“The disappointment caused by the harsh rejection of this first play of William Shakespeare and Harriette Bowenni was not great. Each had had a more than speaking acquaintanceship with sorrow, and trouble is only comparative anyway; so they looked upon the matter rather as a thing to be expected, an amusing circumstance. They knew the play was better than the one accepted, and that was enough. ‘Is not William Shakespeare just as great as though his name was on the bill board?’ the lady said. Another reason that made them look on the matter lightly was that each read their fate in the other’s face, and as long as no separation is threatened love not only laughs at locksmiths but at all disaster. No awkward love-making scene had ever come between them, no formal declaration. As he wrote that first night, the young man unconsciously reached out his hand toward the girl. She took it, and held it lovingly between her own. When they parted he stooped and their lips met.

“When next they walked along the street, among other things he said, ‘I love you, dear.’ The young woman made no sign of surprise, but when she wrote to him the following day (strange how lovers find excuse to write so often!), there were terms of endearment, all inserted without apology. No wooing—no effort at winning—no affected coyness. They loved, and true love need not be ashamed, for ’tis God’s own gift, and given only to the worthy.

“Each day she wrote a letter to her lover—each day he wrote to her. These messages were often in verse, and part of them are preserved in the sonnets of Shakespeare, one hundred and fifty-four in number. These sonnets, it will be noticed, have no special relation one to the other. Part, it can be seen, are written by a woman to her lover. Mixed in with these are others written by a man. You will notice that in those written by the woman she entreats the young man to marry, and expresses much regret and surprise that though he loves her well he will not wed.

“These sonnets were first published in 1609, and were dedicated—

“‘To Mr. W. H. Their onlie begetter.’

“The W stands for William, the H for Harriette. The prefix of ‘Mr.’ is a mere whimsicality, (a thing all lovers are guilty of, yet which we are ever ready to forgive), simply to mystify the world. The first twenty-six of these sonnets were written by Harriette during the years 1585 and 1586, before she knew that Shakespeare was already married; and the perplexity in her ignorance of the real facts of his life can be imagined.

“Long years after these letters were written, Shakespeare turned those which were not already in rhyme into verse for his and her amusement, and now that they had come to know each other perfectly and the oneness was complete, many was the laugh they had over their youthful trials. Anyone who will read the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis and the Passionate Pilgrim, and read them carefully in the light of what I now tell, will get a clear idea of the first few years’ relations of Shakespeare and this beautiful and accomplished young woman. I do not attempt to defend the style or wording of these poems. They are written in all the hot restless desire of youth where flesh is not ruled by soul—where the earthy is not yet transmuted into the spiritual.

“Said ‘rare Ben Jonson’—‘I loved the man, and do reverence his memory on this side of idolatry as much as any! He was honest and of an open and free nature, had an excellent fancy, brave notions and excellent expressions, wherein he flowed with such facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. His wit was in his own power—would the rule of it had been so too! but he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was in him ever more to be praised than pardoned. The players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing whatsoe’er he penned he never blotted out a line. My answer has been, Would he had blotted out a thousand.’

“So with Ben Jonson I say, Oh would that these two had left unwritten a thousand lines!—but who shall dictate to genius?

“When Shakespeare left Stratford he attempted to leave the last year’s dwelling for the new—to steal the shining archway through—close up the idle door. The past was to him dead. He did not hug it to his heart, mourn over it, and attempt to kiss it back to life. He said, ‘The past we cannot recall, the future we cannot reach, the present only is ours.’ So with no attempt at concealment, yet with no disclosure of his history, he said to Harriette Bowenni:

“‘That I do love you, you do know; that I do desire to wed you, you may guess; and that I cannot is but fact. Now why should speak I more? You put your arms about my neck and swear your faith in pretty verse, and next you contradict this faith by still demanding Why? No! If I say it is not best, is not that Why enough?’

“In sonnet number twenty the appearance of Shakespeare is described at this time. A writer says, ‘He has a lady’s face and scarce a beard.’

“Harriette urged the youth to leave his shabby lodgings, marry her, and take up his abode with her and her mother; and in Venus and Adonis we hear of the number of noble lovers that had sought her hand, and yet she almost on her knees besought William to wed her. In a spirit of jolly ridicule of this wooing on the part of Harriette, he wrote the poem of Venus and Adonis and presented it to her. In this poem you will notice he represents himself as cold and unfeeling, when the real truth is he was just as full of desire to marry as she; but the divorce laws of England at that time were very strict, so much so that only the rich or influential could secure a divorce at all.

“Shakespeare should have been frank with this girl and told her his history at once, but he did not do so until over a year after their first acquaintance. You can well imagine the surprise of mother and daughter when he one night said, ‘Come, my history you would know. Well, I’ll run it through, even from my boyish days, to the very moment that you bade me tell it,’ and so he told from childhood to the time he took one last look at the little village and set his face toward London. The story being done she gave him for his pains a world of sighs. She swore in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, ’twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful! she wished she had not heard it. Yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man. She thanked him, and bade him if he had a friend that lov’d her, he should teach him how to tell the story, and that would woo her. On this hint he spake:

“‘Now you do know full well why I, according to England’s law, do not you wed—yet heaven hath decreed it so. You are my rightful mate; and here and now, in the sacred presence of her who brought you forth, I do declare you shall be from now henceforth my true and only wife.’

