CHAPTER VIII Questions of Authenticity

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Owing to the conditions of publication described in Chapter VII there are questions as to the authenticity of a number of the poems and plays ascribed to Shakespeare. Of the poems, "The Phoenix and the Turtle" and "A Lover's Complaint" have been sometimes rejected as unworthy, but there is no other evidence against the ascription to him by the original publishers. The case of The Passionate Pilgrim is different and is interesting as illustrating the methods of piracy practised by booksellers and as affording the only record of a protest by Shakespeare against the free use which they made of his name. This anthology was published by W. Jaggard in 1599 as "by W. Shakespeare." The third edition in 1612 added two pieces by Thomas Heywood. Heywood immediately protested and in the postscript to his Apologie for Actors, 1612, declared that Shakespeare was "much offended with M. Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name." Of the twenty poems that made up the volume, only five are certainly by Shakespeare, two appearing also in The Sonnets and three in Love's Labour's Lost. Six others can be assigned to contemporary poets. The authorship of the remaining The Shakespeare Apocryphanine is unknown, but probably only one or two are by Shakespeare.

In addition to the thirty-seven plays now included in all editions of Shakespeare, some forty others have been, for one reason or another, attributed to him. The First Folio contained thirty-six plays; and it is a strong evidence of the honesty and information of its editors, Heming and Condell, that subsequent criticism has been satisfied to retain the plays of their choice and to make but one addition, Pericles. Of these plays, however, it is now generally agreed that a number are not entirely the work of Shakespeare, but were written by him in part in collaboration with other writers, e.g., Titus Andronicus, 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI, Timon of Athens, Pericles, and Henry VIII. Of two of these, Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry VI, some students refuse to give Shakespeare any share. Of the forty doubtful plays, there is not one which in its entirety is now credited to Shakespeare; and only three or four in which any number of competent critics see traces of his hand. Only in the case of The Two Noble Kinsmen is there any weight of evidence or opinion that he had a considerable share.

The second Folio kept to the thirty-six plays of the First Folio; but the second printing of the third Folio (1664) added seven plays: Pericles Prince of Tyre, The London Prodigal, The History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, The Puritan Widow, A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Tragedy of Locrine. These seven plays were also included in the fourth Folio, and as supplementary volumes to Rowe's, Pope's, and some later editions. They were all originally published in quarto as by W. S., or William Shakespeare, but except in the case of Pericles, this has been regarded as a bookseller's mistake or deception without warrant. Locrine, "newly set forth, overseen, and corrected by W. S., 1595," is a play of about the date of Titus Andronicus, and is probably by Greene, Peele, or some imitator of Marlowe and Kyd. Sir John Oldcastle appeared in 1600 in two quartos, one of which ascribed it to William Shakespeare, but it was clearly composed for the Admiral's men as a rival to the Falstaff plays which the Chamberlain's men had been acting. Thomas Lord Cromwell (1602) and The Puritan (1607) were ascribed to W. S., on their title-pages, but offer no possible resemblances to Shakespeare. The London Prodigal (1605) and A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) were both acted by Shakespeare's company, and bore his name on their first editions, and the latter also on a second edition, 1619. The external evidence for his authorship is virtually the same as in the case of Pericles, which also was acted by his company, appeared under his name during his lifetime, but was rejected by the editors of the First Folio. No one, however, can discover any suggestion of Shakespeare in The London Prodigal. A Yorkshire Tragedy is a domestic tragedy in one act, dealing with a contemporary murder. It gives the conclusion of a story also treated in a play, The Two Noble KinsmenThe Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607) by George Wilkins, the author of a novel The Painful Adventures of Pericles, and sometimes suggested as a collaborator on the play Pericles. A Yorkshire Tragedy is very unlike Shakespeare, but it has a few passages of extraordinarily vivid prose, which might conceivably owe something to him.

The Two Noble Kinsmen was registered April 8, 1634, and appeared in the same year with the following title-page "The Two Noble Kinsmen: Presented at the Blackfriars by the Kings Maiesties servants, with great applause: Written by the memorable Worthies of their time;

Mr. John Fletcher, and
Mr. William Shakespeare
} Gent.

