Part III

” is generally admitted to be the work of Greene, Marlowe and perhaps Peele. Furthermore, the catchwords in the lines parodied betray their author, which is a confirmatory fact. To borrow a citation from the pages of Dr. A. Grosart, “Every one who knows his Greene knows that over and over again he returns on anything of his that caught on, sometimes abridging and sometimes expanding;” and in semi-parodying his own lines, wrapt “Tyger’s heart” in several kinds of hides. It was William Kemp, the comic actor and dancer, not Shakspere, whom Greene wanted to hit. He did not consider as an author at all the “upstart crow” with his “Tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide,” who bombasted orally his own improvisions and interpolations out in blank verse.

In their great desire to discover Shakspere as the author, the words “bombast out in blank verse” are seized upon by Shakspere’s commentators with evident greediness. But these words yield nothing in support of author-craft, for bombast or bombastry, in the idiom of the time, stood for high sounding words which might have proceeded from the mouth of a buffoon, clown, jester, montebank or actor, whose profession was to amuse spectators by low antics and tricks, and whose improvisions and extemporizings were destitute of rhyme, but possessed of a musical rhythm called “blank verse.” The words “blank verse” were doubtless intended for the ear of Marlowe, the great innovator, who was thus reminded that the notorious jig-dancer and clown, William Kemp, declaimed his own improvisions and interpolations in the “swelling bombast of a bragging blank-verse,” as Nash called it, and was an absolute “Johannes Factotum in his own conceit”—that is, a person employed to do many things. Who could do more “in his own conceit” than Kemp, who spent his life in mad jigs, as he says? Who but Kemp, the chief actor in the low comedy scenes, who angered the academic play-writers by introducing “his own wit into their plays and make a merriment of them?”

Greene’s address to his fellow craftsmen does not convey plagiary, or a furbishable, imputation, nor give color to, nor the slightest circumstance for, the conjecture that Shakspere’s authorial career had been begun as the amender of other poet’s plays anterior to the putative authorship of “Venus and Adonis.” Halliwell-Phillips, the most indefatigable and reliable member of the Congress of Speculative Biographers, says that not one such play has been found revised, or amended, by Shakspere in his early career. Still in their extremity, Shakspere’s commentators give hospitality to stupid conjectures that are not reasonable inferences from concurrent facts, and construe Greene’s censure of Kemp, (inferentially) as the first literary notice of Shakspere. It shows an irrepressible desire without proof to confer authorship upon Shakspere one hundred and fifty years after his death. The Shakspere votaries cannot point to a single word, or sentence, in this celebrated address of Robert Greene which connects the contumelious name “Shake-scene” (dance-scene) with the characteristics of either the true, or the traditional, Shakspere.

The biographers of Shakspere never grow weary of charging Robert Greene with professional jealousy and envy. The charge has no argumentative value, even if granting Shakspere’s early productivity as a play-maker, or the amender of the works of other men, for Greene’s activities ran in other lines; play-making was of minor importance, a sort of by-production of his resourceful and versatile pen. The biographers of Shakspere are unfortunate in having taken on this impression, because there is _prima-facie_ evidence that Greene had forsworn writing for the stage a considerable time before the letter was written; thus he followed his friend Lodge, who in 1589 “vows to write no more of that whence shame doth grow.”

The biographers and commentators, agreeing in their asperities, charge Robert Greene with that worst of passions, envy, basing it conjecturally on the assumption of Shakspere’s proficiency as a drama-maker, notwithstanding the sincere and earnest words contained in his most pathetic letter, addressed to three friends, in which he counsels them to give up play writing, which he regarded as degrading, placing their very necessities in the power of grasping shareholding actors, and rendering it no longer a fit occupation for gentlemen. They fail to see the dying should be granted immunity from this ignoble and base passion. Our own rule of law admits as good evidence the testimony of a man who believes himself to be dying, and so the letter states, “desirous that you should live though himself be dying.”

Robert Greene’s charge against “upstart crow” stands unshaken. Henry Chettle, the hack writer, and self admitted transcriber of the letter, does not retract Greene’s statement. He denies nothing on behalf of an “upstart crow” (Kemp); for the author of “Kind Hearts Dreams” does not identify “Shake-scene” (dance-scene) with Shakspere, or Shakespeare, who was not one of those who took offense. It is expressly stated that there were two of the three fellow dramatists, addressed by Greene (Marlowe, Nash and Peele). Still we are told by Shakespearean writers that the dying genius was pained at witnessing the proficiency of another in the very activity (play-making), which he had come to regard as congruous with strolling vagabondism. He enjoined his friends to seek better masters “for it is a pittie men of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasure of such rude groomes, painted monsters, apes, burrs, peasants, puppets,” not play-makers, but actors, who had been beholden to him and his fellow craftsmen whom he addressed.

There is another aspect in which the charge of professional jealousy presents itself to the mind of the reader; those who covet that which another possesses, or envies success, popularity or fortune. To charge Greene with envy is most uncharitable by reason of his versatility. Now what was there in the possession of William Shakspere in 1592 that could have awakened in the mind of Robert Greene so base a passion as envy. The name Shakspere had no commercial value in 1592, for Shakspere of the stage is described many years after this date as merely a “man player” and “a deserving man.” Note this admission by Dr. Ingleby: “Assuredly no one during the century had any suspicion that the genius of Shakespeare was unique.” “His immediate contemporaries expressed no great admiration for either him, or his works.” There is not a particle of evidence to show that Robert Greene was envious of any writer of his time; nor had he cause to be; but the way his contemporaries and successors robbed and plundered him proves the reverse to be true.

“Nay, more, the men that so eclipst his fame, Purloynde his plumes; can they deny the same?”

The fact is, Shakspere passed through and out of life without having attained the distinction, or celebrity, won by Greene in his brief literary career of but nine short years. The more truthful of Shakspere’s biographers concede that the subject of their memoirs was not, in his day, highly regarded, and that his obscurity in 1592 is obvious. There was not the least danger of the author of “Hamlet” “driving to penury” the dean of English novelists, Robert Greene, who was supreme in prose romance, a species of literature, which appealed to the better class of the reading public. Rival-hating envy! Robert Greene cannot be brought within the scope of such a charge, for in 1592, he was not striving to obtain the same object which play writers were pursuing.

The fame of Robert Greene during his lifetime eclipsed that of his contemporaries. “He was in fact the popular author of the day. His contemporaries applauded the facility with which he turned his talents to account.” “In a night and a day,” says Nash, “would he have yearked up a pamphlet as well as in seven years, and glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit.” Even Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” according to Dryden, had no such assurance in his day, if we may judge from his own account of his literary life, which shows that he had to struggle for a subsistence, as no printer was found glad, or felt himself blest, to pay him dear for the cream, much less the very “dregs of his wit.” He told Drummond that the half of his comedies were not in print, and that he had cleared but 200 pounds by all his labor for the public theatre. It has been said by one: “In the breadth of his dramatic quality, his range over every kind of poetic excellence, Jonson was excelled by Shakespeare alone.” (p. 437, “A Short History of the English People.”) When not subsidized by the court he was driven by want to write for the London theatres; he lived in a hovel in an alley, where he took service with the notorious play broker. To such as he, reference is made by Henslow, who in his diary records “the grinding toil and the starvation wages of his hungry and drudging bondsmen,” who were struggling for the meanest necessities of life. This Titan of a giant brood of playwrights, in the days of his declension wrote mendicant epistles for bread, and, doubtless, in his extremity recalled Robert Greene, the admonisher of three brother poets “that spend their wits in making plaies.” “Base minded men, all three of you! if by my miseries ye be not warned, for unto none of you, like me, sought those burrs to cleave, those puppits, I mean that speak from our mouths those antics garnisht in our colors. Is it not strange that I, to whom they all have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be both at once of them forsaken?... O that I might intreate your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.”

It was one of this breed of puppets, we are told, who awakened incarnate envy in the breast of Robert Greene, and engendered rivalship against William Shakspere, whose votaries, in their dreams of fancy, see him revising the dramatic writings of Robert Greene, the most resourceful, versatile, tireless and prolific of literary men. He was a writer of greatest discernment from the viewpoint of the people of his time, “for he possessed the ability to write in any vein that would sell.” He only, of all the writers of his time, gave promise of being able to gain a competence by the pen alone, a thing which no writer did, or could do, in that day, by writing for the stage alone. Hon. Cushman K. Davis in “The Law in Shakespeare” says, “He (Shakspere) is the first English author who made a fortune with his pen.” In the absence of credible evidence, Mr. Davis assumes that the young man who came up from Stratford was the author of the plays. The senator does not seem aware of the fact that Shakspere of Stratford was a shareholding actor, receiving a share in the theatre, or its profits, in 1599; a partner in one or more of the chief companies; a play broker who purchased and mounted the plays of other men; and that he, like Burbage, Henslowe and Alleyn, speculated in real estate. He was shrewd in money matters and became very wealthy, but not by writing plays. Suppose that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon had authored all the plays associated with his name, that alone would not have made him wealthy. The price of a play varied from four to ten pounds, and all Shakspere’s labors for the public theatre would have brought no more than five hundred pounds. The diary of Philip Henslowe makes it clear that up to the year 1600 the highest price he ever paid was six pounds. The Shakespeare plays were not exceptionally popular in that day, not being then as now, “the talk of the town.” Not one of them equalled in popularity Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” or Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.”

Shakespeare was soon superseded by Fletcher in popular regard. Only one of the Shakespeare tragedies, one historical play, and eight comedies were presented at the Court of James First, who reigned twenty-two years. Plays, written by such hack writers as Dearborn, or Chettle, were quite as acceptable to princes.

Robert Greene’s romances were “a bower of delight,” a kind of writing held in high favor by all classes. Sir Thomas Overbury describes his chambermaid as reading Greene’s works over and over again. It is a pleasure to see in the elder time Greene’s writings in hands so full of household cares, since he labored to make young lives happy. Robert Greene’s works express every variation in the changing conditions of life. The poetry of his pastoral landscapes are vivid word pictures of English sylvan scenes. The western sky on amorous autumn days is mantled with sheets of burnished gold. The soft and gentle zephyr blows over castled crag and fairy glen fragrant with the breath of flowers.

