Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “The things had served their turn in the theater which they were made for; in those days when we literally made our plays, and we scarcely supposed people would care to read them.” As he said this, Shakespeare sat down on one of the garden seats, and watched with a scarcely conscious smile the antics of the much-carbuncled gardener who had been pouring hot water down the wasps’ nest in his flower bed and was stiffly capering about with the kettle in his hand to avoid the pursuit of the exasperated insects. As he finally disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, Shakespeare burst into a shout of laughter inaudible except to us who were sharing his invisibility.

  “May I ask,” Bacon demanded, severely, “what is so very diverting in the suggestion I have made? We will not pursue it if you prefer not.”

  “Oh, it isn’t that,” Shakespeare choked out, “it’s the ga-ga-gardener and the wa-wa-wasps!”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Bacon returned, with dry offence. “You must excuse my inadvertance,” and he moved toward the house.

  “Oh, come, come!” Shakespeare called to him. “Don’t go! What you have been telling us is something I hadn’t the least notion of. I beg your pardon. Do go on!”

  “There is no more,” Bacon hesitated, “at least about Virgil, but I had thought of making a parallel of your own case with his—”

  “Well, if it won’t tire our American cousin — or nephew — or brother — or uncle — or fellow-subject — or fellow-citizen, here?”

  “Not at all. I shall be delighted. I think it’s extremely interesting,” I made haste to offer in placation of our friend, who was still loath to forego his offense.

  “It’s this recurrent, this almost essential light-mindedness of yours which spoils so much of your noblest tragedy! You let your motley come clowning in at the highest moments, and to get a laugh from the pit you turn your Macbeth, your Hamlet, your Romeo and Juliet into farce. If you had taken my advice, or would take it now — but you wouldn’t, you won’t!” Shakespeare waited patiently, and Bacon, after he had fretted his grudge away, resumed. “What struck me was the poverty of the known events in Virgil’s life. Of these there are scarce a baker’s dozen of the most elementary; the rest is supposition and inference. There is nothing to show the character or nature of the man in the events; nothing that might not have happened to any other poet. It was a good deal so with Ben Jonson himself, who was one of the most self-advertised poets of our time. We know that he was a quick-tempered, violent-natured, warmhearted, censorious, generous, pedantic, humorous, wrongheaded, delightful old fellow—”

  “He was, he was!” Shakespeare assented, with enjoyment. “And he is much the same still. Of course, he has learnt rather more self-control, but he’s ‘rare Ben’ yet, and will be to all eternity, I hope.”

  “Yes,” Bacon continued, “but what do we know of the intimate facts of his life, the facts that shape and nature a man, the personal facts? We know that he was a posthumous child, and that his mother, who married a second time, is supposed to have loved him in a passionate way of her own, insomuch that when he was sentenced to have his nose and ears slit for ‘insulting the Scotch’ in a play, she prepared a poison which she meant to drink with him before the sentence could be carried out. His stepfather is ‘said’ to have forced him to lay a few bricks after Ben left school, to remind him of their trade of bricklayer; and Ben is ‘supposed’ to have lived unhappily with his wife, whom he mentions coldly, and parted from after five years, though he remembers her tenderly in the verses commemorating the two children they lost. It is certain that he was sent to Westminster school, but ‘it is stated’ only on ‘unsatisfactory evidence’ that he went afterward to Cambridge. He killed a fellow-actor in a duel and barely escaped hanging; in prison he was visited by a Roman Catholic priest and was converted to his faith, which twelve years later he renounced because of the Papist complicity with the Gunpowder Plot. He went soldiering in the Netherlands, and came back to the bricklaying of his youth; later he traveled governor to Sir Walter Raleigh’s son in France. For the rest, he lived and wrote and drank in London; but the encyclopedist doubts whether in the last of his visits to Stratford he was the cause of our friend here overdrinking himself and taking the fever he died of. These are all the intimate facts which his biographer can lay his hands on, and a fair half of them he doubts, or supposes. Merely in number — not to speak of significance — they do not compare with the well-known and generally accepted facts of the life of our friend here, who is imagined to have left little or no material for the biographer—”

