inquiry logically divided itself into two heads; the first being, " Did William Shaksper write the plays and poems attributed to him?" and the second being, "If he did not, who did?" While working from time to time on these two propositions, I discovered that William H. Edwards of Coalburgh, West Virginia, had prepared a book called "Shaksper not Shakespeare," on that part of the same subject which is embraced in the first proposition and which relates to the plays only, and therefore the only excuse which I can give to the public for any attempt to throw light upon the question of the authorship of the plays and poems is that I have broadened the scope of the inquiry so as to embrace the poems and have treated the subject in a different manner from that followed by Mr. Edwards in his learned and able contribution.

Chapter II. How To Reach The Truth About The Plays And Poems

"Nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth To the end of reckoning."

—Measure for Measure, v, 1.

That the plays were called the Shakespeare plays raises a slight presumption in Shaksper's favor. It is, however, very slight indeed, because, first, as will hereafter be discussed and shown, the name used was not Shaksper's name; and because, secondly, everybody of literary taste knows that authors and poets very often conceal their names. Some of the best pieces of prose and poetry, which, if the authors were known, would have immortalized them, are anonymous gems. We do not know, so far as the real author's statements or admissions are concerned, who Junius was. When Waverley entranced the men and women of England, Sir Walter Scott was hiding behind the novel, and although book after book of war and love and knightly prowess came to the thirsty people as refreshing showers come to the parched earth, the glory of the authorship was not revealed; and the real writer was not the one whom the multitudes or the knowing critics and commentators honored; neither would Scott have been found out at all, had not the bankruptcy of his publishers compelled him to step before the curtain. Scott's reasons may seem peculiar to some, and yet they were rational enough. He says in his general preface: "Great anxiety was expressed to know the name of the author, but on this no authentic information could be obtained. My original motive for publishing the work anonymously was the consciousness that it was an experiment on the public taste which might very probably fail," and again he says, " I am sorry I can give little satisfaction to the queries on this subject. I have already stated elsewhere that I can render little better reason for choosing to remain anonymous than by saying, with Shylock, that such was my humor. Another advantage was connected with the secrecy which I observed. I could appear or retreat from the stage at pleasure. In my own person also as a successful author in another department of literature I might have been charged with too frequent intrusions on the public patience; but the author of Waverley was in this respect as impassable to the critic as the ghost of Hamlet to the partisan of Marcellus."

I have said that a poor man, a bad man, a drunkard, or a debauchee may write good poetry, and a man who has not very much learning may likewise do so. Robert Burns, one of Britain's greatest poets, was not a scholar versed in the classics, and he could write of pretty maids, banks and braes, fireside scenes and simple, homely, heart-touching things, but he could not write of the great men and women, states and cities of antiquity, nor of the heroes and gods of mythology. They were strangers to him. John Bunyan was no great scholar, yet he produced a book which, without any trace of great learning therein, contains a display of the imaginative faculty so bewitching as to draw all scholarly men and women to the " Pilgrim's Progress " as a model of simplicity and clearness. Learning may be piled on genius and it will make the recipient a king, aye every inch a king; but learning can not be extracted out of genius by any human process;

and as for the supernatural in aid of a poet or historian or novelist, nothing very reliable can be expected from the ghosts of the departed.

The learned author of a book lately issued from the London press, entitled "Is it Shakespeare?" very aptly says as to genius, at page 126: "Genius can do much, but it is far from being able to make a man omnibus numeris absolutus or ' complete ' in the sense that Shakespeare was. Genius alone can undoubtedly lift a man to a purer and a larger aether than ordinary mortals can breathe in. Instances are numerous enough in the annals of many a cottage home and lowly birthplace, but these self-same favored mortals, even if, as with Milton, they could hope to soar

'Above the flight of Pegasean wing,'

still would find that their wings of genius are sadly clipped, confined, and weakened unless they are taught to rise and fly by the knowledge that is in books and by the varied wisdom that has descended from the ages of the past. Without these helps they may indeed rise somewhat from the brute earth of ordinary humanity, but they will never be able to make those glorious circling swoops in the lofty circumambient air which are ever the wonder of the earthbound crowd below, the marvel of an admiring world."

The writers whose works will show a knowledge, grammatically set forth, of theology, history, medicine, geology, botany, philosophy, finance, or the languages, or all of them, must have been students. Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell, Scott, and Tennyson were all trained and educated men.

King Henry describes the complete man when, in Henry VIII, Act 1, Scene 2, he says of Buckingham:

"The gentleman is learned, and a most rare speaker; To nature none more bound; his training such, That he may furnish and instruct great teachers, And never seek for aid out of himself."

One of the best definitions of a poet is given by Thomas Dekker inhis"Satiro-mastix" :"True poetsarewith art and nature crowned." No one, I take it, but a scholar or coterie of scholars could have written the Shakespeare poems and plays.

Did William Shaksper write them? If not, who did? I think that every student and admirer of the plays and poems will agree with me that the proper way to arrive at the truth is, first of all, to discuss and settle the question of Shaksper's right to the authorship, without reference to the claims set up for any one else; and when it has been fairly shown to the world beyond a reasonable doubt that William Shaksper could not have written the works for which he has so long received credit, the other question as to who wrote them can be better and more easily solved.

I do not expect to please, persuade, or convince the prejudiced reader by my attempt to remove the idol, Shaksper, from his unmerited throne. As Hawthorne beautifully expressed it, the first feeling of every reader must be one of absolute repugnance toward the person who seeks to tear out of the Anglo-Saxon heart the name which for ages it has held dearest, and to substitute another name or names to which the settled belief of the world has long assigned a very different position. The

Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the plays of Shakespeare so called, hold the first place in the affections of the English-speaking people; and although it is one thing to love a book and quite another to question its authorship, the multitude will not appreciate the distinction.

Another learned writer, who has thoroughly exposed the Shaksper fraud, expressed the common feeling when he wrote that " if an archangel from the Empyrean should write a book doubting the complete Shakespearean production of the Shakespeare plays, the book reviewers (and they are the best that money will secure) would say to a man that that archangel was a dolt and an idiot or at least ignorant, misguided, and beyond his depth."