In the manuals of our literature great prominence is given to the fact that Greene led a dissolute, or irregular, life, as if the debauchment of the author was transmitted by his writings. There are no indecencies in his works to attest the passage of a debauchee. Like many persons born to, and nurtured by, religious parents, Greene doubtless exaggerated his own vices. He was bad, but not altogether bad. It may truly be said of him that, in regard to all that pertains to penitence and self abasement, he spares not himself, but like John Bunyan, he was given to selfupbraiding. He (Bunyan) declares that it is true that he let loose the reins on the neck of his lust; that he delighted in all transgressions against the divine law; and that he was the ring leader of the youth of Elstow in all vice. But, when those who wished him ill, accused him of licentious amours, he called God and the angels to attest his purity. No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with having ever made any improper advances to her. Blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking seem to have been Bunyan’s only transgression after all. In Robert Greene’s writings, we have the reverse of “Herrick’s shameful pleading that if his verse was impure, his life was chaste.” Unlike Herrick, Greene did not minister to the unchaste appetite of readers for tainted literature, either in his day, or in the after time. Powerless to condemn Greene’s writings, Shakspere’s votaries would desecrate his ashes.

Deplore as we must his dissolute living, it was of short duration, for he went from earth at the age of two and thirty, and the evil effects have been lost in Time’s abatements. His associates, doubtless were as dissolute as he himself. Nash wrote: “With any notorious crime I never knew him tainted, and he inherited more virtues than vices.” The reader, at any rate, will give but little credence to the accusations of such a hyena-dog as Gabriel Harvey. Robert Greene was not “lip-holy,” nor heart-hollow, for, in regard to his wife and their separation, “he took to himself all blame, breathed never a word against her, and did not squander all of his earnings in dissipation, but sent part of his income to the good woman, the wife of his youth, and addressed to her in loving trust the last letter he wrote.” Gabriel Harvey, drenched in hate, could not rob the “Sweet-wife letter of its pathos.”

In all the galleries of noble women, Greene’s heroines deserve a foremost place, for all the gracious types of womanhood belonged to Greene, before they became Shakespeare’s. “Robert Greene is the first of our play-writers to represent upon the public stage the purity and sweetness of wife and maiden.” Unselfish love and maternity are sketched with feminine delicacy and minuteness of touch in all the tenderness of its purity. His writings have assuaged the sorrow of the self-sacrificing mother, who is always a queen uncrowned, long suffering and faithful. Robert Green “is always on the side of the angels.” When loud mouthed detraction calls him badhearted, we should not forget that this confessedly dissolute man could, and did, keep inviolate the purity of his imagination; few have left a wealthier legacy in feminine models of moral and physical beauty. What is most characteristic in the pages of Greene is the absence of the indecencies which attest the passage of the author of “Lear,” “the damnable scenes which raised the anger of Swinburne and which Coleridge attempted in vain to palliate.”

Little is known of Greene’s life; and into the little we do know, his malignant enemy, Gabriel Harvey, has attempted to inject a deadly virus. The inaccurate figurative expressions in his reputed posthumously printed works (an alleged description of his manner of life) cannot be interpreted literally, “but may be resolved in a large measure into morbid self-upbraidings like the confession made by the revival convert who sees and paints his past in its very darkest colors.” But why should the modern reader linger over the irregularities of dissolute-living authors like Greene and Poe, whose writings are exceptionally clean. Remember Robert Burns’ noble words, “What done we partly may compute but know not what resisted.” The commentators and pharisaic critics, who have written concerning Greene, are mere computists of the poet’s vices; ministers of hate, who burlesque the poet’s soul stiffening with despair, and display their ghoulish instincts “in travestying so pathetic and tragical a deathbed as Greene’s.” Students of Elizabethan literature know that Robert Greene resisted the temptation to write in the best paying vein of the age, that of ministering to the unchaste appetites of readers for ribaldries. “To his undying honor Robert Greene, equally with James Thompson, left scarcely a line, that, dying, he need have wished to blot out.”

There is no record extant of his living likeness. Chettle gives this pleasant description of his personal appearance, “With him was the fifth, a man of indifferent years; of face, amiable; of body, well proportioned; his attire after the habit of scholar-like gentleman, only his hair was somewhat long, whom I supposed to be Robert Greene, Master of Arts.” Nash notices his tawny beard, “a jolly long red peake like the spire of a steeple which he cherished continually without cutting, whereat a man might hang a jewel, it was so sharp and pendant.” Harvey, who had never seen Greene, says that he wore such long hair as was only worn by thieves and cutthroats, and taunts Nash with wearing the same “unseemly superfluity.” The habit of wearing the hair long is not unusual with poets. John Milton “cherished the same superfluity” as does also Joaquin Miller.

Robert Greene expired on the third of September, 1592. When the dead genius was in his grave, Harvey gloated and leered with hellish glee, and wrote of Greene’s “most woeful and rascal estate, how the wretched fellow or, shall I say, the prince of beggars, laid all to gage fore some few shillings and was attended by lice.” This is one of Harvey’s malignant, vitriolic, discharges in his attempt to spatter the memory and deface the monument of the dead. “Achilles tortured the dead body of Hector, and, as Antonious and his wife, Fulva, tormented the lifeless corpse of Cicero, so Gabriel Harvey hath showed the same inhumanities to Greene that lies low in his grave.” The testimony of Gabriel Harvey, whose malignant attacks on the memory of Greene by monstrously exaggerated statement, is vitiated by his own statement that “he was cheated out of an action for libel against Greene by his death.”

Harvey was vulgarly ostentatious, courting notoriety by the gorgeousness of his apparel; currying favor with the great, and aping Venetian gentility after his return from Italy. He was a dabbler in astrology, a prognosticator of earthquakes, and constructor of prophetic almanacs. The failure of his predictions subjected him to much bitter ridicule. His inordinate vanity is best shown by his publication of everything spoken or written in commendation of himself, by his obsequious friends and flatterers, who snickered with the public generally, as he was an object of ridicule, the butt on which to crack their jokes.

In one of those fanciful studies in Elizabethan literature, which we now hold in our hand, we may read, in a work called “A Snip for an Upstart Courtier or A Quaint Dispute Between Velvet-breeches and Cloth-breeches,” that Greene has very vulgarly libeled Harvey’s ancestry; but, when we turn to Greene’s book we learn that the vulgarity consists in calling Gabriel Harvey’s father a ropemaker. Only a snob would regard any honest employment as a degradation, and furthermore, the passage does not point contumeliously and spitefully at Gabriel Harvey’s father, for the reference is very slight. “How is he (Gabriel’s father) abused?” writes Nash, “Instead of his name he is called by the craft he gets his living with.” Still the lines which so mortally offended Gabriel were suppressed by Greene. Notwithstanding this, those biographers and critics whose sole object is to blacken the poet’s memory, conceal from the reader the fact of the detachment of all reference to a rope-maker. Harvey was extremely anxious to push himself among the aristocracy in order to conceal his humble antecedents.

With all his faults, there was nothing of this weakness or snobbishness in Robert Greene, who had himself sprung from the common people, though born to good condition. Robert Burton, a contemporary, writing in “The Spacious Time of the Great Elizabeth” says that idleness was the mark of the nobility, and to earn money in any kind of trade was despicable. Gabriel Harvey flung in Greene’s face the fact that he made a living by his pen. Had young Greene lived a longer life, with all its wealth of bud and bloom, we should now have in fruition a luxuriance of imagination and versatility of diction possessed by few. With longer life he would doubtless “have gained mastery of himself, when he would have gone forward on the path of moral regeneration;” for there was in the poet’s strivings, during the last few years of his life, the promise and prophecy of a glorious future. His soul enlarged, he battled for the commonweal; his heart was with the lowly and his voice was for the right when freedom’s friends were few.

In his play “The Pinner of Wakefield,” first printed in 1599, Robert Greene makes a hero, and a very strenuous one, of a mere pound-keeper who proudly refuses knighthood at the hands of the king. In the sketch given by Professor J. M. Brown we read, “In the first scene of the play when Sir Nicolas Mannering appears in Wakefield with his commission from the rebel, Earl of Kendal, and demands victuals for the rebel army, the stalwart pound-keeper steps forward, makes the knight eat his words and then his seal! ‘What! are you in choler? I will give you pills to cool your stomach. Seest thou these seals? Now by my father’s soul, which was a yeoman’s when he was alive, eat them or eat my dagger’s point, proud squire!’ The Earl of Kendal and other noblemen next appear in disguise and send their horses into the Pinner’s corn to brave him. The pound-keeper approaches and after altercation strikes the Earl. Lord Bondfield says, ‘Villain, what hast thou done? Thou hast struck an Earl.’ Pinner answers, ‘Why, what care I? A poor man that is true is better than an earl if he be false’.” A yeoman boxing or cuffing the ear of an earl! This has all the breezy freshness of American democracy.

“How different from this is Shakespeare’s conception of the place of the working-man in society. In King Lear, a good servant protests against the cruelty of Regan and Cornwall toward Gloucester, and is killed for his courage.” “Give me my sword,” cries Regan, “a peasant stand up thus!” The voice of the yeoman is often heard in Greene’s drama, not as buffoon and lackey, as in Shakespeare, but as freeman whose voice is echoed at Naseby and Marston’s gory fields of glory, where the sturdy yeomanry of England strove to do and to dare for the eternal right—soldiers who never cowered from “sheen of spear,” nor blanched at flashing steel. With Greene rank is never the measure of merit as with Shakespeare. To peer and yeoman alike, he gave equal hospitality; for Robin Greene, as his friends called him, was as friendly to the poor man’s rags as to the purple Robe of King. Greene in his popular sympathies is thoroughly with the working classes, the common people, of whom Lincoln says, “God loves most, otherwise he would not have made so many of them.” His heroes and heroines are taken, many of them, from humble life. In his Pinner of Wakefield there is a very clear discernment of democratic principle in the struggle against prerogative. Half of those plays of Greene’s which we still possess, are devoted to the representation of the life of the common people which gave lineage to Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and John Bunyan. If these are any guide to his character, his is one distinguished both by his amicable and by his amiable qualities.

We have in the “Coney-catching series” Greene’s exposure of the practice of sharpers and knaves, who were fleecing the country people who came to London. The author of these tracts shows great courage in his effort to abate fool-catching. Greene’s life was threatened, and it required the utmost exertion of his friends to prevent his assassination. The Coney-catching knaves, who felt the halter being drawn about their necks, threatened to cut off his hand if he would not desist. Greene, notwithstanding these threats, would not be swerved from his noble aim, but met them like a true Roman, single-handed and alone, while his literary enemies took advantage of this opportunity to blacken his good name. “Greene made these revelations for the good of the commonwealth, and displayed great courage in facing all risks in so doing. No books are more out-and-out sincere.”