“Madame Bowenni was generous, gentle and good, a woman of most rare and discriminating mind, great and loving. Years had not soured nor turned to dross the great and tender heart. She knew for her daughter to accept William Shakespeare for her husband without the consent of England’s law, would not be the one thousandth part the sin as to see her wed a man she did not love, although good and noble the man might be. So Shakespeare took up his abode with this fair lady, and was a faithful and true husband to her, and she a loving and true wife till death called her hence.

“Harriette Bowenni died in the year 1614, leaving one child, Shakespeare’s only son. Anne Hathaway had died some years before, and be it said to his credit Shakespeare sent her ample funds from time to time, and that she shared in his prosperity. It is greatly to be regretted that Harriette died before her lover, otherwise she would have acted as his literary executor and collected his writings in proper form. As it is this work was done by those entirely unfitted for it, and his papers were brought together from many sources seven years after his death; and to-day not a single scrap of his manuscript exists, excepting the letters I possess and the diary of Harriette Bowenni, in which are various entries made by Shakespeare. All these letters and the diary you shall see.

“From his grief at the death of Harriette, Shakespeare never rallied. He left London, the scene of his mighty success, and back to his boyhood’s home did he turn, broken in health and spirit. City men who were once country boys, always look forward to the coming of old age, when they can return again to their childhood’s home. In less than two short years those simple villagers carried to its last resting-place the worn out body of the mightiest man of thought the world has ever known.

“When Shakespeare took Harriette Bowenni as his wife, at once they began their life-work in earnest. Women then were never recognized in literary work, and in fact did not ever act upon the stage, their parts being taken by boys. Harriette knew English history probably better than any man in England at that time, having studied it for several years with her father, and written it out for the nobleman. The first successful plays of Shakespeare were those of English history. Then followed tragedy and comedy in rapid and startling succession. Thirty-seven plays are known positively to be Shakespeare’s, all written in the space of twenty-six years; there being scarcely any repetition of plot or plan, all sweeping forward in that matchless and noble diction possessed by no other writer. The source of nearly all the plots have been well traced. Many of the plays are combinations of two or three others. In several instances the story is taken pure and simple from other writers, and the dialogue changed, modified, interpolated, as if it was necessary to get the play out at a certain time; yet the work is always nobly done, although many of the plays show very plainly the work of two persons.

“In every one of these thirty-seven plays William Shakespeare and Harriette Bowenni worked side by side, she supplying the plot and historical connection and he the language. The philosophy and by-play was worked in between them.

“Shakespeare’s conception of womanhood is higher than that of any other dramatist, even of modern time. Generally we find the saints and sinners pretty evenly divided between the sexes. Not so with the Master! His women are wise, gentle and good. Look at Portia, Rosalind, Cecelia, Viola, Jessica and others. The character of Lady Macbeth was worked out by Harriette alone, as I will show you in her diary where she protests against William parsing excellencies in the feminine gender continually, and she asks leave to portray Lady Macbeth herself alone.

“Each was constantly alert for metaphor, hyperbole, figure, trope, philosophy or poetical expression. Nothing escaped—every thought or fancy to which love could give birth was woven in. Neither went in society, and the fact that Shakespeare could not present this woman as his wife, was rather an advantage than otherwise. They had no friends but books, and thus were not distracted, diverted or dragged down by common-place connections, ignorant or vain people. To be with people was to lose their relationship to the whole. They were merely onlookers in Venice—the world knew them not. This fully accounts for the total lack of knowledge we possess of Shakespeare’s life. It has been stated that Shakespeare belonged to the club to which belonged Sir Walter Raleigh, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Selden and others, that met at the Mermaid Tavern, but there is no proof at all that he ever attended these meetings. How such a man lived with such a mind and still was not known, has astounded humanity; and it is not to be wondered at that many now doubt that he ever wrote at all, and very plausibly prove (or think they do), that this unlettered, untraveled and untutored man could not (mark the words) have written Shakespeare. It is not to be wondered at that they cast about for the most learned man of his time, and pick out Lord Bacon, not knowing that six Lords Bacon all melted into one could never (mark my words) equal the work of one great man and one great woman, who having put away all society but each other, cast out all frivolity, set themselves the task (if task it may be called) solely to assist that alchemist, the only one who can transmute base material into good—Love, undying Love. Love is creative. It is the one and only source of all creation!”

I had been taking the words of The Man at the rate of one hundred words a minute. Suddenly they came faster, faster. I could scarcely keep up. For the first time I saw The Man had lost his composure. I looked up. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. He arose from his seat, paused, raised his hands and exclaimed:

“This woman, Harriette Bowenni; she was my mother!!”