Date.—The Globe Theater was burned on June 29, 1613, when a play called Henry VIII or All is True was being performed. So far as stylistic tests can decide, this was not long after the composition of the play. Sir Henry Wotton, the antiquarian, writing from hearsay knowledge, says that the play being acted at the time of the fire was "a new play called All is True." Shakespeare's scenes in this drama may thus have been his last dramatic work. A praise of King James in the last scene was probably written not later than the rest of the play, and thus insures a date later than 1603. The earliest print of the play was the First Folio, 1623.
Source.—Holinshed was the chief source. Halle furnished certain details. Foxe's Book of Martyrs tells the Cranmer story.
CHAPTER XIV
FAMOUS MISTAKES AND DELUSIONS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
The mystery which enwraps so much of Shakespeare's life, combined with the interest which naturally centers around a great genius, is ideally calculated to stimulate human imagination to fantastic guess-work. It is probably for this reason that a number of famous delusions about Shakespeare have at different times arisen. Some of these are of sufficient importance to deserve attention. Three widely different types of mistakes can be observed.
The Shakespeare Apocrypha.—The most excusable of these delusions was the belief that Shakespeare wrote a large number of plays which are now known to be the work of other men. Some of these plays were printed, either during the poet's life or after his death, with "William Shakespeare" or "W. S." on the title-page. It is now practically certain that the full name was a printer's forgery, and that the letters W. S. were either designed to deceive or else the initials of some contemporary dramatist (such as Wentworth Smith, for example). Six of these spurious dramas were included in the Third Folio of Shakespeare's complete works. Since this came out forty years after the First Folio, when men who had known Shakespeare personally were dead, we certainly cannot believe that its editor had better information than those of the First Folio, who were the poet's personal friends, and who did not include these plays. The spurious dramas printed in the Third Folio were: The London Prodigal, The History of the Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The History of Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Tragedy of Locrine.
Among the other plays imputed to Shakespeare at various times are: Fair Em, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Feversham, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward Third, and Sir Thomas More. Some good critics, chiefly literary men, not scholars, still believe that Shakespeare wrote parts of the last three; but it is practically certain that he had nothing to do with the others, and his part in all these disputed plays is extremely doubtful.
Shakespearean Forgeries.—Men who assigned the above spurious plays to Shakespeare made an honest error of judgment, but other men have committed deliberate forgeries in regard to him. At the end of the eighteenth century, W. H. Ireland forged papers which he attempted to impose on the public as recently discovered Mss. of the 'Swan of Avon.' One of these finds, a play called Vortigern, was actually acted by a prominent company. But the unShakespearean character of these 'great discoveries' was soon perceived, and Ireland at length confessed.
Another famous fraud of a wholly different kind was that of J. P. Collier. The great services which this man has rendered to the world of scholarship make all men reluctant to pass too severe censure on his conduct; but it is only fair that the public should be warned against deception. He pretended to have found a folio copy of the plays corrected and revised on the margin in the handwriting of a contemporary of Shakespeare. Some of these revisions were actual improvements on the carelessly printed text; but it is now known that they were forgeries. Similar changes were made by him in other important documents, and were for some time accepted as genuine.
The Bacon Controversy.—During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the contention was started that Shakespeare was merely an obscure actor who never wrote a line, and that the Shakespearean plays were actually written by his great contemporary, Francis Bacon, who was pleased to let these products of his own genius appear under the name of another man. This delusion is usually considered as beginning with an article by Miss Delia Bacon in Putnam's Monthly (January, 1856), although the idea had been twice suggested during the eight years preceding.
The Baconian arguments fall into four groups. First, they argue that there is no proof to establish the identity of Shakespeare, the actor, with the author of the plays. This is untrue. We have more than one reference by his contemporaries, identifying the actor with the poet, some so strong that the Baconians themselves can explain them away only by assuming that the writer is speaking in irony or that he willfully deceives the public. By assumptions like that, any one could prove anything.
The second point of the Baconians is that a man of Shakespeare's limited education could not have written plays replete with so many kinds of learning. This argument is weak at both ends. It assumes as true that Shakespeare had a limited education and that his plays are full of knowledge learned from books rather than from life. The first of these points rests on vague tradition only, and the second is still a debatable question. But even if we admit these two points, what then? Shakespeare was twenty-nine years old and had probably lived in London for five or six years when the first book from his hand appeared in its present form. Any man capable of writing Hamlet could educate himself during several years in the heart of a great city.
