December 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



25 



^ 1LLUSTRATE|^MAGAZINE ^ 

 SCiENCE,UTERATURE,& A] 



LONDON: DECEMBER 1, 1887. 



SHAKESPEARE'S INDUSTRY. 



HROUGHOUT the length and breadth of 

 the United States, in almost every news- 

 paper and magazine, attention has been 

 directed, with approval or the reverse, to 

 the recently renewed attacks which a Mr. 

 Ignatius Donnelly has made upon the fame 

 and name of Shakespeare. The tone of 

 many of the comments in Mr. Donnelly's imagined dis- 

 covery of a cypher in the Folio of 1623, the interpretation 

 of which shows Bacon to have been the real author of the 

 Shakespeare plays, recalls the exclamation of certain ardent 

 Scotsmen after the first performance of Home's " Douglas," 

 " Whaur's Wullie Shakespeare noo 1 " But it is pleasant to 

 notice that all in America whose opinion can be of any 

 weight consider gentle Will to be where he ever was — 

 enshrined in the hearts of men of English blood, not only 

 as the greatest dramatic poet the world has known, but as 

 one whose works reveal him (almost despite himself, true 

 dramatist that he was) as a man of most lovable nature. 

 The only fault one can find with writers of the latter sort is 

 that they should attach any importance to INIr. Donnelly's 

 nonsensical cypher, the published readings from which are 

 as much like the English of Francis Bacon as the eloquence 

 of a stump orator in the Far West is like the language of a 

 Walter Raleigh. " I was in the greatest fear that they 

 would say that I was," kc, kc, is the beginning of the first 

 sentence attributed by Mr. Donnelly to Francis Bacon 1 He 

 might as reasonably have attributed it to Roger Bacon or 

 to a Saxon chronicler. 



But my purpose is not to follow American writers in 

 discussing either favourably or unfavourably the B.aconian 

 theory of Shakespeare's plays — a theory born dead ; and 

 still less in commenting on the Donnelly development of 

 the theoi-y, a development whose condition is beyond that 

 of the death stage. I wish to touch on what is un- 

 doubtedly the great marvel and mystery of Shake- 

 speax-e's career, a marvel so great that one almost wondeis 

 some mythic developments have not by this time come to 

 surround the story of the poet's life; and I propose to con- 

 sider as serving to diminish the marvel, a piece of evidfnce 

 in regard to Shakespeare's career, which, though well 

 known, lias never, so far as I know, been read as I am about 

 to read it now. 



The great difficulty about Shakespeare has always been 

 that a man with opportunities so imperfect, with a training 

 presumably so insufiicient, should be found, within a few 

 years of his leaving Stratford, already high in repute nmong 

 playwrights, when as yet no poem of his had been published. 

 If we can get over this we can readily understand 

 Shakespeare's rapid advance as something more than a 

 playwright ; because we should thus have evidence of 

 dramatic potency (so to describe the special faculty which 



Shakespeare, beyond all other men, possessed) sufilcient to 

 account even for that amazing progress whicii soon set 

 Shakespeare as far in advance of Marlowe as Marlowe was 

 in advance of Lilly. Deal with Shakespeare as we may, he 

 must remain ever a marvel among men ; but if we were to 

 accept the opinion of Emerson that Shakespeare was a 

 miracle, we should lose somewhat of our interest in him as 

 a man. It will suffice that we should regard him as 

 towering high above all other dramatic poets, even as 

 Gauris-Ankar towers high above Kinchin-Gunga, Dhawala 

 Giri, and the lofty peaks of the Knot of Tsunling : we need 

 not regard his greatness as miraciUous any more than we 

 need imagine that the loftiest peak of the Himalayas was 

 raised to its present height by the efibrts of an imprisoned 

 Titan. 



After all, the chief difficulty, if we consider the matter 

 aright, has been in the assumed wildness of Shakespeare's 

 youth, and the inference that what he did he achieved with 

 little efibrt. That " infinite capacity for taking pains," 

 which is characteristic of genius, has been supposed wanting 

 in Shakespeare's case ; and men wonder not only or chiefly 

 that he should have attained the poetic power he presently 

 displayed, but that he should display correct if not very 

 profound knowledge in a number of subjects — law, medi- 

 cine, surgery, physics, horticulture, history, languages, and 

 so forth — about which he could have learned little in his 

 boyhood and youth. 



But we have evidence of an especially satisfactory kind, 

 since it comes from an avowed enemy, to show that Shake- 

 speare mu.st Lave had just those cjualities which, wiih his 

 innate genius, were alone needed for the acquirement of the 

 knowledge he possessed and the judgment he displayed very 

 soon after his career as actor and dramatist had begun. We 

 learn enough to show that so far from being idle and dis- 

 solute, as Donnelly and other detractors pretend, he must 

 have been patient and industrious to a remarkable degree. 



The evidence I refer to is that which has been often 

 quoted against Shakespeare — the words in which the dying 

 dramatist Greene warns his fellow-actors and playwrights 

 against the rising poet, whose future fame he evidently ibre- 

 saw and envied : — " There is an upstart crow," he tells 

 certain of his fellow-playwrights — probably Marlowe, Peele, 

 and Nash — " beautified with our feathers, that, with his 

 tijgers lieart vrapt in a playci-'s /tide, supposes he is as well 

 able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you ; and, 

 being an absolute Johannes Factvhim, is in his own conceit 

 the only Shake-scene in a country." How this should have 

 come to be regarded as injurious to Shakespeai'e's fame, and 

 how the real though unconscious tribute to his merit in- 

 volved in it should have been overlooked, I find it difficult 

 to understand. But certain it is that while this passage has 

 been eagerly quoted by detiactors, the lovers of Shakespeare 

 have regarded it as involving an attack from which he needs 

 to be defended. 



Now, it is obvious to begin with that Greene was full of 

 anger and bitterness when he wrote his " Groat's worth of 

 Wit bought with a Million of Repentance." A dissolute 

 life, to use no harsher expression (where, however, a much 

 harsher expression might bo used, when we consider his 

 treatment of his wife), had brought him to a wretched 

 death, on a borrowed bed, where still his thoughts turned 

 towards the poetic fame he had sought, insomuch that his 

 last injunction to the shoemaker's wife, on whose bed he lay 

 dying, was that she would crown his corpse with bays I He 

 had earned considerable fame as a dramatist ; indeed, despite 

 his bombast and aflectation, his plays indicate a brilliant 

 fancy and marked dramatic power. He probably thought 

 himself the equal of Marlowe, though he was far from that, 

 and therefore superior to all others. The rising fame of 



