HE thirty-seven plays called, collectively, "Shakespeare," are a phenomenon, not only in English letters, but in human experience. The literature of the country to which they belong, had, up to the date of their appearance, failed to furnish, and has been utterly powerless since, to produce any type, likeness, or formative trace of them; while the literature of other nations possesses not even a corresponding type. The history of a century on either side of their era discloses, within the precints of their birth, no resources upon which levy could have been made for their creation. They came and went like a meteor; neither borrowing of what they found, nor loaning to what they left, their own peculiar and unapproachable magnificence.

The unremitting researches of two centuries have only been able to assign their authorship (where it rested at first) to an hiatus in the life of a wayward village lad named William Shakespeare—who fled his native town penniless and before the constable, to return, in a few years, a well-to-do esquire—with a coat of arms and money in his pocket. We have the history of the boy, and certain items as to the wealthy squire, who left behind him two or three exceedingly common-place and conventional epitaphs (said to be his handiwork) and a remarkable will; but, between them, no hint of history, chronicle, or record. Still, within this unknown period of this man's career, these matchless dramas came from somewhere, and passed current under his name.

The death of their reputed author attracted no contemporary attention, and for many years thereafter the dramas remained unnoticed. Although written in an idiom singularly open to the comprehension of all classes and periods of English-speaking men, no sooner did they begin to be remarked, than a cloud of what are politely called "commentators" bore down upon them; any one who could spell feeling at liberty to furnish a "reading;" and any one who supposed himself able to understand one of these "readings," to add a barnacle in the shape of a "note." From these "commentators" the stately text is even now in peril, and rarely, even to-day, can it be perused, except one line at a time, across the top of a dreary page of microscopic and exasperating annotation. But, up to within a very few years, hardly a handful of Shakespearean students had arisen with courage to admit—what scarcely any one of the "commentators" even, could have failed to perceive—the utterly inadequate source ascribed to the plays themselves.

It is not yet thirty years since an American lady was supposed to have gone crazy because she declared that William Shakespeare, of the Globe and Black-friars theaters in London, in the days of Elizabeth, was not the author of these certain dramas and poems for which—for almost three hundred years—he has stood sponsor.

Miss Bacon's "madness," indeed, has been rapidly contageous. Now-a-days, men make books to prove, not that William Shakespeare did not write these works, but that Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, or some other Elizabethan, did not. And we even find, now and then, a treatise written to prove that William Shakespeare was, after all, their author; an admission, at least, that the ancient presumption to that effect no longer covers the case. And, doubtless, the correct view is within this admission. For, probably, if permitted to examine this presumption by the tests which would be applied to any other question of fact, namely, the tests of contemporary history, muniments, and circumstantial evidence, it will be found to be quite as well established and proved that William Shakespeare was not the author of the plays that go by his name, as any other fact, occurring in London between the years 1585 and 1616, not recorded in history or handed down by tradition, could be established and proved in 1881.

If a doubt as to the authorship of the plays had arisen at any time during or between those years, and had been kept open thereafter, the probability is that it would have been settled by this time. But, as it is, we may be pretty certain that no such doubt did arise, and that no such question was asked, during the years when those who could have dispelled the doubt or answered the question were living. When we are about to visit a theater in these days, what we ask and concern ourselves with is: Is the play entertaining? Does it "draw?" And, when we witness it, the question is: Do we enjoy it—or does it bore us? Will we recommend our friends to come that they may be entertained, too, and that we may discuss it with them? or will we warn them to keep away? We very speedily settle these questions for ourselves. Doubtless we may and do inquire who the author is. But we do not enter into any discussion upon the subject, or charge our minds enough with the matter to doubt it when we are told. The author's name is, not unusually, printed on the play-bill before us; we glance at it indifferently, take what is told us for granted, and think no more about it. If the name happens to be assumed, we may possibly see its identity discussed in the dramatic columns of our newspapers next morning, or we may not. If the play entertains us, we commend it. If it drags, we sneer at it, get up and go off. That is all the concern we give it. The evening has slipped away; and, with it, any idle speculations as to the playwright who has essayed to amuse us for an hour.

If, three hundred years hence, a question as to who wrote the play we saw at Mr. Daly's theater or Mr. Wallack's theater last evening should come up, there would be very little evidence, not any records, and scarcely an exhibit to refer to in the matter. Copies of the play-bill or the newspapers of the day might chance to be discovered; but these—the internal testimony of the play itself, if any, and a sort of tacit presumption growing out of a statement it was nobody's cue to inquire into at the time it was made, and had been nobody's business to scrutinize since—would constitute all the evidence at hand. How this supposititious case is precisely all-fours with the facts in the matter of the dramatic works which we call, collectively, Shakespeare's. Precisely: except that, on the evenings when those plays were acted, there were no play-bills, and, on the succeeding morning, no daily newspaper. We have, therefore, in 1881, much fewer facilities for setting ourselves right as to their authorship than those living three hundred years after us could possess in the case we have supposed. The audiences who witnessed a certain class of plays at Shakespeare's theaters, in the years between 1585 and 1606, were entertained. The plays "drew." People talked of them about town, and they become valuable to their proprietors. The mimic lords and ladies were acceptable to the best seats; the rabble loved the show and glitter and the alarum of drums; and all were Britons who gloated over rehearsal of the prowess of their own kings and heroes, and to be told that their countrymen at Agincourt had slain ten thousand Frenchmen at an expense of but five and twenty of themselves. But, if M. Taine's description of the Shakespearean theaters and the audience therein wont to assemble may be relied upon, we can pretty safely conclude that they troubled themselves very little as to who fashioned the dialogue the counterfeit kings and queens, soldiers, lords, and ladies spoke; or that they saw any thing in that dialogue to make such speculation appear worth their while. Nor can we discover any evidence, even among the cultured courtiers who listened to them—or in the case of Elizabeth herself, who is said to have loved them (which we may as well admit for the argument's sake)—that any recognition of the plays as works worthy of any other than a stage-manager, occurred. Even if it should appear that these plays thus performed were the plays we now call Shakespeare's; had any of this audience suspected that these plays were not written for them, but for all time; that, three hundred years later—when the plays should not only be extant, but more loved and admired than ever—the thinking world should set itself seriously to probe the mystery of their origin; there might have been some interest as to their producer manifested, and we might have had some testimony competent to the exact point to-day.

But it is evident enough that no such prophetic vision was vouchsafed to them, and no such prophetic judgment passed. Nor is the phenomenon exceptional. The critic, does not live, even to-day, however learned or cultured or shrewd, who would take the responsibility of affirming upon his own judgment, or even upon the universal judgment of his age and race, that any literary composition would be, after a lapse of three hundred years, not only extant, but immortal, hugged as its birthright by a whole world. Such a statement would have been contrary to experience, beyond the prophecy of criticism, and therefore only to be known—if known at all—as a Fact. Moreover, it could only be known as a fact at the expiration of the three hundred years. Doubtless, few critics would care, in any case, to commit themselves upon record one way or the other in a matter so hypothetical and speculative as the judgment of posterity upon a literary performance, and certainly nothing of the sort occurred in Shakespeare's day, even if there were any dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the subject. There can be no doubt—and it must be conceded —that certain acted plays did pass with their first audiences, and that certain printed plays, both contemporaneously and for years thereafter, did pass with the public who read them, as the compositions of Mr. Manager Shakespeare; and that probably even the manager's pot companions, who had better call to know him than any others, saw nothing to shake their heads at in his claim to be their author (provided he ever made any such claim; which, by the way, does not appear from any record of his life, and which nobody ever asserted as a fact). If they did—with the exception only of Robert Greene—they certainly kept their own counsel. On the one hand, then, the question of the authorship was never raised, and, on the other hand, if it had been, the scholars and critics who studied the plays (supposing that there were any such in those days) could not possibly have recognized them as immortal. If they had so recognized them, they would doubtless have left us something more satisfactory as to the authorship of the compositions than the mere "impression that they were informed" that the manager of the theater where they were produced wrote them; that they supposed he was clever enough to have done so, and they therefore took it for granted that he did. That is all there is of the evidence of Shakespeare's own day, as to the question—if it still is a question—before us.

