Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

WILLIAM SMITH AND WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE

In the year 1856 Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakspeare Society, received one day a little pamphlet bearing the at that time astounding title, “Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakspeare’s Plays?” The writer’s name was Smith. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 76 Harley Street, writer on Shakspeare, is the style he goes by in the Catalogue of the British Museum, to distinguish him from others of the name, whose works fill no less than eight volumes of that Catalogue, and have a special index all to themselves, thereby nobly confirming the truth of our Mr. Smith’s answer to some irreverent critics who had jested on his patronym, that it was “a name which some wise and many worthy men have borne – which though not unique, is perfectly genteel.” What Lord Ellesmere, either in his presidential or merely human capacity, thought of the pamphlet, we do not know; but Lord Palmerston (who had passed the threescore years then) is said to have declared himself convinced by it, though he is also said to have added that he cared not a jot who the author of the plays might have been provided he was an Englishman. By some of the critics poor Mr. Smith was very roughly handled, and what seems to have galled him most was an insinuation by Nathaniel Hawthorne (then at Liverpool as American Consul) that he had merely taken for his own the ideas of Miss Delia Bacon, whose book was not published till the year after Mr. Smith’s pamphlet, but of whose speculation some rumors had before that come “across the Atlantic wave.” This Mr. Smith (in his next publication, Bacon and Shakspeare; an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth, 1857) most emphatically denied. He had never heard the name of Miss Bacon till he saw it in a review of his pamphlet: he could not for a long while find what or where she had written, and when he did so the alleged insinuation seemed to him too preposterous to be worth notice. Out of courtesy to Mr. Hawthorne, however, he made his denial public; Mr. Hawthorne returned the courtesy of acceptance, and so this part of the great Baconian controversy slept in peace. In 1866 appeared in New York, a book called The Authorship of Shakspeare, the work of a Mr. Nathaniel Holmes, which so enchanted Mr. Smith that he vowed “Providence had provided exactly the champion the cause required,” and that for him it remained only “to retire to the rear of this unexpected American contingent,” and to “make himself useful in the commissariat department.” This American book had, among its other striking merits, this unique one – of being such that no man could possibly quarrel with it. “If argument,” says Mr, Smith, “is ever to outweigh preconception and prejudice, the preponderance can only be in one direction” – perhaps the only judgment ever formulated by mortal man which it would be literally impossible to traverse. In this rearward position Mr. Smith modestly abode for eighteen years; but now – “now that the triumph seems so near at hand, we cannot resist coming to the front to congratulate those that have fought the battle upon their success, and, we candidly own, to show ourselves as a veteran who has survived the campaign, and is ready to give an honest account of the stores which still remain on his hands.” This congratulation and these stores may be read and seen in another little pamphlet just published by Mr. Smith, and to be bought at Mr. Skeffington’s shop in Piccadilly.

It is in no spirit of cavil or disparagement that we overhaul those stores, but solely out of curiosity. We have read Mr. Smith’s last pamphlet, and read again his two earlier ones, with the most lively interest and amusement. Indeed, we have never for our part, been able to see the necessity for that “lyric fury” into which some of Mr. Smith’s opponents have lashed themselves. His theory has amused thousands of readers – readers of Bacon (both Francis and Delia), of Shakspeare, and of Mr. Smith; it has harmed nobody; it has added fresh lustre to the memories of two great men. Surely, then, we should do ill to be angry, and to be angry with one so courteous and good-humored as Mr. Smith would be a twofold impossibility. Moreover, we have always felt that there was a great deal to be said for the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the plays printed under the name of William Shakspeare, just as there is a great deal to be said for the converse of the theory, or for any other speculation with which the restless mind of man chooses for the moment to concern itself. After a certain lapse of years there can be no proof positive, no mathematical proof, that any man did or did not write anything. The mere fact of a work having gone for any length of time under such or such a name proves nothing; that the manuscript is confessedly in a particular man’s handwriting, or the undisputed receipt of a manuscript from a particular man, really, when one comes to consider it, proves nothing, so far as authorship is concerned. Take the excellent ballad of “Kafoozleum,” for instance. That, like Shakspeare’s plays, was known and popular before it was printed; like those, it was printed anonymously; no manuscript of it is known to exist; the authorship is unknown. A hundred years hence who will be able to prove it was not written by Lord Tennyson, let us say? One line in it runs “A sound there falls from ruined walls.” Why should not some speculative Smith a hundred years hence point to this line as proof conclusive that it must be the work of him who wrote, “The splendor falls on castle walls”? The parallel would be at least incomparably closer than any of those as yet found in the undisputed writings of Bacon and the alleged writings of Shakspeare. Let this be, however; we are not now concerned with any attempt to destroy Mr. Smith’s theory, for which, we repeat, we still feel, as we have always felt, there is very much to be said – very much to be said, of course, on both sides; the puzzle is how very little Mr. Smith, and those about him, have found to say on their side.