Greene’s account of the repentance and reformation of a fallen woman, told in a way that discloses the poet’s kindness of heart and fullness of humanitarian spirit, reveals his better self. “He assured his readers, in the words of the woman herself, that her first false step gradually led her on to complete ruin, so heavy-burdened with grief and shame that death seemed to her a benefaction, and the grave the only place for perfect rest.” Not a few there may have been, who, on reading Greene’s account of the reformation and redemption of this unfortunate woman, were started on the path of regeneration, while the dim-eyed critic can see nothing but the blurred reputation of the poet. But who shall estimate Robert Greene’s influence on individual happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better by a writer who held out a kind and friendly hand, and had a heart as true behind it? His statue would crown Trafalgar’s towering shaft more worthily than the statue of England’s greatest naval hero does; for there is more true honor and merit in the man who wrote purely to bring back from evil courses to a state of moral rectitude, than in a monument for the victory over many enemies.

Greene’s non-dramatic works are the largest contribution left by any Elizabethan writer to the novel literature of the day. “He was at once the most versatile and the most laborious of literary men.” Famous, witty, and brilliant, he was one of the founders of English fiction, and is conceded to be the author of half a dozen plays for the theatre. In them we have the mere “flotsam and jetsam” of his prolific pen. What would we not give for all the plays of Robert Greene from whom his contemporaries and successors purloyned plumes! According to Ben Jonson, it was as safe to pillage from Greene in his day, as it is to persecute his reputation in ours. He was a graduate of both universities, was a man of genius, but did not live to do his talents full justice. A born story teller, like Sir Walter Scott, he could do good work easily and quickly.

We glean the following from the pages of “The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare,” by J. J. Jusserand, “Greene’s prose tale, ‘Pandosto, the Triumph of Time,’ had an extraordinary success, while Shakspere’s drama ‘Winter’s Tale’ founded on Greene’s Pandosto was not printed, either in authentic or pirated shape, before the appearance of the 1623 folio, while Greene’s prose story was published in 1588 and was renamed half a century later, ‘The History of Dorostus and Fawnia.’ So popular was it that it was printed again and again. We know of at least seventeen editions, and in all likelihood there were more throughout the seventeenth century, and even under one shape or another throughout the eighteenth. It was printed as a chap-book during this last period and in this costume began a new life. It was turned into verse in 1672, but the highest and most extraordinary compliment of Greene’s performance was its translation into French, not only once but twice. The first time was at a moment when the English language and literature were practically unknown and as good as non-existent to French readers. In fact every thing from Greene’s pen sold. All of his writings enjoyed great popularity in their day, and, after the lapse of three centuries, have been deemed worthy of publication, insuring the rehabilitation of Greene’s splendid genius.”

We are content to believe that almost all of the so-called posthumous writings of Robert Greene are spurious, and that but few genuine chips were found in the literary work-shop of the poet after his death. We accept the very striking and impressive address to his brother play-wrights, the after-words to a “Groats Worth of Wit.” We also may shyly accept the sweet wife letter as the authentic product of the poet’s mind, heart and hand. Of this letter, there are two versions, neither of which are very trustworthy, as both are from posthumed pamphlets. One, which we believe to be a forgery, is found in “The Repentance.” The other is found in a pamphlet written by his malignant enemy, Harvey, which contains an account of the poet’s last illness and death. Nash writes about Harvey, “From the lousy circumstance of his poverty before his death and sending that miserable writt to his wife, it cannot be but thou lyest, learned Gabriel.” We would not set down as auto-biographical the posthumous pamphlets, even though of unquestioned authenticity, for in the repentance Greene is made to say, “I need not make long discourse of my parents who for their gravitie and honest life are well known and esteemed among their neighbors, namely in the citie of Norwich where I was bred and borne;” and then he is made to contradict all this in “Groats Worth of Wit,” where the father is called Gorinius, a despicable miser. “Greene is not known to have had a brother to be the victim of his cozenage.”

As “there is a soul of truth in things erroneous,” there may be a soul of truth in the following letter contained in “The Repentance”:

“Sweet wife, if ever there was any good will or friendship between thee and me, see this bearer (my host) satisfied of his debt. I owe him tenne pounds and but for him I had perished in the streetes. Forget and forgive my wrongs done unto thee and Almighty God have mercie on my soule. Farewell till we meet in heaven for on earth thou shalt never see me more.

“This 2nd day of Sept., 1592.

“Written by thy dying husband,

“ROBERT GREENE.”

The reader will notice the statement in the posthumed letter that the poet had contracted a debt to the sum of ten pounds, equal to $400 present money, but there is nothing whatever about leaving many papers in sundry bookseller’s hands which Chettle averred in the address “To the Gentlemen Readers Kind Hearts Dreame.” If this were a fact, the bookseller doubtless would have been called upon; “see this bearer (my host) satisfied of his debt,” and sweet wife would not have bourne the burden while booksellers felt themselves blest to pay dear for the very dregs of her husband’s wit.

Those writers who express no doubt of the authenticity of the posthumed pamphlets, leave their readers to set down as auto-biographical whatever portions of those pieces he may think proper. At the same time the trend of impulse is given the reader by the critics that he may not fail to read the story of the poet’s life out of characters devoid of all faith in honesty and in virtue, while the author (Greene) is anxious evidently to point a moral by them and reprove vice. These forged pamphlets and so-called auto-biographical pamphlets make Greene accuse himself of crimes which he surely did not commit, such as the crime of theft and murder. He says, “I exceeded all others in these kinds of sinnes,” and he is represented as the most atrocious villain that ever walked the earth. There is not an atom of evidence adduced to show Francisco in “Never Too Late” was intended by the author for a picture of himself, and we do not believe that Greene wrote the pamphlet in which Roberto, in “Groats Worth of Wit” is one of the despicable characters.

Very little is known with any degree of certainty concerning the personal life of Robert Greene, and very little, if anything, in regard to his family or ancestry, although much prominence is given by imaginary writers to the history of his person in the manuals of our literature. These writers attach an auto-biographical reality to their dreams of fancy. They take advantage of Greene’s unbounded sincerity and his own too candid confession in the address to the play-writers, and of his irrepressible desire to sermonize, whether in plays or pamphlets, with all the fervor of a devout Methodist having a license to exhort. The closest analogy to Greene’s position, in fact, is that of the revival preacher—as Prof. Storojenko puts it—“who, to make the picture of the present as telling as possible, sees and paints his past in its very blackest colors. This self-flagellation is strongly connected with a really attractive feature of Greene’s character; we mean his sincerity, a boundless sincerity which never allowed him to spare himself. Robert Greene was incapable of posing and pretending to be what he was not. This is why we may fearlessly believe him when he speaks of the anguish of his soul and the sincerity of his repentance. A man whose deflection from the path of virtue cost him so much moral suffering cannot, of course, be measured by the same standard as the man who acts basely, remains at peace with himself and defends his faults by all kinds of sophistry. Speaking further of his literary labors, he never dealt in personalities in exposing some of the crying nuisances of London and is perfectly silent as to the moral change in his own character, which was the fruit of his dealing with them. In a word, he conceals all that might, in his opinion, modify the sentence that he pronounces on his own life for the edification of others.”

IV

There is a commendative piece of writing which should be read in connection with Greene’s letter to “divers play-makers.” We refer to the preface to “Kind Hearts Dreams,” written by Henry Chettle, which was registered December 8, 1592. Chettle says, “About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry book-seller’s hands, among others, his ‘Groats Worth of Wit’ in which a letter written to diverse play-makers is offensively by one or two of them taken.” Chettle’s statement about many papers in sundry book-sellers hands may be discredited because of the poet’s urgent necessities, and the strong desire on the part of book-sellers to publish Greene’s writings. Of this we may be sure, that the letter was not placed in book-sellers hands by Greene or for him. He would not have called his friends to repentance in that way, for it would have given publicity to the defects in the lives of his friends as well as his own.

The letter evidences the fact of its having been written as a private letter to three of the poet’s friends (Marlowe, Nash and Peele). If sent, it did not reach them, but was surreptitiously procured, doubtless, by some hack-writer, (inferentially, Henry Chettle, who transcribed it.) Gabriel Harvey may have been accessory to its procurement, as his ghoulish instinct led him to visit the poor shoemaker’s house where Greene died, on the day following the poet’s funeral in search of matter foul and defamatory, and with ink of slander to blacken the poet’s memory. This snobbish ape of gentility, Gabriel Harvey, hated Greene because he called his father by “the craft he gets his living with.” However, when Greene learned that Harvey was ashamed of his father’s humble employment, that of ropemaker, he straightway canceled the offensive allusion, but Harvey still continued to manifest the same hateful malignity and venomous spite. The letter is a fine character study of the three poets addressed. Greene drew out the true feature of every distinguishing mark or trait, both mental and moral, of these, his fellow-craftsmen, who, though he did not name them, are asserted to be Marlowe, Nash and Peele. Greene characterized them individually, and twice he collectively admonished them thus, “Base minded men all three of you, if by my miseries ye be not warned,” and, in the concluding part of the letter, “But now return I again to you three, knowing my miseries is to you no news and let me heartily entreat you to be warned by my harmes.”

All of Shakspere’s biographers and commentators aver that Shakspere was not one of the three persons addressed. How then could Chettle’s words bear witness to his (Shakspere’s) civil demeanor or factitious grace in writing. Mr. Fleay stated many years ago (1886) that there was an entire misconception of Chettle’s language that Shakspere was not one of those who took offense. They are expressly stated to have been two of the three authors addressed by Greene. The recent Shakespearean writers have evidently mistaken Chettle’s placation of Nash or Peele, or either of the three play-makers addressed by Greene, it does not matter which, for an apology to Shakspere, who was not the object of Greene’s satire or Chettle’s placation for were not Nash, Marlowe and Peele each “excellent in the quality he professes?” Had they not lived in an age of compliment they would have merited these complimental phrases of Henry Chettle? For their names were in the trump of fame.

Christopher Marlowe, the first great English poet, was the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse. He is, by general consent, identified with the first person addressed by Greene, “With thee will I first begin, thou famous gracer of tragedians, who hath said in his heart there is no God. Why should thy excellent wit, His gift, be so blinded that thou should give no glory to the giver?” The second person referred to is identifiable with Thomas Nash, “With thee I join, young juvenall, that byting satyrist,” though not with equal accord, as the first with Marlowe, as some few persons prefer to name Thomas Lodge. This predilection for Lodge is based on their having been co-authors in the making of a play (“That lastlie with me together writ a comedie”). This fact, however, signifies very little, for it is generally conceded that Marlowe, Nash, Peele, Lodge and Greene mobilized their literary activities in the production of not a few of the earlier plays called Shakspere’s.