But how about the presumption—the legal presumption, arising from such lapse of time as that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary—the presumption springing from tradition and common report—that William Shakespeare composed the Shakespearean plays? It is, of course, understood that one presumption is as good as another until it is disturbed. It is never safe to underrate an existing presumption; as long as it stands at all, it stands as conclusive; once overthrown, however, it is as if it had never existed.

A presumption three hundred years old may be a strong one to overthrow. But if its age is all there is of it—if it be only strong in years—it can yet be toppled over. Once overthrown, it is no more venerable because it is three hundred years old than if it were only three. An egg-shell will toss upon the crest of an angry surf, and, for very frailty, outride breakers when the mightiest ship man ever framed could not survive an instant. But it is only an egg-shell, for all that, and a touch of the finger will crush and destroy it. And so, formidable as it was in age, the presumption as to William Shakespeare's authorship of the great dramas which for three hundred years had gone by his name, had only to be touched by the thumb and finger of common sense to crackle and shrivel like the egg that sat on the wall in the Kindergarten rhyme, which all the king's army and all the king's men could not set up again, once it had tumbled over.

But as the world advanced and culture increased, why did not the question arise before? Simply because the times were not ripe for it. This is the age and generation for the explosion of myths, and, as one after another of them falls to pieces and disappears, who does not wonder that they have not fallen sooner? For how many years has the myth of William Tell been cherished as history! And yet there is no element of absolute impossibility or even of improbability—much less of miracle—in the story of an archer with a sure eye and a steady aim. Or, in the case of physical myths—which only required an exploration by physical sense for their explosion—the maps of two centuries or so ago represented all inaccessible seas as swarming with krakens and ship-devouring reptiles. And it is not twenty years since children were taught in their geographies that upon the coast of Norway there was a whirlpool which sucked down ships prow foremost. And here, in our midst, a cannon-shot from where we sit and write these lines, there was believed to be and exist a Hell Gate which was a very portal of death and slaughter to hapless mariners. But there are no krakens, and not much of a Maelstrom; and, for twenty years before General Newton blew up a few rocks at Hell Gate, people had laughed at the myth of its ferocity. And again: nothing is easier than to invent a story so utterly unimportant and immaterial that it will be taken for granted, without controversy, and circulate with absolute immunity from examination, simply because worth nobody's while to contradict it. For example, it is likely enough that Demosthenes, in practicing oratory, stood on a sea-beach and drilled his voice to outroar the waves. The story is always told, however, with the rider, that Demosthenes did this with his mouth filled with pebble-stones; and, as nobody cares whether he did or not, nobody troubles himself to ascertain by experiment that the thing is impossible, and that nobody can roar with a mouth full of pebble-stones. And not even then would he succeed in removing the impression obtaining with the great mass of the world, that a thing is proven sufficiently if it gets into "print." Charles II. set the Royal Society of his day at work to find the reason why a dead fish weighed more than a live one—and it was only when they gave it up, that the playful monarch assured them that the fact they were searching for the reason of was not a fact at all. It is not impossible to demonstrate from experience, that the human mind will be found—as a rule—to prefer wasting laborious days in accounting for, rather than take the very simplest pains to verify even a proposition or alleged fact, which, if a fact at all, is of value beyond itself. It was objected to the system of Copernicus, when first brought forward, that, if the earth turned on its axis as he represented, a stone dropped from the summit of a tower would not fall at the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west, in the same manner that a stone dropped from the masthead of a ship in full sail does not fall at the foot of the mast, but toward the stern. To this it was answered that a stone, being a part of the earth, obeys the same laws and moves with it, whereas it is no part of the ship, of which, consequently, its motion is independent. This solution was admitted by some and opposed by others, and the controversy went on with spirit; nor was it till one hundred years after the death of Copernicus that, the experiment being tried, it was ascertained that the stone thus dropped from the head of the mast does fall at the foot of it. And so, if, in the case of the Shakespearean authorship, the day has come for truth to dispel fiction, and reason to scout organic miracle, why should we decline to look into an alleged Shakespearean myth simply because it happens to be a little tardy in coming to the surface?

But, most of all, it is to be remembered that it is, practically, only our own century that has comprehended the masterliness and matchlessness of the "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," and the rest of those transcripts of nature, the prophetic insight of whose author "spanned the ages that were to roll up after him, mastered the highest wave of modern learning and discovery, and touched the heart of all time, not through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting mankind up ont of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity; who so wrote that to his all-seeing vision schools and libraries, sciences and philosophies, were unnecessary, because his own marvelous intuition had grasped all the past and seen through all his present and all his future, and because, before his superhuman power, time and space had vanished and disappeared." * The age for which the dramas were written had not come, in that Elizabethan era.

The tongues of the actors were tied, the ears of the audience were deaf to syllables whose burden was for the centuries that were to come after. The time for the question, "Who wrote them?" was not yet. For two hundred years more—from the day of William Shakespeare's death down to years within the memory of those now living—down to at least the date of Lord Byron (who admits that it is the perfectly correct thing to call Shakespeare "god-like," "mighty," and the like, but very unfashionable to read him),—we may ransack the records of scholarship and criticism, and unearth scarcely a hint of what is now their every-where conceded superiority, to say nothing of their immortality. In short, we can not rise from such a search without understanding, very clearly in Fuller, in 1622, chronicles that William Shakespeare's "genius was jocular," his comedies merry, and his tragedies wonderful; his wit quick, but that his learning was very little. Evelyn notes that, in 1661, he saw "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," played: "but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since His Majesty has been so long abroad." * Pepys, his contemporary, says that the "'Midsummer-Night's Dream' was the most insipid, ridiculous play he had ever seen.... and, but having lately read the 'Adventures of Five Hours,' 'Othello' seemed a mean thing," though he liked Davenant's opera of "Macbeth," with its music and dancing. ** When spending some money in books he looks over Shakespeare, but chooses "'Hudibras,' the book now in the greatest fashion for drollery," instead. It is doubtful if Milton ever read the Shakespearean plays, in spite of the eloquent verses, "What needs my Shakespeare," etc.; since, in "L'Allegro," he speaks of his (Shakespeare's) "native wood-notes wild." ***

Surely if there is any thing in letters that is not "native wood-notes," it is the stately Shakespearean verse, full of camps and courts, but very rarely of woodlands and pastures; besides, whatever Milton might say of the book called "Shakespeare" in poetry—like Ben Jon-son—he showed unmitigated contempt for its writer in prose: about the worst thing he could say about his king in "The Iconoclast," was that Charles I. kept an edition of Shakespeare for his closet companion. * "Other stuff of this sort," cries the blind poet, "may be read throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the poet used much license in departing from the truth of history." **

In 1681, one Nahum Tate, supposed to be a poet (a delusion so widespread that he was actually created "poet laureate") stumbled upon "a thing called Lear," assigned to one William Shakespeare, and, after much labor, congratulated himself upon having "been able to make a play out of it." ***

John Dryden, in or about 1700, in his "Defence of the Epilogue," a postscript to his tragedy "The Conquest of Granada," says: "Let any man who understands English, read diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and I dare undertake that he will find in every page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense; and yet these men are reverenced, when we are not forgiven." He denounces "the lameness of their plots," made up of some "ridiculous incoherent story,... either grounded on impossibilities, or, at least, he writes, in many places, below the dullest writers of our own or any precedent age." Of the audiences who could tolerate such matter, he says: "They knew no better, and therefore were satisfied with what they brought. Those who call theirs the 'Golden Age of Poetry,' have only this reason for it: that they were then content with acorns before they knew the use of bread," etc. * To show the world how William Shakespeare should have written, Mr. Dryden publishes his own improved version of "Troilus and Cressida," "with an abjectly fulsome dedication to the Earl of Sunderland, and a Preface," ** in which he is obliging enough to say that the style of Shakespeare being "so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure;" that, though "the author seems to have began it with some fire, the characters of 'Pandarus' and 'Troilus' are promising enough, but, as if he grew weary of his task, after an entrance or two, he lets 'em fall, and the latter part of the tragedy is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms. The chief persons who give name to the tragedy are left alive. 'Cressida' is left alive and is not punished."