And, in truth, little as Mr. Smith had found to say in 1856-57 he has found still less to add now in 1884. His “stores” are still very scanty. He has, indeed, satisfied himself (he had “an intuitive idea” of it in 1856) that Shakspeare could neither read nor write, beyond scrawling most illegibly his own name (the reading he passes by), and curiously enough on the evidence, or rather hypothesis, of another Smith one William James! But, of course, as no scrap of Shakspeare’s handwriting is known to exist beyond six signatures, all tolerably like each other, this hypothesis cannot stand for very much. Yet really this is the only fresh “fact” Mr. Smith has added to his stores in all these seven-and-twenty years. He recapitulates his old “facts” and, we must add, some of his old blunders, when he says “there is no record of his having been in any way connected with literature until the year 1600,” forgetful of the mention of Shakspeare’s name as author of The Rape of Lucrece in the prelude to Willobie’s Avisa (1594), the marginal reference to the same work in Clarke’s Polimanteia (1595), and the long catalogue of the works then attributed to Shakspeare, as well as the very high praise given to him and them in Meres’s Palladis Tamia, 1598. The allusions in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit and Chettle’s Kind-Harts Dreame we put by as hypotheses merely; but how curious it is to find the champions of this theory so strangely ignorant, or careless of facts familiar, we will not say to every student of Shakspeare’s writings, because the word student in connexion with those works has come to have a rather distasteful sound in these Alexandrian days, but to every one who has ever had any curiosity about the man to whom these marvellous works are commonly attributed. Nor is this knowledge within the reach only of those who have money, leisure, or learning. Any one who is able to procure a ticket of admission to the Reading-Room of the British Museum may get it at first hand for himself; numberless books exist any one of which at the cost of a few shillings will furnish him with it at second-hand. We remember to have been much struck last year, when turning over the leaves of Mrs. Pott’s edition of the Promus, with many proofs of the same ignorance of what one may call the very alphabet of the subject. Coleridge, as we all know now blundered much in the same way in his lectures on Shakspeare; but our knowledge both of the poet and his times has very greatly increased since Coleridge lectured. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Pott cannot now soothe themselves with the thought that it is better to err with Coleridge than to shine with Mr. Halliwell-Phillips or Mr. Furnivall; they have only themselves to blame if the world declines to take seriously a theory which its champions have been at so little serious pains to examine and support.

The well-known passage in the Sonnets (Bacon’s or Shakspeare’s)

receives curious confirmation from Mr. Smith’s writings. He has studied Bacon’s works so closely and long that he has insensibly infected himself with some of that great man’s peculiarities. It is the vice, says Bacon, in the Novum Organum, of high and discursive intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances, a vice which leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. Mr. Smith quotes this saying; yet how must this vice have got possession of his intellect when he drew up that list of “Parallel passages, and peculiar phrases, from Bacon and Shakspeare,” which may be read in his Bacon and Shakspeare! Take one instance only: – In the Life of Henry VII. occurs this passage: “As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him”; in Richard II. is this line, “Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee”; and in Hamlet this, “And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Is it possible that Mr. Smith would seriously have us draw any inference from the fact that in these three passages the word “knee” occurs and in two of them the word “heart”? Really, he might as well insist that, because Mr. Swinburne has written “Cry aloud; for the old world is broken” and because Mr. Arnold has declared himself to be “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,” the author of Dolores and the author of the Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse must be one and the same man! Again, Macaulay has noticed how, contrary to general custom, the later writings of Bacon are far superior to the earlier ones in richness of illustration. It is the same with Mr. Smith. His first pamphlet, though direct and lucid enough, was singularly free from all illustration or ornament of any kind. His next contains passages of wonderful richness and imagination. Bacon, he says, is like an orange-tree, “where we may observe the bud, the blossom, and the fruit in every stage of ripeness, all exhibited in one plant at the same time.” And he goes on in a strain of splendid eloquence: – “The stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, restoring his voice with the luscious fruit, continues his harangue to the applauding multitude, little reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by its side, and was gathered at the same time, decorates the fair brow of the fainting bride in the far-off village church.” Never surely before has the familiar fruit of domestic life been so poetized since “Bon Gaultier” wrote of the subjects of the Moorish tyrant how they would fain have sympathized with his Christian prisoner: —