We are convinced that Lodge was not the person addressed by Greene as young juvenall. He was absent from England at the date of Greene’s letter, having left in 1591 and did not return till 1593. Moreover, he had declared his intention long before to write no more for the theatre. In 1589 he vowed “to write no more of that whence shame doth grow.” At Christmas time in 1592 he was in the Straits of Magellan. Born in 1550, Lodge led a virtuous and quiet life. He was seventeen years older than Nash, and four years older than Greene, who would not, in addressing one four years his senior, have used these words, “Sweet boy might I advise thee.” The youthfulness of Nash fits well. He was boyish in appearance. Born in Nov., 1567, he was seven years younger than Greene, and was the youngest member of their fellowship. The mild reproof “for his too much liberty of speech” contained in the letter, justifies the belief that Thomas Nash was referred to as “young juvenall, that byting satyrist, who had vexed scholars with bitter lines.”

The equal unanimity and general consent which identifies the first with Marlowe, identifies the third and last person, who had been co-worker in drama making of the same fellowship, with George Peele, “and thou no less deserving than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing inferior” driven (as myself) to “extreame shifts, a little have I to say to thee.” Chettle could, however, have bourne witness to Peele “his civil demeanor and factitious grace in writing.” Peele held the situation of city poet and conductor of pageants for the court. His first pageant bears the date of 1585, his earliest known play, “The Arraignment of Paris” was acted before 1584. “Peele was the object of patronage of noblemen for addressing literary tributes for payment. The Earl of Northumberland seems to have presented him with a fee of three pounds. In May, 1591, when Queen Elizabeth visited Lord Burleigh’s seat of Theabald, Peele was employed to compose certain speeches addressed to the queen, which deftly excused the absence of the master of the house, by describing in blank verse in his ‘Polyphymnic,’ the honorable triumph at tilt. Her majesty was received by the Right Honorable the Earl of Cumberland.” In January, 1595, George Peele, Master of Arts, presented his “Tale of Troy” to the great Lord Treasurer through a simple messenger, his eldest daughter, “necessities servant.” Peele was a practised rhetorician, who embellished his writings with elegantly adorned sentences and choice fancies. He was a man of polished intellect and social gifts, and possessed of a very winsome personality. “His soft, caressing woman voice” low, sweet and soothing, may have had a considerable effect upon Chettle, and could not have been unduly honored by Chettle’s apology in witnessing “his civil demeanor and factitious grace in writing.”

As Henry Chettle had been brought into some discredit by the publication of Greene’s celebrated letter, and his admission that he re-wrote it, we know that the letter must have been surreptitiously procured as evidenced by its contents. The letter is as authentic, doubtless, as any garbled or mutilated document may be; but Chettle’s foolish statement contained in his preface to “Kind Hearts Dreams” has awakened the suspicion, in regard to the authorship of “Groats Worth of Wit,” that, while the letter (or as much as Chettle chose to have published) is genuine, “I put something out,” the pamphlet “Groats Worth of Wit” is spurious, and evidently not the work of Robert Greene. Who can be content to believe Chettle’s statement that Greene placed this criminating letter in the hands of printers, or that it was left in their hands by others at his request? A private letter, written to three friends, who have been co-workers in drama-making, calling them to repentance, charging one (Marlowe) with diabolical atheism! This was a very serious charge in those times, when persons were burnt at the stake for professing their unbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity.

Chettle was the first to make current the charge of atheism against Marlowe, the one of them that took offense, and whose acquaintance he (Chettle) did not seek. Chettle reverenced Marlowe’s learning, and would have his readers believe that he did greatly mitigate Greene’s charge, but the contents of the letter as transcribed by Chettle and printed by the bookmakers, discredit Chettle’s statement, as the charge of diabolical atheism was not struck out, and was, if proven, punishable by death.

There is no evidence adduced to show that Marlowe was indignant because of Greene’s admonition, contained in a private letter written to three play-makers of his own fellowship, but resented the public charge of atheism, for which he, Chettle, as accessory and transcriber, was chiefly responsible in making public. We know that Marlowe was in retreat at the time of his death at Deptford, for in May, 1593, following the publication of Greene’s letter printed at the end of the pamphlet, “Groats Worth of Wit,” the Privy Council issued a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest. A copy of Marlowe’s blasphemies, so called, was sent to Her Highness, and endorsed by one Richard Bame, who was soon after hanged at Tyburn for some loathsome crime. But a few days later, before Marlowe’s apprehension, they wrote in the parish-book at Deptford on June 1st “Christopher Marlowe slain by Francis Archer.” At the age of thirty, he, “the first and greatest inheritor of unfulfilled renown,” went where “Orpheus and where Homer are.”

The loss to English letters in Marlowe’s untimely death cannot be measured, nevertheless, England of that day was spared the infamy of his execution. However, the zealots of those days found a subject, in Francis Kett, a fellow of Marlowe’s college, who was burnt in Norwich in 1589 for heresy. Unlike Marlowe, he was a pious, God-fearing man who fell a victim to the strenuousity with which he maintained his religious convictions. Another subject was found in the person of Bartholomew Leggett, who was burnt at the stake for stating his confession of faith, which was identical with the religious belief of Thomas Jefferson and President William H. Taft. The times were thirsty for the blood of daring spirits. The shores of the British Isles were strewn with the wreckage of the great Armada. In Germany, Kepler (he of the three laws) was struggling to save his poor old mother from being burnt at the stake for a witch. In Italy, they burnt Bruno at the stake while Galileo played recanter.

That Marlowe was one of the play-makers who felt incensed at the publication of Greene’s letter admits of no doubt. He most likely would have resented the public charge of atheism. “With neither of them that take offense was I acquainted (writes Chettle) and with one of them (Marlowe) I care not if I never be.” In such blood bespattered times, Chettle could and did write “for the first (Marlowe) whose learning I reverence, and at the perusing of Greene’s book (letter) struck out what in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ, or had it been true yet to publish it was intolerable.” Chettle’s conscience must have been a little seared, for he omitted to strike out the only statement of fact contained in the letter, which could have imperiled the life of Marlowe! The letter evidences the fact that all of that portion referring to Marlowe was not garbled, and that there was not any intolerable something struck out, but instead, as transcriber for the pirate publisher, he retained the fulminating passage, “had said in his heart there is no God.” Notwithstanding Chettle’s statement, we are of the opinion that the passage about Marlowe was printed in its integrity.

Chettle’s having failed to omit the charge of diabolical atheism, reveals the strong personal antipathy he had for Marlowe. Few there are who set up Marlowe as claimant for Chettle’s apology, and fewer still, who would not regard him worthy of the compliment, “factitious grace in writing,” and whose acquaintance Chettle did not seek, but whose fascinating personality and exquisite feeling for poetry was the admiration of Drayton and Chapman, who were among the noblest, as well as the best loved, of their time. George Chapman was among the few men whom Ben Jonson said he loved. Anthony Wood described him as “a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate qualities.” Chapman sought conference with the soul of Marlowe:

“Of his free soul whose living subject stood Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”

Henry Chettie’s act of placation is offered to one of two of the three play-makers addressed, and not to the actor referred to, who was not one of those addressed; therefore, “upstart crow” could not have been the recipient of Chettle’s apology, or placation, in whose behalf (“upstart crow”) Chettle retracts nothing. The following reference is to one of the offended playmakers pointed at in Greene’s address, whom Chettle wishes to placate, “The other whome at that time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had—that I did not I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault because myself have seen his demeanor no less civil excellent in the qualities he professes; besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty and his factitious grace in writing that approves his art.” With the votaries of Shakspere, however, these words of Chettle chime with their dreams of fancy; for there is a pre-inclination and a predetermination to read Shakspere into them, as if the words of Greene and Chettle were not accessible to all inquirers—words that can be made to comprehend only one of the two playmakers that take offense, who must be one of the three (Marlowe, Nash and Peele) admonished by Greene, and who were of his fellowship. The reader, after studying Elizabethan literature and history, is content to believe that the least celebrated of the three playmakers pointed at in Greene’s address (Marlowe, Nash and Peele), stood high enough in the scale of literary merit in 1592 to be the recipient of Chettle’s praise.

The word “quality,” in “excellent in the quality he professes,” is by the fantastically inclined, made to yield a convenient connotation, but in the ordinary and contextural meaning of the word, may embrace all that makes or helps to make any person such as he is. Are these words of Chettle written in 1592 when the theatre was lying under a social ban, and the actor was still a social outcast, identifiable with a vagabond at law, or with Thomas Nash, who took his bachelor’s degree at Cambridge in 1585? “In the autumn of 1592, Nash was the guest of Archbishop Whitgift at Crogdon, whither the household had retired for fear of the plague, and, as the official antagonist of Martin Marprelate was constrained to keep up such a character as would enable divers of worship to report his uprightness of dealing,” he certainly was entitled to commendation for his “factitious grace in writing.” The appropriation of the complimentary remarks of Chettle on Nash, or any one of the three playmakers addressed, to Shakspere, who was not one of those addressed, and therefore, could not have been the recipient of Chettle’s apology, so called, is one of the fancies in which critics of the highest reputation have indulged. There is nothing equal to this in all the annals of literature, unless it be “Cicero’s famous letter to Lucretius, in which he asks the historian to lie a little in his favor in recording the events of his consulship, for the sake of making him a greater man.”

Chettle lost no time in transcribing the posthumous letter. Doubts as to “Groats Worth of Wit” were entertained at the time of publication. Some suspected Nash to have had a hand in the authorship, others accused Chettle. Nash did take offense at the report that it was his. Its publication caused much excitement and the rumor went abroad that the pamphlet was a forgery. “Other news I am advised of,” writes Nash, in an epistle prefixed to the second edition of “Pierce-penniless,” “that a scald, trivial, lying pamphlet called ‘Greene’s Groats Worth of Wit’ is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soul, but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were any way privy to the writing or printing of it.” We regard these words confirmatory of the fact that “Groats Worth of Wit” is not a work of unquestioned authenticity, and, furthermore, that Nash did not believe it the work of Robert Greene. _Prima facie_, it is spurious, for Nash spoke in high praise of Greene’s writings. He neither would, nor could, have used the words “scald, trivial, lying” of a genuine work of Robert Greene, whose writings were held in high favor by all classes. Nash could not have taken offense at the allusion of Greene, which was rather complimental, though personal, and not intended for publication; but it did, however, contain some slight mixture of censure,—“Sweet boy, might I advise thee, get not many enimies by bitter words. Blame not scholars vexed with sharp lines if they reprove thy too much liberty of reproof.” Nash was very angry, but only because Greene’s letter was given to the public by Chettle, who felt constrained to placate “that byting satyrist,” whose raillery he had reason to fear, by bearing witness to “his civil demeanor and factitious grace in writing.”