"I have undertaken to remove that heap of rubbish.... I new-modelled the plot; threw out many unnecessary persons, improved those characters which were begun and left unfinished,... made, with no small trouble, an order and connection of the scenes, and... so ordered them that there is a coherence of 'em with one another,... a due proportion of time allowed for every motion,... have refined the language, etc."

The same thing was done in 1672, by Ravenscroft, who produced an adaptation of "Titus Andronicus," and boasted "that none in all the author's works ever received greater alterations or additions; the language not only refined, but many scenes entirely new, besides most of the principal characters heightened, and the plot much increased." John Dennis, a critic of that day, declares that Shakespeare "knew nothing about the ancients, set all propriety at defiance,... was neither master of time enough to consider, correct, and polish what he had written,... his lines are utterly void of celestial fire," and his verses "frequently harsh and unmusical." He was, however, so interested in the erratic and friendless poet that he kindly altered "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and touched up "Coriolanus," which he brought out in 1720, under the title of "The Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Resentment." The play, however, did not prosper, and he attributed it to the fact that it was played on a Wednesday. Dean Swift, in his "The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris, concerning the Strange and Deplorable Frenzy of John Dennis," relates how the said Dennis, being in company with Lintot, the bookseller, and Shakespeare being mentioned as of a contrary opinion to Mr. Dennis, the latter "swore the said Shakespeare was a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which gave Mr. Lintot a very ill opinion of the said Shakespeare." Lord Shaftesbury complains, at about the same date, of Shakespeare's "rude and unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit." *

Thomas Rymer knows exactly how Othello, which he calls "a bloody farce, the tragedy of the pocket-handkerchief," ought to have been done. In the first place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a-moor, and that the army should be insulted by his being a soldier. Of "Desdemona" he says: "There is nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen-maid—no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so meanly." Speaking of expression, he writes that "in the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, I may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights of Shakespeare." He is indignant that the catastrophe of the play should turn on a handkerchief. He would have liked it to have been folded neatly on the bridal couch, and, when Othello was killing Desde-mona, "the fairy napkin might have started up to disarm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth. Then might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for dead; then might he, believing her dead, and touched with remorse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and truly represented in the theater. Then for the unraveling, of the plot, as they call it, never was old deputy recorder in a country town, with his spectacles on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so blundered and be doltified as is our poet to have a good riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. What can remain with the audience to carry home with them? How can it work but to delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt our appetite, and till our head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what all the parish clerks in London could ever pretend to?" He then hopes the audience will go to the play as they go to church, namely, "sit still, look on one another, make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they would a sermon." With regard to "Julius CÆsar," he is displeased that Shakespeare should have meddled with the Romans. He might be "familiar with Othello and Iago as his own natural acquaintances, but CÆsar and Brutus were above his conversation." To put them "in gulls' coats and make them Jack-puddens," is more than public decency should tolerate—in Mr. Rymer's eyes. Of the well-known scene between Brutus and Cassius, this critic remarks: "They are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to show their activity of face and muscles. They are to play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swaggering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reckoning." Rymer calls his book "A Short View of Tragedy, with Some Reflections on Shakespeare and Other Practitioners for the Stage." Hume thought that both Bacon and Shakespeare showed "a want of simplicity and purity of diction with defective taste and elegance," and that "a reasonable propriety of thoughts he (Shakespeare) can not at any time uphold." Voltaire thought the Shakespearean kings "not completely royal." Pope (who declared that Rymer, just quoted, was "a learned and strict critic"), to show that he was not insensible to the occasional merits of the plays, was good enough to distinguish, by inverted commas, such passages as he thought might be safely admired by the rest of mankind; while Richard Steele, in "The Tatler," * borrows the story of the "Taming of the Shrew," and narrates it as "an incident occurring in Lincolnshire," feeling, no doubt, that he did a good deed in rescuing whatever was worth preserving from the clutches of such obscure and obsolete literature!

And then came the period when scholars and men of taste were ravished with Addison's stilted rhymes, and the six-footed platitudes of Pope, and the sesquepedalian derivatives dealt out by old Samuel Johnson. The Shakespearean plays are pronounced by Mr. Addison ** "very faulty in hard metaphors and forced expressions," and he joins them with "Xat. Lee," as "instances of the false sublime."

Samuel Johnson is reported as saying that William Shakespeare never wrote six consecutive lines (he subsequently made it seven) without "making an ass of himself," (in which speech he seems to have followed his namesake without the "h," old Ben, in the "Discoveries")—backing up his assertion with some very choice specimens of literary criticism. Let any one, interested enough in the matter to see for himself, take down Dr. Johnson's own edition of Shakespeare, and read his commentaries on the Shakespearean text. Let him turn, for example, to where he says of "Hamlet":

We must allow to the tragedy of "Hamlet" the praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous that the argument of the play would make a long tale. The scenes are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solemnity,... that includes judicious and instructive observations.... New characters appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth;... the catastrophe is not very happily produced; the exchange of weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the dagger and Laertes with the bowl.

Again, of "Macbeth":

This play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fiction, and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action, but it has no nice discriminations of character.... I know not whether it may not be said in defense of some parts which now seem improbable, that in Shakespeare's time it was necessary to warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions.

Again, of "Julius CÆsar":

Of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated. But I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc.

Was "Hamlet" a low comedy part, in the days when all England bowed at the feet of an unkempt and mannerless old man, awed by the brilliancy of his literary judgment? And did Hamlet's "pretended madness" cause "much mirth" to the age, or only to Samuel Johnson? People now-a-days do not sit and giggle over "the pretended madness of Hamlet." But, waiving these questions, let him turn to the "Rambler," * of this excellent lexicographer, and read him (patiently, if he can), citing the magnificent lines—

Come thick night

And pall thee in the dun nest smoke of hell;

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry "hold, hold!"

as an example of "poetry debased by mean expressions;" because "dun" is a "low" expression," seldom heard but in the stable;" "knife" an instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employment; and asking "who, without some relaxation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt peeping through the blanket of the dark!"