  “I wish,” Shakespeare said, starting restively to his feet, “that my biographers would agree to forget some of the most intimate facts of my life. I have willingly done so, and I remember them only when I find them recurring in print. Then I feel like denying them.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE philosopher glared at the poet from under brows which met in a frown such as he used perhaps to bend upon suitors in court while his pockets bulged with their offerings to justice. His pipe had now gone out, and he went about lighting it with the effect of having quite finished what he had to say.

  “Well!” the poet prompted.

  “There is nothing more,” the philosopher answered, in cold resentment, and began pulling at his pipe.

  “But that parallel?”

  “I thought you preferred your trifling.”

  “My joke is dear to me, but not so precious as your interest in my biography.”

  “And I, if I may venture to entreat your lordship,” I put in, “should think myself greatly the loser if I failed of your parallel. I don’t think anything like it has been offered, yet, in proof of our friend’s authorship of his plays.”

  His lordship continued silent for a little longer; then he severely resumed. “I had thought of enforcing the parallel with other examples, but it is not necessary, and I will only suggest in refutation of the argument that Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare because he has left no handwriting of his behind except two or three autographs differently spelled from each other, that we have no signature of Chaucer’s, though he was an eminent diplomat and went upon many embassies to the continent, requiring signatures. It is not certainly known who his father was, or precisely his wife. None of his poems survive in his own manuscript, and it isn’t known which were irrefutably his; just as some of our friend’s plays here are of doubted origin, and none were printed from his own handwriting. Your two poets are alike, moreover, in certain alleged violations of the law: Shakespeare is said to have stolen deer, and Chaucer to have taken part in the abduction of a young girl; probably neither did either; but the interesting fact is that uncertainties cloud the history of the courtier as well as the life of the player. Seven years of Chaucer’s time left no record, just as nine of Shakespeare’s left none. But when you come to speak of the paucity of biographical material in the case of our friend here, I would have you contrast its abundance with the want of facts concerning most of his eminent contemporaries and predecessors. It is perfectly known who his father and mother were and their origin. The year and almost the day of his birth are known, but not so clearly the place; though it was certainly Stratford and certainly not the Birthplace. The day of his baptism is ascertained, and when and where he went to school — almost. There is no doubt whom he married, and if not where, then when, and reasonably why. At fixed dates his three children are baptized. In a certain year and month he goes to London, where he becomes not so much personally a holder of gentlemen’s horses at the theater, as a sort of horseholding syndicate or Trust, and an employer of skilled labor in the boys trained by himself for the purpose. From this business eminence he sinks to be a poet, a playwright, and even a player by distinctly dated gradations, and is enviously attacked for his success in the drama by a brother dramatist. The dates of his successive plays are fairly approximated in their production at the theater and their reproduction from the press, and the time of his buying New Place is fixed. His unbroken relation to Stratfo
rd during his London years can be traced by the dates of his various purchases and lawsuits and participation in local affairs. His devotion to his family expressed itself in all filial, paternal and fraternal sorts; he marries his daughters to his liking; he stands godfather to his friends’ children; when his mother dies he yields to the homesickness always in his heart, and comes back to end his days in Stratford. He wishes to be a principal citizen and a man of social standing; he buys tithes and joins in fencing the people’s commons; he rejoices in a coat-of-arms, and likes to be known as William Shakespeare, Esquire, trusting that his low-class career as actor-manager in London will not be remembered against him. But he likes to be remembered by his old dramatic friends, and he welcomes Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson to New Place, where he lives till his death in peace, if not affection, with his wife. He even engages to excess in their jolly riot, for, as a Vicar of Stratford recalls some fifty years later, ‘Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Drayton had a merie meeting, and it seems drank too hard, and Shakespeare died of a fevour there contracted.’ Others, however, hold that his fever was a filth disease contracted from the pigsties that then ran the length of New Place in Chapel Lane. But it is enough,” his lordship ended, with a dignified gesture of his pipe-stem, “that he died full of glory and honor.” Shakespeare, who had been listening more and more restively, wincing from time to time at facts which I thought his guest might better have spared him, rose and stretched himself, saying: “I didn’t realize before that I was such an unquestionable celebrity.” Then, as I rose too and thanked his lordship for his convincing statement, but said I must really be going, Shakespeare, as if he would escape some merited reproach, said he would go a little way with me, if I didn’t mind, and we hurried off together. We had not got as far as the bridge when he answered the tacit question in my mind, as the custom is among disembodied spirits.