We cannot conclude without offering to Mr. Smith, in all humility, a little theory of our own, vague as yet and unsubstantial, but worth, we do venture to think, his consideration or the consideration of anybody who is in want of a theory to sport with. This is, that these plays, or at any rate a considerable number of them, were really and truly written by Walter Raleigh. We have not as yet had time to examine this theory very closely, or (like Mr. Smith with his) to find very much evidence in support of it. But of what we have done in that direction we freely make him a present. The following plays were all produced after the year 1603, the year when Raleigh was sent to the Tower for his alleged share in the Cobham plot: —Othello, Measure for Measure, Lear, Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Henry VIII., Taming of the Shrew. It has been allowed on Mr. Smith’s side that Bacon, amid all his variety of business, both public and private, must have been very hard put to it to find the mere time to write the plays. No man of that age could have had at that time so much leisure on his hands as Raleigh. But that is not all. In the ninth chapter of his Instructions to his Son, on the inconveniences arising from the immoderate use of wine, is a passage which might almost be described as a paraphrase of Cassio’s famous discourse on the same subject. Nor is this all. Raleigh had been in the Tower before, in 1592, on a rather delicate matter, in which Mistress Throckmorton, afterward Lady Raleigh, had a share. The injustice of his second imprisonment would naturally recall the first to his mind, equally or still more unjust as he probably thought. To the second he would hardly dare to allude; but what was more likely than that he should find a sort of melancholy pleasure in recalling the first? Now, if Mr. Smith will turn to the second scene of the first act of Measure for Measure (first acted in December 1604, and written therefore in the first year of Raleigh’s imprisonment), he will find an allusion to the unfortunate cause of his first disgrace obvious to the dullest comprehension. The apparently no less obvious allusion in Twelfth Night to Cole’s brutality at Raleigh’s trial cannot, unfortunately, stand, as we know for certain from John Manningham’s Diary that the comedy was played in the Middle Temple Hall in the previous year. But from such evidence as we have given (and, did time and space serve we could add to it) we think a very good case could be made out for Raleigh, and we commend the making of it to Mr. Smith, who seems to have plenty of time to spare on such matters. At any rate if he will not have Shakspeare for the author of these plays, he must really now begin to think of getting some other Simon Pure than Bacon, if within a quarter of a century and more he has been able to find no better warranty for his theory than that he has given us. But we must entreat him to be a little more careful of poor Raleigh, if he discard our suggestion, than he has been of poor Shakspeare, the only evidence of whose existence he has declared to be the date of his death! But perhaps he is only following Plutarch, whom Bacon praises for saying “Surely I had rather a great deal men should say there was no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say there was one Plutarch that would eat his children as soon as they were born.” —Saturday Review.

SOME SICILIAN CUSTOMS

Naturally the most important events of human life are birth, marriage, death. Hence we find among all peoples who have emerged from primitive barbarism, ceremonies and customs special to these three supreme circumstances. These ceremonies and customs are of most picturesque observance and most quaint significance in the middle term of civilization; – amongst those who are neither savages not yet blocked out into fair form, nor educated gentlefolk smoothed down to the dead level of European civilization; but who are still in that quasi-mythical and fetichistic state, when usages have a superstitious meaning beyond their social importance, and charms, signs, omens, and incantations abound as the ornamental flourishes to the endorsement of the law.