Let the reader look on a little further, and find this fossil-scanning machine telling off the spondees and dactyls in the dramas (to ascertain if the cÆsura was exactly in the middle) on his fingers and thumbs, and counting the unities up to three, to see if he could approve of what the ages after him were to worship! if, haply, this Shakespeare (although he might have devised a scheme to kill Laertes with the bowl and Hamlet with the dagger, or might have thrown a little more fire into the quarrel with Brutus and Cassius) could be admitted to sit at the feet of Addison, with his sleepy and dreary "Campaign;" or Pope, with his metrical proverbs about "Man;" or even the aforesaid Samuel Johnson himself, with his rhymed dictionaries about the "vanity of human wishes," and so on. Let him find the old lexicographer admitting, in his gracious condescension, that "The Tempest" "is sufficiently regular;" of "Measure for Measure" that "the unities are sufficiently preserved;" that the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was "well written;" that the style of the "Merchant of Venice" was "easy:" but that in "As you Like It" "an opportunity of exhibiting a moral lesson" is unhappily lost. The "Winter's Tale" is "entertaining;" in "King John" he finds "a pleasing interchange of incidents and characters," remarking that "the lady's grief is very affecting." Of "Troilus and Cressida" the old formalist says, that it "is one of the most correctly written of Shakespeare's plays;" of "Coriolanus," that it "is one of the most amusing." But, he says, that "Antony and Cleopatra" is "low" and "without any art of connection or care of disposition." he dismisses "Cymbeline" with the remark that he does not care "to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility; upon faults too evident for detection and too gross for aggravation." He is pleased to approve of "Romeo and Juliet," because "the incidents are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresistibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on with such probability, at least with such congruity to popular opinions, as tragedy requires" and, while on the whole, approving of "Othello," he can not help remarking that, "had the scene opened in Cyprus, and the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity." And so on every-where! Let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these mighty and deathless monographs to-day! Let him imagine a better illustration, if he can, of what our Johnson's friend Pope called—in long meter—"fools rushing; in where angels feared to tread!" And let him confess to himself that these were not the times nor the men to raise the question.

Is it not the fact that, until our own century, the eyes of the world were darkened, and men saw in these Shakespearean dramas only such stage plays, satisfying the acting necessities of almost any theater, as might have been written—not by "the soul" of any age; not by a man "myriad-minded" not by a "morning-star of song," or a "dear son of memory," but—by a clever playwright? The sort of days when an Addison could have been pensioned for his dreary and innocent "Campaign," and a Mr. Pye made poet-laureate of the laud where an unknown pen had once written "Hamlet were, consequently, not the days for the discovery with which this century has crowned itself—namely, the discovery that the great first of poets lived in the age when England and America were one world by themselves, and that they must now draw together again to search for the master "who came"—to use, with all reverence, the words of Judge Holmes—"upon our earth, knowing all past, all present, and all future, to be leader, guide, and second gospel of mankind." But the fullness of time has come, and we now know that, whoever was the poet that he "kept," he was of quite another kidney than the manager of the theater, "William Shakespeare, who employed him to write Plays, and who wrote Revelations and Gospels instead.

If we were interested to inquire what manner of man Mr. Manager Shakespeare was, we have only to look about us among the managers of theaters in this latter half of our nineteenth century. Let us take Mr. Wallack or Mr. Daly, both of whom arrange plays for the stages of their own theaters, for example; or, better yet, take Mr. Lion Boucieault, who is an actor as well as a manager, and is, moreover, as successful in his day as was William Shakespeare in his. Mr. Boucieault has, so far, produced about one hundred and thirty-seven successful plays. Mr. William Shakespeare produced about a hundred less. All of Mr. Boucicault's plays show that gentleman's skillful hand in cutting, expanding, arranging, and setting for the stage; and in the representation of them, Mr. Boucieault has himself often participated. In like manner, Mr. Shakespeare, the manager, we are told by tradition, often assisted at the representation of the dramas produced on his boards, playing the Ghost in "Hamlet," * and the King in "Henry VI," which indicate very readily that his place in the "stock" was that of a "walking (or utility) gentleman."

We happen to know, also, that Mr. Shakespeare rewrote for the stage what his unknown poet, poets, or friends composed, from the tolerable hearsay testimony of his fellow actor, Ben Jonson, who tells us that he remembers to have heard the players say that the stage copies of the plays were written in Shakespeare's autograph, and were all the more available on that account, because he (Shakespeare), was a good penman, in that "whatever he penned, he never blotted line." * Mr. Boucicault, while claiming the full credit to which he is entitled, is quite too clever, as well as too conscientious to set up for an original author or a poet, as well as a playwright. Neither does Shakespeare (as we have already said), anywhere appear to have ever claimed to be a poet, or even to have taken to himself—what we may, however, venture to ascribe to him—the merit of the stage-setting of the dramatic works, which, having been played at his theater, we collectively call the "Shakespearean plays" to-day. Why, then, to begin with, should we not conceive of Mr. Manager Shakespeare discharging the same duties as Mr. Wal-lack, Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault? as very much—from the necessities of his vocation—the same sort of man as either of them?

There is scarcely any evidence either way; but the fact that the actors were in the habit of receiving their fair copy of these plays from the manager's—William Shakespeare's—own hand, seems to make it evident that he did not originally compose them. Indeed, if Shakespeare had been their author, well-to-do and bustling manager as he was, he would probably have intrusted their transcription to some subordinate or supernumerary; or, better yet, would have kept a playwright of experience to set his compositions for the stage, to put in the necessary localisms, "gags," and allusions to catch the ear of the penny seats. Such a division of labor is imperative to-day, and was imperative then—or at least to suppose that it was not, is to suppose that of his dozen or so of co-managers, William Shakespeare was the one who did all the work, while the others looked on.

But, it is surmised that Shakespeare was his own playwright; took the dramas and rewrote them for the actors; he inserted the requisite business, the exits, and entrances, and—when necessary—suited the reading to the actor who was to pronounce the dialogue, according as he happened to be fat or lean. *

Such was the employment which fell to the part of William Shakespeare, in the division of labor among the management in which he was a partner, and the resulting manuscript was what Ben Jonson's friends told him of. For nobody, we fancy, quite supposes that the poet, whoever he was, produced "Hamlet" one evening, "Macbeth" on another, and "Julius CÆsar" on another, without blotting or erasing, changing, pruning or tiling a line, and then handed his original drafts to the players next morning to learn their parts from! This is not the way that poems are written (nor, we may add, the way theaters are managed). The greater the geniuses, the more they blotch and blot and dash their pens over the paper when the frenzy is in possession of them. And besides, the fact that there exist to-day, and always have existed, numerous and diverse readings of the Shakespearean text, does very clearly show that their author or authors did, at different times, vary and alter the construction of the text as taste or fancy dictated, and, therefore, that the manuscripts Ben Jonson's friends saw and told him of (and Heminges & Condell, as far as their testimony is of any value, confirm Jonson, for they assert that what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have received from him "scarce a blot in his papers", were the acting copies, and not the original manuscripts of the Shakespearean plays.

With the exception of Ben Jonson (to whose panegyric we devote a chapter in its place further on), the contemporaries of William Shakespeare, who celebrated his death in verse, nowhere assert him to have been the myriad-minded Oceanic (to use Coleridge's adjectives) genius which we conceive him now-a-days—which he must have been to have written the works now assigned to him. Let any one doubting this statement open the pages of Dr. Ingleby's "Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse," a work claimed by its compiler to be inclusive of every allusion to, comment or criticism on Shakespeare, which Dr. Ingleby has been able to unearth in print, dating anywhere within one hundred years of Shakespeare's death. We have industriously turned every page of this work, and will submit to any other who will do the same, the question whether it contains a line which exhibits William Shakespeare as any other than a wit, a successful actor, a poet of the day, a genial and generous friend, a writer of plays, or whether—when eulogistic of the plays called his seven years after his death (a very different list, by the way, than the one assigned him during his life), rather than biographical as to the man, they are of any more value as evidence than Gray's or Milton's magnificent apostrophes to a genius with whom their only familiarity was through report, rumor, or impression derived from the ever immortal works. For, like Gray, Coleridge, Emerson—all that John Milton knew about William Shakespeare was pure hearsay, derived from local report or perusal of the Shakespearean plays ("a book invalued," he calls them). Even if we were called upon to do so, we could hardly conceive Milton—a Puritan, and a blind Puritan at that—as much of a play-goer or boon companion of actors and managers. But we are not called upon to imagine any thing of the sort; for, as a matter of fact, John Milton was exactly seven years and four months old when William Shakespeare died. And so, what is called "the Milton testimony," upon examination, proves to be no testimony at all, but only hearsay—venerable, perhaps—but hearsay, nevertheless; * as utterly immaterial as his "Marbling his native wood notes wild"—a line that might be, not inaptly, applied to Robert Burns, but which suggests almost any thing except the stately and splendid pages of the Shakespearean opera—to which we have before alluded as justifying us, indeed, in wondering if the Puritan poet had ever gone so far, before formulating his opinion, as to open the book assigned to the Shakespeare he wrote of.