Votaries of Shakspere may take their choice of one of the three addressed. Which one shall be named? What matter it to them, with Shakspere barred, whether Nash, Peele or Marlowe be named, the least of whom was worthy of Chettle’s commendation?

There is not a crumb of evidence adduced for Shakspere as a putative author of plays until 1598, and then only in the variable and shadowy Elizabethan title page. Chettle terms Greene “the only comedian of a vulgar writer,” meaning he was a writer in the vernacular tongue or common language, a fact which proves Shakspere’s nihility as playmaker in 1592. Now the fact of the matter is that this “lying pamphlet,” so called by Nash, was not authored by Greene. It should be called, “Chettle’s Groats Worth of Wit,” for the pamphlet proper is from his pen or some other hack writer’s. The letter alone was authored by Greene, addressed as a private letter to three fellow poets, and surreptitiously procured for Chettle and transcribed by him. Chettle writes, “I had only in the copy this share—it was ill written—licensed it must be, ere it could be printed, which could never be if it might not be read. To be brief I writ it over and as nearly as I could follow the copy. Only, in that letter I put something out, but in the whole book, not a word in, for I protest it was all Greene’s, not mine, nor Master Nash’s, as some unjustly have affirmed.”

The letter and pamphlet both in Greene’s handwriting would have been the best possible evidence of the genuineness of its contents and legibility. Chettle’s not offering in evidence the original letter is strong presumptive proof of the commission of a forgery. He, if not the chief actor in the offense, was an accessory after the fact, and should, in his appeal to the public in defense of his reputation, have brought forward the pamphlet itself, embracing the whole matter, for examination and comparison; for we feel satisfied that such an examination would prove that the celebrated letter was authored and in the handwriting of Robert Greene, and not so ill written that it could not be read by the printers, who must have been familiar with the handwriting of the largest contributor of the prose literature of his day. For ourselves, what we have adduced convinces us that the tract, “Groats Worth of Wit,” was authored and written by one of Philip Henslowe’s hacks, presumedly, Henry Chettle, a literary dead beat, and an indigent of many imprisonments, who was always importuning the old play-broker for money. Since the tract, “Groats Worth of Wit,” was in Chettle’s own handwriting, he strove to fool the printers by transcribing Greene’s letter and binding both together, through that “disguised hood” to fool the public. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, “You may fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.” It is possible that Chettle may have fooled some of the people of his own generation some of the time, but in later times, through the misapprehension of his quoted words, he has fooled the Shaksperolators all of the time. Chettle, however, would not permit the letter to come forward in its integrity and speak for itself, disclosing the nature of the intolerable something “stroke out,” which piques our curiosity, but not in anticipation of any of those indecencies that taint the writings of Ben Jonson and the work of many writers of that age, not excepting Shakespeare, who is also amenable in no slight degree to the charge of the same coarseness of taste which excites repulsion in the feelings of Leo Tolstoy.

The fact of the whole matter appears to be that Henry Chettle, wishing to profit financially by the great commercial value of Robert Greene’s name, was accessory to the embezzlement and the commission of a forgery, and was the silent beneficiary of the fraud. The mutual connection of hack writer and pirate publisher is so obvious that a jury of discerning students, with the exhibits, presented together with the presumptive proofs and inferential evidence contextured in both letter and preface, should easily confirm our opinion of the incredibleness of Chettle’s statements contained in the preface to “Kind Hearts Dreams.” The evidence of their falsity is, _prima-facie_, destitute of credible attestations.

We are made to see, in our survey of the age of Elizabeth, much that is in striking contrast with the spirit and activities of our time. There is a notable contrast between the public play house of those days, where no respectable woman ever appeared, and with the theatre of our day—the rival of the church as a moral force. In the elder time “the permanent and persistent dishonor attached to the stage,” and the stigma attached to the poets who wrote for the public playhouse, attached in like manner to the regular frequenters of public theatres, the majority of whom could neither read nor write, but belonged chiefly to the vicious and idle class of the population. At all the theatres, according to Malone, it appears that noise and show were what chiefly attracted an audience in spite of the reputed author. There was clamor for a stage reeking with blood and anything ministering to their unchaste appetites. The spectacular actor and clown was relatively advantaged, as he could say much more than was set down for him. Kemp’s extemporizing powers of histrionic buffoonery, gagging, and grimacing, paid the running expenses of the playhouse.

“It must be borne in mind that actors then occupied an inferior position in society, and that in many quarters even the vocation of a dramatic writer was considered scarcely respectable.” Ben Jonson’s letter to the Earl of Salisbury, lets us see very clearly that he regarded play writing as a degradation. We transcribe it in part as follows:

“I am here, my honored Lord, unexamined and unheard, committed to a vile prison and with me a gentleman (whose name may perhaps have come to your Lordship), one Mr. George Chapman, a learned and honest man. The cause (would I could name some worthier though I wish we had known none worthy our imprisonment) (is the words irk-me that our fortune hath necessitated us to so despise a course) a play, my Lord—.”

We see how keenly Jonson felt the disgrace, not on account of the charge of reflecting on some one in a play in which they had federated, for he protested his own and Chapman’s innocence, but he felt that their degradation lay chiefly in writing stage poetry, for drama-making was regarded as a degrading kind of employment, which poets accepted who were struggling for the meanest necessities of life, and were driven by poverty to their production, and to the slave-driving play-brokers, many of whom became very rich by making the flesh and blood of poor play-writers their maw.

In looking into Philip Henslowe’s old note-book, we see how the grasping play-brokers of the olden time speculated on the poor play-writers necessities, when plays were not regarded as literature; when the most strenuous and laborious of dramatic writers for the theatre could not hope to gain a competence by the pen alone, but wrote only for bread; when play-writers were in the employ of the shareholding actors, as hired men; and when their employers, the actors, were social outcasts who, in order to escape the penalty for the infraction of the law against vagabondage, were nominally retained by some nobleman. In further proof of the degradation which was attached to the production of dramatic composition, “when Sir Thomas Bodley, about the year 1600, extended and remodeled the old university library and gave it his name, he declared that no such riff-raff as play-books should ever find admittance to it.” “When Ben Jonson treated his plays as literature by publishing them in 1616 as his works, he was ridiculed for his pretentions, while Webster’s care in the printing of his plays laid himself open to the charge of pedantry.”

V

What Lord Rosebery says of Napoleon is equally true of the author of “Hamlet” and “King Lear,” “Mankind will always delight to scrutinize something that indefinitely raises its conception of its own powers and possibilities, and will seek, though eternally in vain, to penetrate the secrets of this prodigious intellect,” and it is to Stratford-on-Avon that many turn for the final glimpse of what Swinburne calls “the most transcendent intelligence that ever illuminated humanity.” William Shakspere, the third child and eldest son (probably), of John Shakspere, is supposed to have been born at a place on the chief highway or road leading from London to Ireland, where the road crosses the river Avon. This crossing was called Street-ford or Stratford. This, at any rate, was the place of his baptism in 1564, as is evidenced by the parish register. The next proven fact is that of his marriage in 1582, when he was little more than eighteen years old. Before this event nothing is known in regard to him.

John Shakspere, the father apparently of William Shakspere, is first discovered and described as a resident of Henley Street, where our first glimpse is had of him in April, 1552. In that year he was fined the sum of twelve pence for a breach of the municipal sanitary regulations. Nothing is known in regard to the place of his birth and nurture, nor in regard to his ancestry. The evidence is, _prima-facie_, that the Shaksperes were of the parvenu class. John Shakspere seems to have been a chapman, trading in farmer’s produce. In 1557 he married Mary Arden, the seventh and youngest daughter of Robert Arden, who had left to her fifty-three acres and a house, called “Ashbies” at Wilmecote. He had also left to her other land at Wilmecote, and an interest in two houses at Smitterfield.

This step gave John Shakspere a reputation among his neighbors of having married an heiress, and he was not slow to take advantage of it. His official career commenced at once by his election in 1557, as one of the ale-tasters, to see to the quality of bread and ale; and again in 1568 he was made high bailiff of Stratford. John Shakspere was the only member of the Shakspere family who was honored with civic preferment and confidence, serving the corporation for the ninth time in several functions. However, the time of his declination was at hand, for in the autumn of 1578 the wife’s property at Ashbies was mortgaged for forty pounds. The money subsequently tendered in repayment of the loan was refused until other sums due to the same creditor were repaid. John Shakspere was deprived of his aldermanship September 6, 1580, because he did not come to the hall when notified. On March 29, he produced a writ of habeas corpus, which shows he had been in prison for debt. Notwithstanding his inability to read and write, he had more or less capacity for official business, but so managed his private affairs as to wreck his own and his wife’s fortune.

At the time of the habeas corpus matter William Shakspere was thirteen years old. “In all probability,” says his biographer, “the lad was removed from school, his father requiring his assistance.” There was a grammar school in Stratford which was reconstructed on a medieval foundation by Edward VI, though the first English grammar was not published until 1586. This was after Shakespere had finished his education. “No Stratford record nor Stratford tradition says that Shakspere attended the Stratford grammar school.” But, had the waning fortune of his father made it possible, he might have been a student there from his seventh year—the probable age of admission—until his improvident marriage when little more than eighteen and a half years old. However, a provincial grammar school is a convenient place for the lad about whose activities we know nothing, and whose education is made to impinge on conjecture and fanciful might-have-been.

We are told that Shakspere must have been sent to the free school at Stratford, as his parents and all the relatives were unlearned persons, and there was no other public education available; nevertheless, it was the practice of that age to teach the boy no more than his father knew. One thing is certain, that the scholastic awakening in the Shakspere family was of short duration, for it began and ended with William Shakspere. His youngest daughter, Judith, was as illiterate as were her grandparents. She could not even write her name, although her father at the time of her school age had become wealthy, and his eldest daughter “the little premature Susanna,” as De Quincy calls her, could barely scrawl her name, being unable to identify her husband’s (Dr. Hall) handwriting, which no one but an illiterate could mistake. Her contention with the army surgeon, Dr. James Cook, respecting her husband’s manuscripts, is proof that William Shakspere was true to his antecedents by conferring illiteracy upon his daughters. The Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was not exceptionally liberal and broad minded in the matter of education in contrast with many of his contemporaries, notably Richard Mulcaster, (1531-1611), who says that “the girl should be as well educated as her brother,” while the real author of the immortal plays had also written, “Ignorance is the curse of God,” and, “There is no darkness but ignorance.”