Printed at London by the Tho. Cotes for Iohn Waterson; and are to be sold at the signe of the Crowne in Paul's Church-yard. 1634." The exclusion of the play from the First Folio may be explained on the same basis as the exclusion of Pericles; for in each play Shakespeare wrote the minor part. There is now general agreement that The Two Noble Kinsmen was written by two authors with distinct styles, and that the author of the larger portion is Fletcher. The attribution of the non-Fletcherian part to Shakespeare has been upheld by Lamb, Coleridge, De Quincey, Spalding (in a notable Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1833), Furness, and Littledale (who edited the play for The New Shakespeare Society, Series II, 1, 8, 15, London, 1876-1885); but there are still many critics who do not believe that Shakespeare had any part in the play. This question will probably always remain a matter of opinion; but the evidence of various verse tests confirms esthetic judgment in assigning about two fifths of the verse to Shakespeare. The Shakespearean portion, here and there possibly touched by Fletcher, includes, I. i; I. ii; I. iii; I. iv. 1-28; III. i; III. ii; V. i. 17-73; V. iii. 1-104; V. iv, and perhaps the prose II. i and IV. iii.

The dance in the play is borrowed from an anti-masque in Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, presented at court, February 20, 1613. This fixes the date of composition for the play in 1613, the same year as Henry VIII, on which it is now generally agreed that Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborated. On both of the plays the collaboration seems to have been direct; i.e., after making a fairly detailed outline, each writer took certain scenes, and, to all intents, completed these scenes after his own fashion.

One other play must be mentioned in connection with The Two Noble Kinsmen. Cardenio, entered on the Stationers' Register, 1653, was described as "by Fletcher and Shakespeare." It seems probably identical with a Cardenno acted at court by the King's men in May, 1613, and a Cardenna in June, 1613. Attempts have been made to connect it with Double Falsehood, assigned to Shakespeare by Theobald on its publication in 1728.

Last AscriptionsOther non-extant plays ascribed to Shakespeare after 1642 require no attention, nor do a number of Elizabethan plays assigned to him in certain of their later quartos. Among these are The Troublesome Reign of King John, on which Shakespeare's King John was based; The First Part of The Contention, and (the Second Part) The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (versions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI); and The Taming of a Shrew, the basis of Shakespeare's play. The relation of Shakespeare's plays to these earlier versions is discussed in the introductions to the respective volumes of the Tudor Shakespeare. Other plays assigned, without grounds, to Shakespeare by late seventeenth-century booksellers are The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Arraignment of Paris, Fair Em, Mucedorus, and The Birth of Merlin.

A few other anonymous plays have been ascribed to Shakespeare by modern critics. Of chief note are Arden of Feversham, 1592, first attributed to Shakespeare by Edward Jacob in 1770; Edward III, 1596, included with other false attributions to Shakespeare in a bookseller's list of 1659, and edited and assigned to Shakespeare by Capell in 1760; Sir Thomas More, an old play of about 1587, preserved in manuscript until edited by Dyce in 1844 and assigned to Shakespeare by Richard Simpson in 1871. There is no evidence for the ascription of various portions of these plays to Shakespeare, except that certain passages seem to some critics characteristic of him. But at the date when the three plays were written his style had not attained its characteristic individuality; and the assignment of these anonymous plays to any particular author neglects the obvious fact that many writers of that period present similar traits of versification and imagery. The attribution to Shakespeare of the Countess of Salisbury episode in Edward III, parts of the insurrection scenes in Sir Thomas More, and a few passages in Arden of Feversham has scarcely any warrant beyond the enthusiastic admiration of certain critics for these passages.

Thus only one play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha has any considerable claim to admission into the canon. The evidence for his participation in The Two Noble Kinsmen is about as strong as in Pericles, and the part assigned to him is fairly comparable with his contribution to Henry VIII.