And so, in the first place, there was no great call or occasion for discussion as to the authorship of the Shakespearean dramas in the days when they first began to be known by the public; and, as for Mr. Manager Shakespeare's friends, and the actors of his company, they testified to what they had heard, and, if they knew any thing to the contrary, they kept it to themselves. If his friends, jealous of his reputation, they were not solicitous of heralding him a fraud; and if the "stock" upon his pay-roll, they held their bread at his hand, and were not eager to offend him. If—as we shall notice further on—a wise few did suspect the harmless imposition, either they had grounds for not mentioning it, or there were reasons why people did not credit them. And so, in the second place, the times were not ripe for the truth to be known, because there was nobody who cared about knowing it, and nobody to whom it could be a revelation.

To suppose that William Shakespeare wrote the plays which we call his, is to suppose that a miracle was vouchsafed to the race of man in London in the course of certain years of the reign of Elizabeth. If, however, instead of probing for miracles, we come to consider that men and managers and theaters in the age of Elizabeth were very much the same sort of creatures and places that we find them now; that, among the habitues of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters in that reign, were certain young gentlemen of abundant leisure and elegant education who admitted managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange for the entre of the green-room; and that managers in those days as in these, were always on the alert for novelties, and drew their material—in the crude, if necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they were so fortunate—from wherever they could find it; if, in short, we find that among the curled darlings who frequented Master William Shakespeare's side doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, at least one ready writer who was so placed as to be eager to write anonymously for bread (and who, moreover, had access to the otherwise sealed and occult knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the giants of his day—to say nothing of the theater-managers—did not and could not dream)—if, we say, we consider all this, we need pin our faith to no miracles, but expect only the ordinary course of human events.

If William Shakespeare were an unknown quantity, like Homer, to be estimated only by certain masterly works assigned to him, this answer might, indeed, be different. For, just as Homer's writings are so magnificent as to justify ascribing to him—so far as mere power to produce them goes—any other contemporary literature to be discovered, so the works attributed to William Shakespeare are splendid enough to safely credit him with the compositions of any body else; of even so great a man as Bacon, for example. But William Shakespeare is no unknown quantity—except that we lose sight of him for the few years between his leaving Stratford, and (as part proprietor of the largest London play-house) accepting Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in His Humour"—we know pretty well all about him. There are half a hundred biographies extant—new ones being written every day—and any one of them may be consulted as to the manner of life William Shakespeare's was. The breakneck marriage bond, which waived all formalities, the consent of any body's parents, justification of sureties, three askings of banns, etc., so he could only be fast married; the beer-bouts, youthful and harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, Sir Thomas Lucy thought, to justify instructing a Warwick attorney to prosecute the lad before the law: all these are matter of record, amply photographing for-us William Shakespeare in Stratford. Then the hiatus—and this same lad appears, prosperous, and in the great town; sending home money to his impoverished family—part proprietor of a theater, purchasing freehold estates in London—a grant of arms for his father—the great house in his native village for his own homestead; investing in the tithings of his county, and beginning a chancery suit to recover lands which his father—in his poverty—had allowed himself to forfeit by foreclosure. Surely we will not go far astray if we set it down that some pretty hard work at what this rising lad found to do in London, and learned to do best, has filled up those unrecorded years! Was all this money made by writing plays for the Globe, or by working on Bacon's Novum Organum, or by other literary labor? Was that the hard work William Shakespeare found to do, and laid up money at, in the interval between his last crop of wild oats at Stratford, and the condescension of the man of affairs in London? If it were, it is curious that no rumor or tradition of it comes from Stratford. Nothing travels quite so fast in rural neighborhoods as a reputation for "book learning," while the local worthy, who has actually written a book of his own, is a landmark in his vicinage. Now, William Shakespeare died one of the richest men—if not the richest—in all Stratford. It is strange that the gossip and goodwives, who so loaded themselves with his boyish freaks and frailties, should never have troubled themselves about his manly pursuits and accomplishments. The only English compositions he is credited within Stratford gossip are one or two excessively conventional epitaphs on Elias James, John a Coombe, and others—the latter of which is only to be appreciated by a familiarity with Warwickshire patois. He sprang from a family so illiterate that they could not write their own name; and, moreover, lived and died utterly indifferent as to how anybody else wrote it—whether with an "x" or a "g," a "c" or a "ks." And as he found them, so he left them. For, although William Shakespeare enjoyed an income of $25,000 (present value of money) at his death, he never had his own children taught to read and write, and his daughter Judith signed her mark to her marriage bond.

That the rustic youth, whom local traditions variously represent as a scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's apprentice, and the like, but never as a school-boy, a student, a reader, a poet—as ever having been seen with a hook in his hand—driven by poverty to shift for himself, should at once (for the dates, as variously given by Mr. Malone and Mr. Grant White, are exceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman about town, Southampton, is almost incredible. But, it is no more incredible than that this ill-assorted friendship can be accounted for by the lad's superhuman literary talents. Southampton never was suspected, during his lifetime, of a devotion to literature, much less of an admiration for letters so rapt as to make him forget the gulf between his nobility and that of a peasant lad—who (even if we disbelieve his earliest biographers as to the holding horses and carrying links) must necessarily have been employed in the humblest pursuits at the outset of his London career. But yet, according to the various "chronologies" (which, in the endeavor to crowd these works into William Shakespeare's short life, so as to tally with the dates—when known—of their production, only vary inconsiderably after all), the Stratford boy hardly puts in his appearance in London before he presents Lord Southampton, as the "first heir of his invention," with—if not the most mature—at least the most carefully polished production that William Shakespeare's name was ever signed to; and, moreover, as polished, elegant, and sumptuous a piece of rhetoric as English letters has ever produced down to this very day.

Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all the Latin and Greek extant; this poem, dedicated to Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if not a miracle. The genius of Robert Burns found its expression in the idiom of his father and his mother, in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he was born. When he came to London, and tried to warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire; without schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace of that Warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and coetaneans spoke—the language of his own fireside! As a matter of fact, English, was a much rarer accomplishment in the days when Thomas Jenkins and Thomas Hunt were masters of Stratford Grammar School, than Greek and Latin. Children, in those days, were put at their hic, hÆc, hoc at an age when we send them to kindergartens. But no master dreamed of drilling them in their own vernacular. Admitting William Shakespeare to have been born a poet, he must also have been born a master of the arbitrary rules of English rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and prosody, as well, to have written that one poem. But, say the Shakespeareans, even if William did not study English at the Stratford Grammar School, or read it in those crowded days when earning his bread by menial employment in stranger London, he had an opportunity to study Lyly, Nash, Greene, Peele, Chettle, and the rest. But the Shakespearean vocabulary—like the whole canon of the plays—is a thing apart—unborrowed, unimitated, and unlearned from any of these. These were satisfied to write for the stages of the barns called "play-houses," and for their audiences, which—according to all reports—were decidedly indifferent as to scholarship. These might introduce a Frenchman, but they never troubled themselves to make him French; or a Scotchman, but they never stopped to make him Scotch. But even if William Shakespeare, in the immersions of the management, was author of that intellectual Dane, over-refined in a German university of metaphysics, he called Hamlet; or of that crafty Italian, named Iago; or of that Roman iceberg, Brutus—it is quite as difficult to conceive either the skylarking boy in Stratford, where there were no libraries, and his father too poor (not daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest for debt) to buy books; or the self-made man toiling from the bottom rung of poverty to the top of fortune—with leisure to study the characteristics of race and nationality—as acquiring all the grandeur of diction, insight into the human heart (which, at least, is not guess-work), knowledge and philosophy, we call his to-day. Even if we go no further than the "Venus and Adonis"—appearing at a date preluding a drill that, for the sake of the argument, we might even assume—how could that poem have been written by the peasant who only knew his native dialect, or the penniless lad earning his bread in stranger London, at the first shift at hand—with no entre to the great libraries, and no leisure to use one if he had it? Ben Jonson spent some years at Cambridge before he was taken away and set at brickmaking—he is said to have been a very studious brickmaker, working, according to Fuller, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other. As to his career as a soldier—a soldier, when not actually in the field or on the march, may find considerable opportunity for rumination; and, when lying in jail, he would certainly have ample leisure for his Greek and Roman. But Jonson wrote for the Elizabethan theaters; he lived and died hungry and poor, a borrower, over his ears in debt to the last. William Shakespeare, his contemporary, loaned Ben Jonson money; rose rapidly from penury to affluence; made his father rich, and a gentleman with an escutcheon; bought himself the most splendid house in Stratford (so splendid as to be deemed worthy a royal residence by Queen Henrietta); invested in outlying lands; speculated in tithes, and lived, until his death—according to Dominie Ward—at the rate of $25,000 a year. We are familiar enough with these stories of self-made men (so-called) in our daily newspapers. Let those who will, believe that William Shakespeare accumulated this splendid fortune, not by the successful management of the best appointed and affected theater in London, but by writing plays for its stage! and—at the same time—conceived, evolved from his own inner consciousness, all the learning which other playwrights (like Ben Jonson and the rest) were obliged—like ordinary mortals—to get out of books!

The only efforts made to account for this wealth flowing into the coffers of a poet, have been mere surmises, like the story of Southampton's munificence, and of the royal favor of King James, who wrote the manager a letter with his own hand. But neither of these stories happens to be contemporary with William Shakespeare himself. The first was an afterthought of Davenant, who was ten years old when Shakespeare died; and who is not accepted as an authority, even as to his own pedigree, by the very commentators who most eagerly seize upon and swear to his Southampton fiction. The other is not even hearsay, but the bold invention of Bernard Lintot, who published an edition of the plays in 1710. Doubtless, as has been the ambition of all the commentators, before Mr. Collier and since, Lintot was bound to be at least one fact ahead of his rivals, even if he had to invent that fact himself, he vouchsafes, as authority for this tale of the royal letter, however, the statement of "a credible person now living," who saw the letter itself in the possession of Davenant: in the teeth of the certainty that, had Davenant ever possessed such a letter, Davenant would have taken good care that the world should never hear the last of it: and coyly preserves the incognito of the "credible person," whom, however, Oldys conjectures must have been, if any body, the Duke of Buckingham. But, miracles aside, to consider William Shakespeare as the author of the Shakespearean drama—for that he has christened it, and that it will go forever by his name, we concede—involves us in certain difficulties that seem altogether insurmountable. In the first place, scholars and thinkers, whose hearts have been open to the matchless message of the Shakespearean text, and who found themselves drawn to conclude that such a man as William Shakespeare once lived, were amazed to discover that the very evidence which forced them to that conclusion, also proved conclusively that that individual could not have written the dramas since known by his name. Coleridge, Schlegel, Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, Hallam, Delia Bacon, Gervinus, and, doubtless, many more, clearly saw that the real Shakespeare was not the Shakespeare we have described. "In spite of all the biographies, 'ask your own hearts,' says Coleridge—'ask your own common sense to conceive the possibility of this man being... the anomalous, the wild, the irregular genius of our daily criticism. What! are we to have miracles in sport? or (I speak reverently) does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?'"

"If there was a Shakespeare of earth, as I suspect," says Hallam—alluding to the fact that all the commentators told him of the man Shakespeare, inferred him as anything but the master he was cited—"there was also one of heaven, and it is of him we desire to learn more." * **

This evidence was of three sorts: 1. Official records and documents; 2. The testimony of contemporaries; and, 3. That general belief, reputation, and tradition, which, left to itself in the manner we have indicated, has grown into the presumption of nearly three hundred years. We will not recapitulate the well-thumbed records, nor recite the dog's-eared testimony, which together gave rise to the presumption. But the dilemma presented to the student was in this wise: By the parish records it appeared that a man child was christened in Stratford Church April 26th, (old style) 1564, by the name William. He was the son of one John Shakespeare, a worthy man, who lived by either, or all, the trades of butcher, wool-comber, or glover—three not incompatible pursuits variously assigned him—was, at different times, a man of some means, even of local importance, (becoming, on one occasion, even ale-taster for the town,) and, at his son's birth, owner in freehold of two plots of ground in Stratford village, on one of which plots a low-raftered house now stands, which has come to be a Mecca to which pilgrims from the whole world reverently repair. The next official record of the son so born to John Shakespeare is the marriage-bond to the Bishop of Worcester; enabling this son to wed one Anne Hathaway, his senior in years, which bond remains to this day on file in the office of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.

Later on, the son, having become a person of means, purchases for his father a grant of arms; and (the name being Shakespeare) the heralds allot him an escutcheon on which is represented a shaking spear (symbolically treated)—a device which, under the circumstances, did not tax the heralds' ingenuity, or commit them to any theory about ancestors at Hastings or among the Saracens. The increasing wealth of the son leaves its traces in the title-deeds to and records of purchase of freehold and leasehold possessions, of the investment in meadow-lands, and tithes, and of sundry law suits incidental to these. Local tradition—which in like cases is perforce admitted as evidence—supplements all this record, and, so far as it can, confirms it, until we have an all but complete biography.

This biography the world knows by heart. It does not esteem the boy William Shakespeare the less because he was a boy—because—in the age and period reserved for that crop—he sowed and garnered his "wild oats." It has reason to believe him to have been much more than a mere wayward youth. Aubrey ("old Aubrey," "arch-gossip Aubrey," the Shakespeareans call him, probably because he wrote his sketch fifty years after his subject's death, instead of two hundred and fifty), says that he was the village prodigy, that "he exercised his father's trade—but, when he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech," etc., etc. Nor is there anything in the record of his mature and latter years—of his investments in tithes, and messuages, and homesteads—of his foreclosures and suits for money loaned and malt delivered—of his begetting children and dying; leaving—still with finical detail and nice and exact economy—an elaborate testament, in which he disposes, item by item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down to the second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he tenderly bestows upon the wife of his youth and the mother of his children—any thing at which the world should sneer.