It was not the least of John Shakspere’s misfortunes that in November, 1582, his eldest son, William, added to his embarrassments, by premature and forced marriage. It is the practice of Shakespere’s biographers to pass hurriedly over this event in the young man’s life, for there is nothing commendable in his marital relations. There is expressed in it irregularity of conduct and probable desertion on his part; pressure was brought to bear on the young man by his wife’s relations, and he was forced to marry the woman whom he had wronged. Who can believe that their marriage was a happy one, when the only written words contained in his will are not words expressive of connubial endearment, such as “dear wife” or “sweet wife,” but “my wife?” He had forgotten her, but by an interlineation in the final draft, she received his second best bed with its furniture. This was the sole bequest made to her.

We are by no means sure of the identity of his wife. We do not know that she and Shakespere ever went through the actual ceremony of marriage, unless her identity is traceable through Anne Wateley, as a regular license was issued for the marriage of William Shaxpere and Anne Wateley of Temple Grafton, November 27, 1583. Richard Hathaway, the reputed father of Shakspere’s wife, Anne, in his will dated September 1, 1581, bequeathed his property to seven children, his daughters being Catherin, Margaret and Agnes. No Anne was mentioned. The first published notice of the name of William Shakspere’s (supposed) wife appears in Rowe’s “Life of Shakespere” (1709), wherein it is stated that she “was the daughter of one Hathaway said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighborhood of Stratford.” This was all that Betterton, the actor Rowe’s informant, could learn at the time of his visit to Stratford-on-Avon. The exact time of this visit is unknown, but it was probably about the year 1690. This lack of knowledge in regard to the Hathaways shows that the locality of Anne Hathaway’s residence, or that of her parents, was not known at Stratford. The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and reached from Stratford by fieldpaths, may have been the home of Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakspere, before his marriage, but of this there is no proof.

Shakspere was married under the name “Shagspere,” but the place of marriage is unknown, as his place of residence is not mentioned in the bond. In the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) is contained a deed wherein Sandells and Richardson, husbandmen of Stratford, bound themselves in the bishop’s consistory court on November 28, 1582, as a surety for forty pounds, to free the bishop of all liability should any lawful impediment, by reason of any precontract, or consanguinity, be subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the contemplated marriage of William Shakspere with Anne Hathaway. Provided, that Anne obtained the consent of her friends, the marriage might proceed with at once proclaiming the bans of matrimony. The wording of the bond shows that, despite the fact that the bridegroom was a minor by nearly three years, the consent of his parents was neither called for, nor obtained, though necessary “for strictly regular procedure.” Sandells and Richardson, representing the lady’s family, ignored the bridegroom’s family completely. In having secured the deed, they forced Shakspere to marry their friend’s daughter in order to save her reputation. Soon afterwards—within six months—a daughter was born. Moreover, the whole circumstances of the case render it highly probable that Shakspere had no thought of marriage, for the waning fortune of his father had made him acquainted with the “cares of bread.” He was a penniless youth, not yet of age, having neither trade, nor means of livelihood, and was forced by her friends into marrying her—a woman eight years older than himself. In 1585 she presented him with twins.

When he left Stratford for London we do not know positively, but the advent of the twins is the approximate date of the youth’s Hegira. He lived apart from his wife for more than twenty-five years. The breath of slander never touched the good name of Anne (or Agnes), the neglected wife of William Shakspere. There is _prima-facie_ evidence that the playbroker’s wife fared in his absence no better than his father and mother, who, dying intestate in 1601 and 1608, respectively, were buried somewhere by the Stratford church, but there is no trace of any sepulchral monument, or memorial. If anything of the kind had been set up by their wealthy son, William Shakspere, it would certainly have been found by someone. The only contemporary mention made of the wife of Shakspere, between her marriage in 1582 and her husband’s death in 1616, was as the borrower, at an unascertained date, of forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father’s shepherd. The money was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and his executor was directed to recover the sum from Shakspere and distribute it among the poor of Stratford. There is disclosed in this pecuniary transaction, coupled with the slight mention of her in the will and the barring of her dower, _prima facie_ evidence of William Shakspere’s indifference to, and neglect of, if not dislike for, his wife. All this is in striking contrast with the conduct of Sir Thomas Lucy, whom the biographers of Shakespere have attempted to disparage, and whose endearment for his wife is so feelingly expressed in his will. And, in contrast also, is the conduct of Edward Alleyn, famous as an actor, and as the founder of Dulwich College, who lived with his wife in London, and called her “sweet mouse.”

The tangibility of this Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon is very much in evidence along pecuniary lines, especially as money lender, land-owner, speculator and litigant. In 1597 he bought New Place in Stratford for sixty pounds; also mentioned as a holder of grain at Stratford X quarters. The following entry is in Chamberlain’s accounts at Stratford in 1598: “Paid to Mr. Shaxpere for one lode of stone xd;” in the same year Richard Quiney wrote to William Shakspere for a loan of thirty or forty pounds; in 1599 William Shakspere was taken into the new Globe Theatre Company as partner; in 1602 Shakspere bought one hundred seven acres of arable land at Stratford for three hundred two pounds (in his absence the conveyance was given over to his brother, Gilbert); in the same year he bought a house with barns, orchards, and gardens, from Hercules Underhill for sixty pounds; also a cottage close to his house, New Place; in 1605 Shakspere bought the thirty-two-year lease of half Stratford tithes for four hundred forty pounds; in 1613 Shakspere bought a house near Blackfriars’ Theatre for one hundred and forty pounds, and mortgaged it next day for sixty pounds; in 1612 Shakspere is mentioned in a law suit brought before Lord Ellsimore about Stratford tithes; in 1611 Hamnet, his only son, died at Stratford at the age of eleven and half years. The father, however, set up no stone to tell where the boy lay.

In the autumn of the year 1614 Shakspere became implicated with the landowners, William Combe and Arthur Mannering, in the conspiracy to enclose the common field in the vicinity of Stratford. The success of this rapacious scheme would have advantaged Shakspere in his freehold interest, but might have affected adversely his interest in the tithes, so he secured himself against all possible loss by obtaining from Riplingham, Combe’s agent, in October, 1614, a deed of indemnification; then, in the spirit of his agreement, he acted in unison with the two greedy land-sharks to rob the poor people of their ancient rights of pasturage. The unholy coalition caused great excitement. The humble citizens of Stratford were thoroughly aroused, and the town corporation put up a sharp and vigorous opposition to the scheme, for enclosure would have caused decay of tillage, idleness, penury, depopulation, and the subversion of homes. Happily, the three greedy cormorants Combe, Mannering and Shakspere failed in their efforts and the common field was unenclosed.

Shakspere is thought to have been penurious for his litigious strivings point in that direction, but this feature of his character was not disclosed in 1596 and 1599, when he sought to have his family enrolled among the gentry, as shown by his extravagance in bribing the officers of the Herald College to issue a grant of arms to his father, “a transaction which involved,” says Dr. Farmer, “the falsehood and venality of the father, the son and two kings-at-arms, and did not escape protest, for if ever a coat was cut from whole cloth we may be sure that this coat-of-arms was the one.” Shakspere himself was not in a position to apply for a coat-of-arms—“a player stood far too low in the social scale for the cognizance of heraldry.” Nevertheless, recent writers on the subject of Shakespeare stamp this bogus coat-of-arms on the covers of their books. We know that the Shaksperes did not belong to the Armigerous part of the population, and that they stood somewhat lower in the social scale than either the Halls or Quineys, who bore marital relations with them.

Shakspere’s son-in-law, John Hall, was a master of arts and an eminent physician. He was summoned more than once to attend the Earl and Countess of Northampton at Ludlow Castle. He was of the French Court School, and was opposed to the indiscriminate process of bleeding. On June 5, 1607, Dr. Hall was married at Stratford-on-Avon to Shakspere’s eldest daughter, Susanna. Stratford then contained about fifteen hundred inhabitants. One hundred sixty-two years later, Garrick gave his unsavory description of Stratford-on-Avon as “the most dirty, unseemly, ill-paved, wretched-looking town in all Britain.” Cottages of that day in Stratford consisted of mud walls and thatched roofs. “At this period and for many generations afterwards the sanitary conditions of the thoroughfares of Stratford-on-Avon were simply terrible.”

On February 10, 1616, Thomas Quiney, a vintner, and also an accomplished scholar and penman, was married at Stratford church to Judith, Shakspere’s younger daughter, who could neither read nor write. The marriage ceremony took place without a license or proclaiming the bans. For this breach of ecclesiastical procedure both the parties were summoned to the court at Worcester and threatened with excommunication. When the fortune hunter goes forth to woe, and is determined to win, he is content to wade through reeking refuse and muckheaps to marry a rich heiress and does not much care if her histrionic father by XXXIX Elizabeth were a vagabond.

If “there is a soul of truth in things erroneous,” so there may be a soul of truth in the creditableness of the Shakspere traditions, for in them are revealed the environment in which they had their genesis, and the character of the inventor or fabricator. All of the traditions are comparatively recent or modern, and were made current by people who were, with few exceptions, coarse and densely ignorant. These apocryphal accounts serve to show also how little educated people knew, or cared, about writing with literary or historical accuracy when Shakspere was the subject. Unfortunately all of the traditions about Shakspere are of a degrading character.

The poaching escapade of his having robbed a park is one of the invented stories of fancy-mongers. There is very little likelihood that the young husband, with a wife and three babies to support, would voluntarily place himself in a position where he would have to flee from Sir Thomas Lucy’s prosecution; thereby degrading the lowermost rank of life by bringing disgrace upon himself, his wife and children, while his parents in straitened circumstances were struggling to keep the wolf from the door. The records show that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park either at Charlecote or Fulbroke, still the Lucys of a later day were not anxious to lose the honor of having spanked Shakspere for poaching on the ancestral preserves.

England was called in those days “The toper’s paradise,” and tradition informs us that Shakspere was one of the Bedford topers. However, we should not infer from this that William Shakspere, a firm man of business, was at any time a drunken sot. The only story recorded during Shakspere’s life is contained in John Manningham’s note-book. It savors strongly of the tavern, the diarist criminating Shakspere’s morals. This entry was made on March 13, 1601, the reference being to player Shakspere.