  “Yes, he is often very tiresome company, especially when he gets to harping on my record and its sufficiency for all the practical purposes of the biographer. But I haven’t the heart to stop him, for I know it forms his escape from grievous thoughts about himself which otherwise he could not bear.”

  “You mean his conviction of bribery, and his dishonor before the world; that heavy fine, which was the least of his burdens, and his deposition from the high office which he had held with such pride and splendor?”

  “No, no; not chiefly that. He settled with that when he owned it, saying, ‘I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defense.’”

  “But why not supremely that immeasurable fall?” I insisted. “Above all other great men — for he was one of the very greatest — he ‘loved the world and the world’s law’ of luxury and state and flattery. He crawled and truckled to those who could forward him, and he took their snubs and insults almost with thanks, as for so much condescension. He knew himself the sublimest intellect in the realm; why should he show himself the basest lickspittle in it to that old harridan Elizabeth and that slobbering pedant James, and his own ungracious kinsmen, their ministers?”

  “Ah, it’s a strange anomaly,” my companion answered. “He is a riddle that I don’t often attempt to read. But what I say is that he has long ago ceased to feel shame for his dishonor, but when he returns to earth the ingratitude and treachery he used toward those who trusted him are again an unquenched fire in his memory. He still writhes in pity of the poor man Aubrey, whose bribe he took and then pronounced ‘a killing decree’ against him. And his friend Essex, who enriched him with gifts and never tired of showing him good will and doing him good deeds, and whom he repaid by hunting him to his death and stopping every chance of mercy which the law might have left him — in the remembrance of Essex he suffers as if Essex would be living yet but for his pitiless pursuit. I don’t know how he bears it; and since he finds some little respite from his remembrance of the wrong he did by righting the little wrong which he thinks has been done me, I can’t deny it him.”

  “No, of course not,” I agreed, “but I could have wished that his argument had been a little less in the nature of special pleading.”

  “You mean in regard to that famous old saying of Hallam’s that ‘no letter of Shakespeare’s writing, no record of his conversation has been preserved?’ Why, I thought he met that fairly. People used not to keep their correspondents’ letters, and I was never a great correspondent. But the encyclopedist, whom he mainly followed in his argument, cites as to my conversation the interview my kinsman Thomas Greene had with me in London concerning the inclosure of the common lands, at Stratford and Welcombe; and there were other meetings with the friends of the scheme, when I told them distinctly that I ‘was not able to favor the inclosing of Welcombe.’ This is not only proof that I could and did talk with people and that they remembered it; but it ought to be remembered by those who imagine I cared nothing for the poor, that in these meetings I defended their interests and not mine, in opposing the fencing of the common lands.”

  There was more warmth of feeling in Shakespeare’s voice than he usually allowed to be felt in it; for the most part it was expressive of a kindly, if ironical humor, as though the matter in hand were not worth very serious consideration, though he liked playing with it. I was about to say that I was glad to have him express himself so decidedly, in this connection, when I was aware of being alone, and I pursued my way across the bridge and kept on in one of those rambles through the town which were mostly as aimless as they were eventless.