Thirdly, a certain lady found in Bacon's writings a large number of expressions which seemed to her to resemble similar phrases in Shakespeare. Except to the mind of an ardent Baconian many of these show no likeness whatever. Most of those which do show any likeness were proverbial or stock expressions which can be found in other writers.
Lastly, various Baconians have repeatedly asserted that they had found in the First Folio acrostic signatures of Bacon's name; that one could spell Bacon or Francis Bacon by picking out letters in the text according to certain rules. But unfortunately either these acrostics do not work out, or else the rules are so loose that similar acrostics can be found anywhere, in modern books or pamphlets, and even on the gravestones of our ancestors. Many of the more intelligent Baconians themselves have no faith in this last form of evidence.
On the other hand, there are certain very weighty objections to Bacon as author of the plays. In the first place, it is a miracle that one man should produce either the works of Bacon or Shakespeare alone; it is a miracle past all belief that the same man in one lifetime should have written both. In the second place, the little verse which Bacon is known to have written shows clearly how limited he was as a poet, no matter how great in other directions. Moreover, his prose, though splendid in its kind, is wholly unlike the prose of Shakespeare. Finally, Bacon's contemptuous attitude toward woman and marriage was diametrically opposed to that found in Shakespeare. To imagine that the same man wrote both sets of writings is to assume that he was one man one day and another the next.
The advocates of this strange theory vary greatly in fairmindedness and ability, and it is not just to judge them all by the mad extremes of some; but, nevertheless, their writings, taken as a whole, form one of the strangest medleys of garbled facts and fallacious reasoning which has ever imposed on an honest and intelligent but uninformed public.
SCENE IV. THE PLATFORM.
Enter Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus
Hamlet
The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.
Horatio
It is a nipping and an eager air.
Hamlet
What hour now?
Horatio
I think it lacks of twelve.
Hamlet
No, it is struck.
Horatio
Indeed? I heard it not: then it draws near the season
Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.
A flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off, within
What does this mean, my lord?
Hamlet
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
Horatio
Is it a custom?
Hamlet
Ay, marry, is’t:
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour’d in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and tax’d of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As, in their birth — wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin —
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’er-leavens
The form of plausive manners, that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star,—
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo —
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault: the dram of eale
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.
Horatio
Look, my lord, it comes!
Enter Ghost
Hamlet
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?
Ghost beckons Hamlet
Horatio
It beckons you to go away with it,
As if it some impartment did desire
To you alone.
Marcellus
Look, with what courteous action
It waves you to a more removed ground:
But do not go with it.
Horatio
No, by no means.
Hamlet
It will not speak; then I will follow it.
Horatio
Do not, my lord.
Hamlet
Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life in a pin’s fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?
It waves me forth again: I’ll follow it.
Horatio
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
Hamlet
It waves me still.
Go on; I’ll follow thee.
Marcellus
You shall not go, my lord.
Hamlet
Hold off your hands.
Horatio
Be ruled; you shall not go.
Hamlet
My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve.
Still am I call’d. Unhand me, gentlemen.
By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!
I say, away! Go on; I’ll follow thee.
Exeunt Ghost and Hamlet
Horatio
He waxes desperate with imagination.
Marcellus
Let’s follow; ’tis not fit thus to obey him.
Horatio
Have after. To what issue will this come?
Marcellus
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Horatio
Heaven will direct it.
Marcellus
Nay, let’s follow him.
Exeunt
SCENE V. ANOTHER PART OF THE PLATFORM.
Enter Ghost and Hamlet
Hamlet
Where wilt thou lead me? speak; I’ll go no further.
Ghost
Mark me.
Hamlet
I will.
Ghost
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.
Hamlet
Alas, poor ghost!
Ghost
Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
Hamlet
Speak; I am bound to hear.
Ghost
So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.
Hamlet
What?
Ghost
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love —
Hamlet
O God!
Ghost
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
Hamlet
Murder!
Ghost
Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
Hamlet
Haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge.
Ghost
I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear:
’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown.
Hamlet
O my prophetic soul! My uncle!
Ghost
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,—
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce!— won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen:
O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!
From me, whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made to her in marriage, and to decline
Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor
To those of mine!
But virtue, as it never will be moved,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
And prey on garbage.
But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air;
Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
And with a sudden vigour doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine;
And a most instant tetter bark’d about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,
All my smooth body.
Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch’d:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head:
O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,
Complete Plays, The Page 65