No wonder that such eminent votaries of Shakspere as Stevens, Hallam, Dyce and Emerson are disappointed and perplexed, for, while the record concerning the life of the player, money-lender, landowner, play-broker, speculator and litigant are ample, they disclose nothing of a literary character; but the pecuniary litigation evidence, growing out of Shakspere’s devotion to money-getting in London and Stratford, does unfold his true life and character. The records do not furnish a single instance of friendship, kindness or generosity, but upon the delinquent borrower of money he rigidly evoked the law, which gave a generous advantage to the creditor, and its vile prison to the debtor.

In 1600 Shakspere brought action against John Clayton for seven pounds and got judgment in his favor. He sued Philip Rogers, a neighbor in Stratford Court, for one pound, fifteen shillings and six pence due for malt sold, and two shillings loaned. In August, 1608, Shakspere prosecuted John Addenbroke to recover a debt of six pounds. He prosecuted this last suit for a couple of years until he got the defendant into prison. The prisoner was bailed out by Horneby. Addenbroke, running away, escaped from the clutches of his tormentor, who then bore down on his security, Horneby.

“The pursuit of an impoverished man for the sake of imprisoning him, and depriving him both of the power of paying his debts and supporting his family, grate upon our feelings,” says Richard Grant White, “and,” adds this eminent Shakspearean, “we hunger and we receive these husks, we open our mouths for food and we break our teeth against these stones.” We may be sure that there was left in the impoverished home of John Addenbroke little more palatable than husks and stones, when the father fled to escape from the clutches of his insistent creditor, William Shakspere of Stratford.

The paltry suits he brought to recover debts do not tend to disclose this Shakspere’s “radiant temperament,” or fit him to receive the adjective, “gentle,” except in contumely for his claim to gentility. It is not known that Shakspere ever gave hospitality to the necessities of the poor of his native shire, for whom, it appears, there beat no pulse of tenderness. A man of scanty sensibilities he must have been. The poor working people of Stratford, we may be sure, shed no tear at this Shakspere’s departure from the world.

We do not envy the man, who can regard these harsh pecuniary practices in this Shakspere, as commendable traits of his worldly wisdom, for he was shrewd in money matters, and could have invested his money in London and Stratford so as not to have brought sorrow and distress upon his poor neighbors. These matters are small in themselves, but they suggest a good deal, for they bear witness to sorrow-stricken mothers, hungry children and fathers in loathsome prisons, powerless to provide food, warmth and light for the home. The diary, or note-book, of Philip Henslowe, the theatrical manager and play-broker, shows that Henslowe was himself a very penurious and grasping man, who, taking advantage of starving play-makers’ necessities, became very wealthy. William Shakspere, of Stratford-on-Avon, as a theatrical manager, became rich also, but his note-book has not been preserved, so nothing is known of his business methods in dealing with the poor play-makers; but the literary antiquarians, by ransacking corporations’ records and other public archives, have proven that Shakspere was very much such a man as the old pawnbroker and play-broker, Philip Henslowe, of a rival house.

The biographers should record these facts, and not strive to shun them, for the literary antiquaries have unearthed and brought them forward, and they tell the true story of Shakspere’s life, though we do not linger lovingly over them, for, like Hallam, “we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterward an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Lear,’” for the Stratford records are as barren of literary matter as the lodgings in Silver street, London. Not a crumb for the literary biographer in either place!

Professor Wallace has added another non-literary document in the matter of Shakspere’s deposition in the case of Bellot vs. Mountjoy, which he discovered in the public record office, but it in no way contributes to a literary biography. The truth is that, with all their industry, the antiquarians have in this regard not brought to light a single proven fact to sustain the claim that this Shakespere was either the author of poems or plays. This bit of new knowledge gives us a glimpse of this William Shakspere as an evasive witness, having a conveniently short memory. These depositions disclose his intermediation in the matter of making two hearts happy, but not the faintest glimpse of the author of poems or plays. When the claim of authorship is challenged, new particulars of the life of Shakspere, such as this and others that have been unearthed by antiquarians, whether in the public record office or corporation archives, are alike worthless so far as establishing the poet Shakspere’s identity. They fail to confirm the identity of the actor Shakspere with the author of the plays and poems that are associated with his name. There are no family traditions, no books, manuscripts, or letters, addressed to him, or by him, to poet, peer or peasant. The credible evidence supplied by contemporaneous, or antiquarian, research do not identify the player and landowner with the author of “Hamlet,” “Lear” and “Othello.”

Our belief in the pseudonymity of the author of the poems and plays, called Shakespeare, is strengthened by the absence of verse commemorative of concurrent events, such as the strivings of his boldest countrymen in the great Elizabethan age. There is, from his pen, neither word of cheer, nor sympathy, with the daring and suffering warriors and adventurers of that time, although his contemporaries versified eulogies to the heroes of those days for their stirring deeds. There is, in the poems and plays, no elegiac lay in memory of Elizabeth, “the glorious daughter of the illustrious Henry,” as Robert Greene calls her, nor is there one line of mourning verse at the death of Prince Henry, the noblest among the children of the king, by a writer who was always a strenuous and consistent supporter of prerogative against the conception of freedom. This is another evidence of the secrecy maintained as to the authorship of the poems and plays. We cannot discover a single laudatory poem or commendatory verse, or a line of praise of any publication, or writer of his time. All this is in contrast with his contemporaries, whose personalities are identifiable with their literary work, and, so liberal of commendation were they, that they literally showered commendatory verses on literary works of merit, or those thought to have merit. Of these, thirty-five were bestowed on Fletcher, a score or more on Beaumont, Chapman and Ford, while Massinger received nineteen. Ben Jonson’s published works contain thirty-seven pieces of commendation. His Roman tragedy, “Sejanus,” was acclaimed by ten contemporary poets. In praise of his comedy, “Volpone,” there are seven poems. The versified compliments bestowed on him by his fellow craftsmen embrace many of the most celebrated names antecedent to his death, which occurred in 1637. Early in 1638 a collection of some thirty elegies were published under the title of “Jonsonus Virbius,” or “The Memory of Ben Jonson,” in which nearly all the leading poets of the day, except Milton, took part.

It must appear strange to the votaries of Shakspere that Jonson should have received so many crowns of mourning verse, while for Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon, the reputed author of “Hamlet,” “Lear” and “Macbeth,” there wailed no dirge. Not a single commendatory verse was bestowed by a contemporary poet antecedent to his death, nor was a single elegiac poem written of him in the year of his death, 1616. Already in that fatal year there had been mourning for Francis Beaumont, who received immediate posthumous honors by many poets, in memorial odes, sighing forth the requiem to his name in mournful elegy.

Eight and forty days after the death of Francis Beaumont, all that was mortal of William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was buried in the chancel of his parish church, in which, as part owner of the tithes and consequently one of the lay rectors, he had the right of interment. Over the spot where his body was laid, there was placed a slab with the inscription imprecating a curse on the man who should disturb his bones,

“Good friend, for Jesus sake forbeare To digg the dust enclosed here Bless be ye man yt spares this stown And curst be he yt moves my bones.”

This rude, absurd and ignorant epitaph has given much trouble to writers on the subject of Shakespeare. The usual explanation of the threat is given that the Puritans thought that the church had been profaned by the ashes of an actor. These ignorant words could not have been written as a deterrent to the Puritans, for they did not belong to the ignorant section of the population, but to the middle class, nor would they have been deterred from invading Shakspere’s tomb by the superstitious fear of a threat contained in doggerel verse cut on the tomb. There was not the least danger that the actor’s grave would be violated by the Puritans, for Dr. John Hall, Shakspere’s son-in-law, was a Puritan. If he had had this warning epitaph cut on the tomb it would have been written in scholarly English. The doggerel lines, rude as they are, satisfied, doubtless, the widow and daughters, themselves ignorant. The most pleasing epitaph, it seems to us, would have been one expressing a known wish of their “dear departed” in words, when read by others, that would best suit their understandings, for the Shakspere family were uncultured. They could not read the stupid epitaph on his tomb, and so their hearts were not saddened as they gazed upon an inscription of barbaric rudeness.

Some slight circumstance may have given rise to William Hall’s conjecture, during his visit to Stratford, in 1694, that Shakspere authored his own epitaph, and that these lines were written to suit the capacity of clerks and sextons, who, according to Hall, in course of time would have removed Shakspere’s dust to the bone house. This is not improbable from the point of view taken by those who believe that Shakspere of Stratford wrote the doggerel epigram on John Combe, money lender, and the vituperative ballad abusing the gentleman whose park he (Shakspere) robbed, for the three compositions are of the same grade of ignorant nonsense. But we do know that had the author of “Hamlet” written his own epitaph, it would have been as deathless as the one over the Countess of Pembroke:

“Underneath this sable hearst Lies the subject of all verse Sidney’s sister—Pembroke’s mother Death, ere thou hast slain another Learned and fair and good as she Time shall throw a dart at thee.”

It should be borne in mind that clerks and sextons were not the only ignorant people in and about Stratford. There were some that had a grievance, or thought they had, which parish clerks and sextons had not. We have reference to the poor debtors, who regarded Shakspere of Stratford as a grasping usurer, hard upon poor people in his power, so the curse inscribed slab was placed over Shakspere’s grave as a shield to protect his ashes from those who would not hesitate to invade the tomb of one whose memory had become hateful to them. If in pressing his claim the money lender elects to be a tormentor, his name will be execrated while living and a hateful memory when dead.

One thing is evidenced by the maledictory epitaph; that the one who wrote it was afraid the tomb might be violated by the removal of the bones to the charnel house. Who were they that would most likely invade Shakspere’s tomb? Obviously those, we repeat, who regarded him as a hard-hearted man, who pressed poor debtors with all the rigor of the law to enforce the payment of petty sums; the man who had shown himself supremely selfish in an attempt to enclose the Stratford common field; the man who would be made “a gentleman” by misrepresentation, fraud and falsehood. The foregoing facts, and the legal and municipal evidence bound up in dusty records, a bogus coat-of-arms, and a rude epitaph, tell the true story of the life of William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon.

There is no record of any pretended living likeness of Shakspere better representing him than the Stratford bust. This bust is erected on the north side of the chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon. On the floor of the chancel in front of the monument are the graves of Shakspere and his family. We have no means of ascertaining when the monument and bust were erected. The first folio edition of his reputed works was published in 1623. It contained words from Leonard Diggs prefatory lines “and time dissolves thy Stratford moniment,” monument being used interchangeably with tomb; but these words do not prove that the bust was set up before 1623. His image was rudely cut, sensual and clownish in appearance.