If he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he shows no especial anxiety that posterity shall hear of it. Besides such contracts and business papers as he must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the theaters, and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his name to nothing except a declaration of debt against a poor neighbor who is behind-hand with his account, footed at one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence, and a not over-creditable last Will and Testament. This is his own business, and who has any thing to say? But, when our biographers go a step further and demand that we shall accept this as the record of a demigod; of the creator of a "Hamlet" and an "Othello;" and this practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to London—worked himself up (as he must have worked himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater; and, in that business and calling earned money and kept it—as the identical man who singly and alone wrote the "Hamlet," the ".Julius CÆsar," the "Othello," and all the splendid pages of the Shakespearean drama—some of us have been heard to demur! The scholar's dilemma is how to reconcile the internal evidence of the plays, which is spread before them undimmed by age, with these records, which are as authentic and beyond question as the internal evidence itself. And, once stated, the dilemma of the scholar becomes the dilemma of the whole world. Let any one try to conceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employment to-day—when the theater is at its best, and half the world play-goers—precarious for capital and industry; but in those days an experiment, in every sense of the word), who succeeded by vigilance, exact accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in securing and saving not only a competency, but a fair fortune; in the mean time—while engaged in this engrossment of business—writing Isabella's magnificent appeal to the duke's deputy, Angelo; or Cardinal Wolsey's last soliloquy! Or conceive of the man who gave the wife of his youth an old bedstead, and sued a neighbor for malt delivered, penning Antony's oration above CÆsar, or the soliloquy of Macbeth debating the murder of Duncan, the invocation to sleep in "King Henry IV.," or the speech of Prospero, or the myriad sweet, or noble, or tender passages that nothing but a human heart could utter! Let him try to conceive this, we say, and his eyes will open to the absurdity of the belief that these lines were written by the lessee and joint-manager of a theater, and he will examine the evidence thereafter for corroboration, and not for conviction; satisfied in his own mind, at least, that no such phenomenon is reasonable, probable, or safe to have presented itself.

Then, last and greatest difficulty of all, is the Will. This is by far the completest and best authenticated record we have of the man William Shakespeare, testifying not only to his undoubtedly having lived, but to his character as a man; and—most important of all to our investigation—to his exact worldly condition. Here we have his own careful and ante-mortem schedule of his possessions, his chattels real and chattels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety bedstead under his roof. And we may be pretty sure that it is an accurate and exhaustive list. But if he were—as well as a late theater-manager and country gentleman—an author and the proprietor of dramas that had been produced and found valuable, how about these plays? Were they not of as much value, to say the least, as a damaged bedstead? Were they not, as a matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual source of his wealth? How does he dispose of them? Does our thrifty Shakespeare forget that he has written them? Is it not the fact, and is it not reason and common sense to conceive, that, not having written them, they have passed out of his possession along with the rest of his theatrical property, along with the theater whose copyrights they were, and into the hands of others? This is the greatest difficulty and stumbling-block for the Shakespeareans. If their hero had written these plays, of which the age of Elizabeth was so fond, and in whose production he had amassed a fortune—that he should have left a will, in items, in which absolutely no mention or hint of them whatever should be made, even their most zealous pundits can not step over, and so are scrupulous not to allude to it at all. This piece of evidence is unimpeachable and conclusive as to what worldly goods, chattels, chattel-interests, or things in action, William Shakespeare supposed that he would die possessed of. Tradition is gossip. Records are scant and niggardly. Contemporary testimony is conflicting and shallow, but here, attested in due and sacred form, clothed with the foreshadowed solemnity of another world, is the calm, deliberate, ante mortem statement of the man himself. We perceive what becomes of his secondhand bedstead. What becomes of his plays? Is it possible that, after all these years' experience of their value—in the disposition of a fortune of which they had been the source and foundation—he should have forgotten their very existence?

But if, diverging from the scanty records, we go to the testimony of contemporaries, what do we find there? Very little more of the man William Shakespeare, but precisely the same dilemma as to his alleged authorship of the plays. We find that the country lad William, the village prodigy with whom the gossips concerned themselves, was no milksop and no Joseph; that he was hail-fellow with his fellows of equal age; that he poached—shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned their owner when punished for the offense; went on drinking-bouts with his equals of the neighboring villages; and, finally—-just as any clever, country lad, who had made his fellows merry with mock eulogies over the calves he slaughtered might and probably would do to-day, and which is precisely what his earliest and, therefore, safest biographer, Howe, asserts that he did do—wound up with following a company of strolling players to the metropolis; where he began his prosperous career by holding gentlemen's horses at the theater door, while the gentlemen themselves went inside to witness the performance. We turn to the stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting, and the beer-drinking, with relief. It is pleasant to think that the pennywise old man was—at least in his youth—human. A little poaching and a little beer do nobody any harm, and it is, at all events, more cheerful reading than the record of a parsimonious freeholder taking the law of his poorer neighbor who defaults in the payment of a few shillings for a handful of malt. There is a village school in Stratford, and Mr. De-Quincy, and all his predecessors and successors who have preferred to construct pretty romances, and call them "lives of William Shakespeare," rather than to accept his known and recorded youth, boldly unite in making their hero attend its sessions. Their assertions are bravely seconded by the cicerones and local guides of Stratford, who, for a sixpence, will show you the identical desk which Shakespeare, the lad, occupied at that grammar school; and at Shottery, the same guides show us the chair in which our hero sat while courting Mistress Anne; just as, in Wittemburg, these same gentry point out the house where Hamlet lived when a student in the University there; or, in Scotland, the spot where Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu fought. But, William could not have attended this school very perseveringly, since he turns up in London at about the age that country lads first go to school. In London, he seems to have risen from nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of co-manager, along with a dozen others, of a theater. Here, just as young lords and swells take theater managers into their acquaintance to-day, he became intimate with greater men than himself, and so enlarged his skirts and his patronage, as it was the part of a thrifty man to do. At this time there were no circulating libraries in London, no libraries, accessible to the general public, of any sort, in fact; no booksellers at every corner, no magazines or reviews; no public educators, and no schools or colleges swarming with needy students; even the literature of the age was a bound-up book to all except professional readers. But, for all that, this William Shakes-peare—this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a term at Stratford school (admitting that he went where the romancers put him), cuts off to London at the heels of a crew of strolling players—who begins business for himself somewhere (perhaps as "link-boy" at a theater door, but we may be sure, at an humble end of some employment) and, by saving his pence, works up to be actually a part-proprietor in two theaters, and ultimately a rich man—begins to possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the Past which, even to-day, with all our libraries, lyceums, serials, and booksellers, it would need a lifetime to acquire.

He did the work of a lifetime. Like Mr. Stewart, in New York, he began penniless, and by vigilance, shrewdness, and economy, rose to respectability, affluence, and fortune.

But, as we could not imagine Mr. Stewart, gentleman as he was, writing all the tags and labels on his goods or making with his own hand every pen-stroke necessary in the carrying on of his immense trade; or poems or philosophical essays on the manufacture of the silks and linens and cottons he handled while slowly coining his fortune, and revolving poetry in his overworked brain while overseeing the business that was evolving that fortune; so do we fail to conceive of William Shakespeare doing all the pen-work on the dramas he coins his money by producing on his boards. How much less can we conceive of this man composing, not only poems of his own, but a Literature of his own—drawing his material from the classic writers (and notably from those Greek plays not at that time translated, and only accessible in the originals and in manuscript), from legal works, "caviare to the general;" from philosophical treatises not known to have been available even for reference; writing of the circulation of the blood in the human system—a fact not discovered until years after his own death! Let us find him, too, setting down, in writing, epitomes of all known wisdom; ascertaining the past, prophesying of the future; laying down off-hand the philosopher's, the lawyer's, the leech's, the soldier's, the scholar's craft and art, which only these themselves, by long years of study, might attain to—and all this while coining a fortune in the management of two theaters; to have solved, in short, the riddle of the sphinx and all the as yet unspinning whirligigs of time! Verily, a greater riddle than the sphinx's is this the riddle of the boy—Master Shakespeare. Thomas Chatterton found his wealth in a musty chest in an old muniment room. But here the chest and imminent room were not in existence till years after the boy Shakespeare has been a man, and traveled on to his grave. It is no solution of this riddle to say the lad was a genius, and that genius is that which soars, while education plods. *