An account of the Shakespeare Apocrypha is, however, incomplete without reference to the forgeries of documents or plays. Theobald published Double Falsehood in 1728, as based on a seventeenth-century manuscript which he conjectured to be by Shakespeare. John Jordan, a resident of Stratford, forged the will of Shakespeare's father, and probably some other papers in his Collections, 1780; William Henry Ireland, with the aid of his father, produced in 1796 a volume of forged papers purporting to relate to Shakespeare's career, and on April 2, 1796, Sheridan and Kemble presented at Drury Lane the tragedy of Vortigern, really by Ireland, but Forgeriessaid by him to have been found among Shakespeare's manuscripts. Ireland was exposed by Malone, and he published a confession of his forgeries in 1805. More skilful and far more disturbing to Shakespearean scholarship are the forgeries of John Payne Collier, extending over a period from 1835 to 1849. These included manuscript corrections in a copy of the second Folio, and many documents concerning the biography of Shakespeare and the history of the Elizabethan theater. These forgeries have vitiated many of Collier's most important publications, as his Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, and History of English Dramatic Poetry.

We turn now from attempts to increase Shakespeare's writings to an extraordinary effort to deny him the authorship of all his plays. Doubts on this score seem to have been raised by Joseph C. Hart in his Romance of Yachting, 1848, and by an article in Chambers' Journal, August 7, 1852. In 1856, Mr. W. H. Smith first proposed Bacon's authorship in a letter to Lord Ellesmere, "Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's plays?" These were followed by an article by Miss Delia Bacon in Putnam's Monthly, 1856, and a volume, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon. Since Miss Bacon's book, her hypothesis has resulted in the publication of hundreds of volumes and pamphlets supporting many variations of the theory. Some are content to view the authorship as a mystery, assigning the plays to an unknown author. Others attribute the authorship to a club of distinguished men, or to Sir Anthony Shirley, or the Earl of Rutland, or another. Others give Bacon only a portion of the plays, as those containing many legal terms. The majority, however, are thoroughgoing "Baconians," and the most prodigious cases of misapplied ingenuity have been the efforts to find in the First Folio a cipher, by which certain letters are selected which proclaim Bacon's authorship; as The Great Cryptogram, 1887, by Ignatius Donnelly, and The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon, 1900, by Mrs. Gallup. Such cyphers are mutually destructive, and their absurdity has been repeatedly demonstrated. Either they will not work without much arbitrary manipulation, or they work too well and are found to indicate Bacon's authorship of literature written before his birth and after his death. Yet similar 'discoveries' continue to be announced.

The evidences supporting Shakespeare's authorship have been set forth sufficiently in this volume and offer no basis for an attitude of skepticism. A few considerations may be recalled as correctives for a partial or mistaken reading of the evidence. (1) Though the records of Shakespeare's life are meager, they are fuller than for any other Elizabethan dramatist. Indeed we know little of the biography of any men of the sixteenth century unless their lives affected church or politics and hence found preservation in the records. There is no 'mystery' about Shakespeare. (2) Records amply establish the identity between The "Baconian" QuestionShakespeare the actor and the writer. Moreover, the plays contain many words and phrases natural to an actor, many references to the actor's art, and show a wide and detailed knowledge of the ways and peculiarities of the theater. (3) The extent of observation and knowledge in the plays is, indeed, remarkable, but it is not accompanied by any indication of thorough scholarship, or a detailed connection with any profession outside of the theater, or a profound knowledge of the science or philosophy of the time. (4) The law terms are numerous, and usually correct, but do not establish any great knowledge of the law. Elizabethan London was full of law students who were among frequent patrons of the theater. Through acquaintance with these gentlemen Shakespeare might have readily acquired all the law that he displays. Moreover Shakespeare had an opportunity to gain a considerable familiarity with the law through the frequent litigations in which he and his father were concerned. (5) The dedication, commendatory poems, and address to the readers prefixed to the First Folio ought in themselves to be sufficient to remove the skepticism as to Shakespeare's authorship.

The following considerations apply to the attribution to Bacon, so far as that rests on any tangible basis: (1) Sir Tobie Matthews writes in a letter to Bacon, written some time later than January, 1621, "The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another." The sentence probably refers to Father Thomas Southwell, a Jesuit, whose real surname was Bacon. There is nothing to connect it with Shakespeare. (2) The parallelisms between passages in Shakespeare and Bacon deal with phrases in common use and fail to establish any connection between the two men. (3) The few surviving examples of Bacon's verse suggest no ability as a poet. (4) Bacon's life is well known, and it offers no hint of connection with the theaters and no space in its crowded annals for the production of Shakespeare's plays. In fact, if we had to find an author for Shakespeare's plays among writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Bacon would be about the last person conceivable.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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