There is not a tittle of evidence adduced to show that a knowledge of Shakspere’s putative authorship of poems and plays was current at Stratford when the first folio edition of his reputed works was published in 1623. The records attest that Shakspere’s fame reputatively as writer is posterior to this event. How strange it must seem to those who claim for Shakspere an established reputation as poet and dramatist of repute anterior to the first folio edition in 1623, that Dr. Hall, himself an author and most advantaged of all the heirs by Shakspere’s death, should fail to mention his father-in-law in his “cure-book” or observations! The earliest dated cure is 1617, the year following Shakspere’s death, but there are undated ones. In “Obs. XIX.” Hall mentions without date an illness of his wife, Mrs. Hall; and we find him making a note long afterwards in reference to his only daughter, Elizabeth, who was saved by her father’s skill and patience. “Thus was she delivered from death and deadly diseases and was well for many years.” The illness of Drayton is recorded without date in “Obs. XXII.,” with its wee bit of a literary biography, and he is referred to as “Mr. Drayton, an excellent poet.” Had Shakspere received a like mention as a poet or writer by one who knew him so intimately, what a delicious morsel it would have been to all those who have followed the literary antiquarian through the dreary barren waste of Shakespearean research. We have found nothing but husks, and these, eulogists of Shakespeare—Hallam, Stevens and Emerson—refused to crunch! For nearly three centuries the Stratford archives have contained all matters concerning Shakspere’s life and character, and have given us full knowledge of the man; nothing has been lost; but of his alleged literary life, there is not a crumb, no family traditions, no books, no manuscripts, no letters, no commendatory verses, plays, masques or anthology.

The biographers of Shakespeare have none of the material out of which poets and dramatists are made, but only those facts which are congruous with money lenders, land speculators, play-brokers and actors; also, a good assortment of apocryphal stores and gossipy yarns which have become traditional currency. According to Mark Twain there is something more. He says, “When we find a vague file of chipmunk tracks stringing through the dust of Stratford village we know that Hercules has been along.” Again he proceeds, “The bust, too, there in the Stratford church, the precious bust, the calm bust with a dandy mustache, and the putty face unseamed with care—that face which has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years, and will look down upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.”

Not having found the slightest trace of Shakespeare in 1592 as writer of plays, or as adapter or elaborator of other men’s work, his advent into literature must have been at a later date, if at all. In 1593 “Venus and Adonis” appeared in print with a dedication to Lord Southampton, and signed “William Shakespeare.” In 1594 appeared another poem, “Lucrece,” also with a dedication to Lord Southampton. The poems bore no name of an author on the title page. Here is literary tangibility, but does it establish the identity of their author, or attest the responsibility of the young Stratford man for the poems which were published under the name of Shakespeare? This was the first mention of the now famous name? Was it a pseudonym, or was it the true name of the author of the poem? The enthusiastic reception of the poems awakens a suspicion when we learn that their popularity was due to a belief in their lasciviency; and that the dedicatee was the rakish Henry Wriothesley, third Earle of Southampton; and, furthermore, that the name of the dedicator, “Shakespeare,” was one of a class of nicknames which in 1593 still retained in some measure that which was derisive in them. In 1487 a student at Oxford changed his own name of “Shakespeare” into “Saunders,” because he considered it too expressive and distinctive of rough manners, and significant of degradation, and as such was unwilling to aid in its hereditary transmission, when all that is derisive in the name Shakspere remained fixed and fossilized in the old meaning. In those unlettered times, lascivious persons were sometimes branded, so to speak, with the nickname “Shakspere.” Primarily, the name has no militant signification. There is no such personal name in any known list of British surnames. They are of the parvenu class without ancestry.

Mr. Sidney Lee admits that the Earle of Southampton is the only patron of Shakspere that is known to biographical research (p. 126). By what fact, or facts, may we ask, is the authenticity of the Earl’s friendship or patronage attested? Southampton was the standing patron of all the poets, the stock-dedicatee of those days. It was the fashion of the times to pester him with dedications by poets grave and gay. They were after those five or six pounds, which custom constrained his Lordship to yield for having his name enshrined in poet’s lines. All the poets of that age were dependents, and there is, with few exceptions, the same display of pharisaic sycophancy, greediness, and on the part of dedicatee an inordinate desire for adulation. Every student of Elizabethan literature and history should know that the Southampton-Shakspere friendship cannot be traced biographically. The Earl of Southampton was a voluminous correspondent, but did not bear witness to his friendship for Shakspere. A scrutinous inspection of Southampton’s papers contained in the archives of his family, descendants and contemporaries, yields nothing in support of the contention that Southampton’s friendship, or patronage, is known to biographical research, and it is as attestative as that other apocryphal story preserved by Rowe “which is fast disappearing from Shakespearean biography.”

“There is one instance so singular in its munificence that if we had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William Davenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, we should not venture to have inserted that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him (Shakspere) a thousand pounds, to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.” (Davenant was the man who gave out that he was the natural son of Shakspere). A present of a thousand pounds which equals at least twenty-five thousand dollars to-day! The magnitude of the gift discredits the story nevertheless, the startled Rowe, is the first to make it current, but does not give his readers the ground for his assurance. Be it what it may, he could hardly satisfy the modern reader that this man, a son, who insinuatingly defiles the name and fair fame of his own mother, is a credible witness, or that such a man is “fit for wolf bait.” What purchase did Shakspere “go through with?” Not New Place in 1597, for the purchase money was only sixty pounds. Neither could it have been the Stratford estate in 1602, for at that time Southampton was a prisoner in the Tower. In fact, the whole sum expended by Shakspere did not amount to a thousand pounds in all. The truth is, the social Rules of Tudor and Jacobin times did not permit peer and peasant to live on terms of mutual good feeling. Almost all the poets in hope of gain, penned adulatory sonnets in praise of Lord Southampton. In those times they had a summary way of dealing with humble citizens. Jonson, Chapman and Marston, were imprisoned for having displeased the king by a jest in “Eastward Ho,”—

“A nobleman to vindicate rank brought an action in the star-chamber against a person, who had orally addressed him as ‘Goodman Morley.’” The literati of those days found in scholastic learning, neither potency, nor promise, to abrogate class distinctions by giving a passport to high attainment in literature, poetry and philosophy. Ben Jonson says, “The time was when men were had in price for learning, now letters only make men vile. He is upbraidingly called a poet as if it were a contemptible nickname.”

Mr. Lee tells us, that the state papers and business correspondence of Southampton were enlivened by references to his literary interest and his sympathy with the birth of English Drama. (P. 316.). “However, Mr. Lee has extracted no reference to Shakspere from the paper.” Southampton’s zest for the theatre is based on the statement contained in the “Sidney Papers” that he and his friend Lord Rutland “come not to court but pass away the time merely in going to plays every day.” When a new library for his old college, St. Johns, was in course of construction, Southampton collected books to the value of three hundred and sixty pounds wherewith to furnish it. Southampton’s literary tastes and sympathy with the drama cannot be drawn from his gift to the library, for it consisted largely of legends of the saints and mediaeval chronicles. When and where did William Shakspere acknowledge his obligations to the only patron of the player? According to Mr. Lee, who is known to biographical research, not one of the Shakespearean plays was dedicated to Southampton. The name “Shakspere” is conspicuously absent from among the distinguished writers of his day, who in panegyrical speech and song acclaimed Southampton’s release from prison in 1602.

Francis Meres, a pedantic schoolmaster and Divinity student, had his “Palladis Tamia” registered September 7, 1598, and published shortly after. Meres in his “Tamia” writes of the mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, and his “Venus and Adonis,” and his “Lucrece,” and his sugared sonnets to his friends, and enumerates twelve plays—though at the time three only had been published with his name. Like others of his contemporaries, Meres writes tritely of the honey-tongued, the honey sweet and the sugared. With him, everything written is mellifluent, but he says nothing of the man. In fact, no contemporary left on record any definite impression of Shakespeare’s personal character. Meres asserted that Ben Jonson was one of our best poets for tragedy, when at that time (1598) Jonson had not written a single tragedy, and but one comedy.

Before, we transcribe, in part, “Wits Treasury” by Francis Meres, we ask the readers’ pardon for this abuse of their patience, for Meres merely repeats names of Greek, Latin and modern play-makers. “As these tragic poets flourished in Greece—Aeschylus, Euripides” (in all seventeen are named and these among the Latin, Accius, M. Attilus, Seneca and several others). “So these are our best for tragedy; the Lord Buckhurst, Dr. Leg of Cambridge, Dr. Eds of Oxford, Master Edward Ferris—the author of the ‘Merriour for Magistrates,’—Marlowe, Peele, Watson, Kyd, Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, Decker and Benjamin Jonson. The best poets for comedy”—(Meres proceeds with his enumeration, naming sixteen Greeks and ten Latins, twenty-six in all.) “So the best for comedy amongst us be Edward, Earl of Oxford; Dr. Lager of Oxford; Master Rowley; Master Edwards: eloquent and wittie John Lilly; Lodge; Gascoyne; Greene; Shakespeare; Thomas Nash; Thomas Heywood; Anthony Munday. Our best plotters: Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathaway and Henry Chettle.”

Meres does not seem to have considered it necessary to read before reviewing. Had he done so he would not have placed the name of Lord Buckhurst first in his list, giving primacy to this mediocrist, and the author of “Romeo and Juliet,” whoever he was, ninth in his list of dramatic poets which he considered best among the English for tragedy; nor, would he have named for second place on the list Dr. Leg of Cambridge, instead of the author of “The Jew of Malta” (Marlowe). What has Dr. Eds of Oxford, whose name stands third in the Meres list, written that he should have been mentioned in the same connection with the author of “The White Devil” (Webster) or the author of that classic “The Conspiracy,” and “The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron” (Chapman)? Why this commingling of such insignificant writers as Edward, Earl of Oxford, Lord Buckhurst, Drs. Lager and Leg, with the giant brotherhood? The fact is, so far as attesting the responsibility of anybody or anything, the Meres averments are as worthless as “a musty nut.” What was said of John Aubrey is also true of Francis Meres, “His brain was like a hasty pudding whose memory and judgment and fancy were all stirred together.” Yet this is the writer that many Shakespearean commentators confidently appeal to, in part, and whose testimony, in part, they, with equal unanimity impeach.

The slight mention of Shakespeare by the “judicious Webster,” as Hazlet calls him, comprehends no more than that Shakspere was one of the hack writers of the day: “detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance.” For mine own