  CHAPTER IX

  IT was more than a week after we were placed in our pleasant hotel in Stratford before we began to look about us in the lovely country round. The town was enough, with its openness, its brightness, its smiling kindness; for the time we could not wish for anything more, and we never found anything better, though we found abundant beauty in the farms and villages of the Midland slopes and levels. Everything in Stratford was homelike, and nothing more so than the Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where we took our luncheon, with their blaze of a small flower garden behind and the little arbor at the kitchen door where you might have a table if you liked. The coffee was very good there, for a wonder in England, and the buttered brown-bread toast was an example to the scorched and refrigerated slices of cottage-loaf prevailing elsewhere on the island; and after ordering these it was pleasant to keep along Church Street past the low-roofed and timbered almshouses to the shop where first green gages and, after their season was past, large red Victoria plums were to be had. Such a crooked little shop, with half its stock in two unrelated windows, and the rest in baskets behind and under the counter that began elbowing you our of doors as soon as you got in, and ceased treading on breathless small boys with pennies in their hands, could have been rightly served only by two such scrupulous sisters, or at the worst sisters-in-law, who would not defraud us of a single plum in the half-pound. The fruit was grown, they said, in their own orchards just out of town, but which way we never understood, and it was in no wise related to the fruit of their next-door neighbor, as he, equally with themselves, assured us. We always hurried back to the Cochin-China with it lest the toast or the coffee should be cold; but it never was, for at noonday the little tables were all full, and the service, though reliable and smiling, was not eager. We had a table in the back room looking out on the kitchen arbor, and though we were but three we kept it against all comers till one overcrowded day a young German priest came in with three nuns, and looked so hopelessly at a three-chair table that we could not do less than offer him ours, which was for four chairs. They took it with such bows and thanks as ought to have made us ashamed, but only made us proud of our simple civility, and anxious to found a claim to acquaintance on it. We did not push, though I tried hard to believe that it was my duty to tell them I knew a little of the German they were speaking, and I only eavesdropped as hard as I could till a decent chance of warning them offered. I suppose that there are sometimes gayer parties of young people, but I have seldom heard more joyous and innocent laughte
r than that of those gentle sisters in their angelic flirtation with that handsome young priest. He could speak English, it seemed, from his constantly saying, “All right, all right,” and presently it seemed that the sisters could. All three of them were lovely and two were beautiful, and all three again were as glad as children; and none of the fashionable ladies we had left in London seemed so perfectly ladies as these dear sisters in their starched white coifs under their black veils and in their broadcloth robes falling round them in sculpturesque folds. When some offered courtesy broke what ice was left between us, the young priest was proud to tell us that the sisters were from a Catholic college in England, and he went further and said that the least young of the three was “a very learned sister.” This brought us somehow to the question, always rife at Stratford, of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and the sister was of such a decided mind upon it that she was not surprised so much as grieved to learn that the poor lady who first mooted it had died in a lunatic asylum.

  I could have wished that Shakespeare, and even Bacon, had been there to enjoy the learned sister’s rejection of the theory, but I saw neither of them for some time after that day at their riverside villa. In the mean time we saw a great many fellow-Americans, not indeed at the Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where they came very sparingly, but at our hotel, where they abounded, mostly in motors with the dust of hurried travel upon them. I suppose that the motor-face, of whatever nationality, is not engaging; but when its composite expression was added to the effect of something intense and almost fierce that seems to characterize our native physiognomy abroad, one could wish that it was not always so self-evidently American in those who wore it. If the automobile conditions are everywhere such as to rob the motorist’s presence of charm, to these compatriots’ hardness of face was added that peculiar stoniness of voice which is so often noticeable in us, and which made them as wounding to the ear as to the eye. They overwhelmingly outnumbered the English, who lurked apart in the hotel parlor while the Americans prevailed in the hallway. It must have been difficult for the English to bear this, and I heard two of them revenging themselves one day: “It seems to me I have heard that voice before.”