Genius itself can not account for the Shakespearean plays. Genius may portray, but here is a genius that not only portrayed that which after his death became fact, but related other facts which men had forgotten; the actors in which had lain in the dust for centuries, and whose records had slept sealed in dead languages, in manuscripts beyond his reach! Genius, intuition, is beyond education indeed. It may prophesy of the future or conceive of the eternal; but only knowledge can draw record of the past. If the author of Shakespeare had been a genius only, his "Julius CÆsar" might have been a masterpiece of tragedy, or pathos, or of rage; but it would have portrayed an ideal Rome, not the real one. His "Comedy of Errors" might have been matchless in humor and sparkling in contretemps, but, three years afterward, on translating a hidden manuscript of Plautus, the comedies would not have been found quite identical in argument. *

The precocity of a child may be intuitive. But no babe learns its alphabet spontaneously or by means of its genius; but out of a book, because the characters are arbitrary. Pascal, when a child, discovered the eternal principles of geometry, and marked them out in chalk upon the floor; but he did not know that the curved figures he drew were called "circles," or that the straight ones were called "lines;" so he named them "rounds" and "bars." He discovered what was immutable and could be found by the searcher, but his genius could not reinvent arbitrary language that had been invented before his birth. In short, to have possessed and to have written down, in advance, the learning and philosophy of three centuries to come, might have been the gift of Prophecy (such a gift as has ere this fallen from we know not where upon the sons of men) descending into the soul of a conceivable, genius. But who can tell of more than he knows? Second sight is not retrospective. And to have testified of the forgotten past, without access to its record, was as beyond the possibilities of genius as the glowing wealth of the Shakespearean page is above the creation of an unlettered man of business in the age of Elizabeth or of Victoria.

Here is the dilemma with which the Shakespear-eans struggle: that in those years the man William Shakespeare did live, and was a theatrical manager and actor in London; and precisely the same evidence which convinces us that this man did live in those days, convinces the world to-day—or must convince it, if it will only consent to look at it—that the dramas we call Shakespearean were so called because they were first published from the stage of William Shakespeare's theaters in London, just as we call certain readings of the classics the "Delphin classics," because brought together for a Dauphin of Prance; or certain paintings "DÜsseldorf paintings," because produced in the DÜsseldorf school. If, however, in the course of ages it should come to be believed that the Dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named DÜsseldorf painted the pictures, even then the time would come to set the world right. If there had been no Dauphin and no DÜsseldorf, we might have assigned those names to a power which might have produced the poems or the pictures. If there had been no William Shakespeare, we might easily have idealized one who could have written the plays. But, unhappily, there was the actual, living, breathing man in possession of that name, who declines to assign it to another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the Shakespeareans want. And, moreover, once the presumption is waived and the question is opened again; there is a mass of evidence in the possession of this century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped together, is a mountain over which the airiest skeptic can not vault.

But did none of William Shakespeare's contemporaries suspect the harmless deception? There is no proof at hand, nor any evidence at all positive, that the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or to have ever pretended to have been, the original author of the text of the plays he gave to his players. Let us hasten to do William Shakespeare the justice to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his having asserted a falsehood. But, if he did so pretend to his intimates, and if the dramas we now call "Shakespearean" were actually produced, in those days, on William Shakespeare's own stage, under that pretension, certainly some of them must have wagged their heads in secret. Surely, Ben Johnson, who bears testimony that his friend Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek," must have queried a little within himself as to where certain things he read in the text of his friend's plays came from, always supposing that he did not know perfectly well where they did come from. It seems more than probable, as we have already said, that, whoever suspected or knew the source of the plays, and who also knew, if such was the fact, that they were claimed as Shakespeare's compositions —had more cue to wink at than to expose the humbug. We find, indeed, that one, Robert Greene, by name, did protest against "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and adapter of other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when he was not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he 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." That is to say, in language more intelligible at this day, that, being a sort of Jack-of-all-trades around the theater—holding horses, taking tickets, acting a little, putting pieces on the stage, and writing out their parts for the actors—he (Shakespeare) came in time to consider himself a dramatist, a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. Doubtless Greene was inspired by jealousy—for he was a writer of plays for the stage himself—in making and publishing this sneer. But, as he was endeavoring to make his remarks so personal to Shakespeare as to be readily recognized, he would not have alluded to him except by some well-known characteristic. So he calls him a "Jack-of-all-trades," that is, a man who did a little of everything. Is a Jack-of-all-trades about a theater the ideal poet, philosopher, and seer, who wrote the Shakespearean drama—the ideal of the Sliakespeareans?

According to the chronicles and the record, then, one William Shakespeare, a "general utility" actor, and Johannes Factotum, lived and thrived in London, some two hundred and fifty odd years ago. At about that date a book is likewise written. Who are these who find this book, and make this man to fit it? Verily, there are none so blind as those who are determined not to see! To have written that book one must needs have been, let us say—for he was at least all these—a philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a leech, a naturalist, a traveler, a student of Bible history! Strange to say, at the time this book—in portions—is making its appearance, there are two men living, each of whom is a poet, a philosopher, a student of laws and of physics, and a traveler over the by-ways of many lands beside his own. One of them is known to have read the Bible, then what we understand to-day by a "current work." Together, these two men possess in themselves about all of their age with which subsequent ages care to connect themselves. But it is not suggested that these two men, Bacon and Raleigh, might have written the book for which an author is wanted. We are to pass them by, and sift the dust at their illustrious feet, if haply we may find a fetich to fall down before and worship!

Must the man that wrote the dramas have visited Italy? Mr. Halliwell and others inform us of Shakespeare's visit to Verona, Venice, and Florence. Must Shakespeare have been at the bar? My Lord Campbell writes us a book to show his familiarity with the science of jurisprudence. (That book has traveled far upon a lordly name. It is an authority until it happens to be read. Once we open it, it is only to find that, the passages of the Shakespearean dramas which stamp their author's knowledge of the common law are the passages his lordship does not cite, while over the slang and dialect which any smatterer might have memorized from turning the pages of an attorney's hornbook, his lordship gloats and postulates and relapses into ecstasy). Must Shakespeare have been a physician? There have not been wanting the books to prove him that. * And, crowning this long misrule of absurdity, comes an authority out of Philadelphia, to assure us that the youth Shakespeare, on quitting his virgin Stratford for the metropolis, was scrupulous to avoid the glittering temptations of London; that he eschewed wine and women; that he avoided the paths of vice and immorality, and piously kept himself at home, his only companion being the family Bible, which he read most ardently and vigorously! **

It is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his latest authority has truth for his color and testimony for his oil. The picture has at least the freshness and charm of utter novelty!

The work of Shakespeare-making goes on. The facts are of record. We may ran as we read them! But rather let us, out of reverence for the errors of our fathers, refuse to read at all, and accept the ideal of Malone, of Halliwell and De Quincy, of Grant White, and of ten thousand more, who prefer to write their biographies of William Shakespeare, not in the first person, like Baron Munchhausen, nor in the second person, like the memoirs of Sully, but in the probable and supposititious person of "it is possible he did this," and "it is likely he did that."

Let those who will, disparage the boy and man William Shakespeare, who married and made an honest woman of Anne Hathaway of Shottery; left home to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the slender household store; used his first wealth to make a gentleman of his father; and who, with what followed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood's banks, where—"procul negotiis"—in the evening of life he might enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. But that he ever claimed, much less wrote, what we call the Shakespearean drama, let those bring proof who can.