Shakespeare, with all his poor penmanship, with his proneness to poach, with his poverty and his neglect of his wife and his children, could write a play wherein the leading man and the man who played the bass drum in the orchestra did not claim to have made the principal part.
Shakespeare did not want his plays published. He wanted to keep them out of the press in order to prevent their use at spelling schools in the hands of unskilled artists, and so there was a long period of time during which the papers could not get hold of them for publication.
During this time Francis Bacon was in public life. He and Shakespeare had nothing in common. Both were great men, but Bacon's sphere was different from Shakespeare's, While Bacon was in the Senate, living high and courting investigation, Shakespeare had to stuff three large pillows into his pantaloons and play Falstaff at a one-night stand.
Is it likely that Bacon, breathing the perfumed air of the capitol and chucking the treasury girls under the chin ever and anon, hungered for the false joys of the under-paid and underscored dramatist? Scarcely!
That is one reason win I prefer to take the side of Shakespeare rather than the side of Bacon.
Mr. Donnelly's book shows keen research, and preserves the interest all the way through, for the reader is impressed all along with the idea that there is a hen on, if I may be permitted to coin a phrase; but so far my sympathies and kind regards go with Shakespeare. He was one of the Yeoman of Stratford, and his early record was against him; but where do poets usually come from? Do they first breathe in the immortal sentiments which, in after years, enable their names to defy the front teeth of oblivion while stopping at one of our leading hotels? Did Burns soak his system with the flavor and the fragrance of the Scotch heather while riding on an elevated train? Did any poet ever succeed in getting up close to Nature's great North American heart by studying her habits at a twenty-five dollar german? I trow not. Moreover, every one who studies the history of our great poets and orators will trow likewise. Lord Tennyson wrote better things before he tried to divide his attention between writing poetry and being a Lord. So I say that from our yeomanry frequently spring the boys whose rare old rural memories float in upon and chasten and refine their after-lives even when fame comes, and fills them full of themselves and swells their aching heads as they swoop gayly across the country in a special ear.
I do not go so far as some of the friends of Shakespeare, and say that while he was a lovely character and a great actor, that Bacon was a ham. I do not say that, for Bacon had his good points.
The thing that has done more to injure Shakespeare in the eyes of the historian than aught else, perhaps, was his seeming neglect of his wife. But we should consider both sides of the question before we pass judgment. The Hathaways were queer people, and Anne was unusually so. Her father snubbed her in his will just as her husband did, which shows that Mrs. Shakespeare was not highly esteemed even by her parents. The brief notice which Anne received in these two wills means a good deal, for there is nothing quite so thoroughly unanswerable as a probate snub.
Shakespeare in his own will gave to his wife his second-best bed, and that was all. When we remember that it was a bed that sagged in the middle, and that it operated by means of a bed-cord which had to be tightened and tuned up twice a week, and that the auger-holes in the bedstead seemed ever to mutely appeal for more powder from Persia's great powder magazine, we will be forced to admit that William did not passionately love his wife.
I know that Shakespeare has been severely criticised by the press for leaving his family at Stratford while he himself lived in London, only visiting home occasionally; but I am convinced that he found they could live cheaper in that way. Help in the house was very high at that time in London, and the intelligence offices were doing a very large business without giving very much intelligence. Friends of his told him that it was not only impossible to get enough help in the homes of London, but that there was hardly enough servants to prevent a panic in the Employment Bureaus. Seven, offices were in fact compelled to shut down for a half day at a time, one using the limited stock in the forenoon and the other in the afternoon.
Shakespeare was a perfect gentleman, having been made so by the Herald's College, which invested his father with coat armor. This coat armor made a gentleman of the elder Shakespeare, and as William's mother was already a gentleman under the code, William became one also both on his father's and on his mother's side. Of course all this is mere detail and is dull and uninteresting; but I refer to it to show that those who have read things in Shakespeare's works that they did not like, and who, therefore, say that he was no gentleman, do the great Bard an injustice.
I think I like Shakespeare's expurgated poems best, and I often wish that he had confined himself entirely to that kind. If I had a son who seemed to lean toward poesy and felt like twanging his lyre now and then, I would advise him to write expurgated poems exclusively.
I do not say that Shakespeare was the author of his own works, and it would not look well in me to set up my opinion in opposition to that of scholars, experts and savants who have had more advantages than I have, for I would never take advantage of any one; but I say that somehow the impression has crept into the papers that he was a pretty good little play-writer, and I am glad that Mr. Childs has had a testimonial made and sent over to England that will show an appreciation, at least, of his ability to keep before the people.
It will be noticed by the alert and keen-scented littérateur that I have carefully avoided treading on the tail of Mr. Donnelly's cipher. Being rather a poor mathematician anyway, I will not introduce the cipher at this time, but I will say that although the whole thing happened about three hundred years ago, and has now nearly passed out of my mind, to the best of my recollection Shakespeare, though he was the son of a buckwheater, and though he married his wife with a poetic license, and though he left his family at Stratford rather than take them to live in a London flat, wrote the most of his plays with the assistance of an expurgator who was out of the city most all of the time.
I cannot show Shakespeare's ready wit better at this time than by telling of his first appearance on the stage as I remember it. He came quietly before the footlights with a roll of carpet under one arm and a tack hammer under the other. In those days it was customtomary to nail down stage carpets, and while doing so "Shake," as we all called him then, knocked the nail off his left thumb, whereupon he received an ovation from the audience. Some men would have been rattled and would have "called up," as we say, but Shakespeare was always ready to please his friends or respond to an encore; so putting his right thumb up against a large painted rock in a mountain scene, he obliged by knocking off the other thumb-nail.
Shakespeare wrote the poem called "Venus and Adonis," during the absence of his expurgator, and sent it to the editor of the Stratford Appeal, who deadheaded the paper to him for a year and told him that he wished he would write up any other gossip that might come to his knowledge in that part of the country, especially if it promised to be spicy.
Shakespeare was one of the few Englishmen who never visited this country for two weeks, for the purpose of writing an eight pound book on his impressions of America.
CHESTNUT-BURR II—HOW THE GLORIOUS FOURTH WAS CELEBRATED AT WHALEN'S GROVE LAST YEAR.
An Oration by a Self-Made Man which had Bones in it—Suggestions of Deep Interest to Taxpayers—Freedom as it Suggests Itself to a Hickory Township Man—Our Duties to a Common Country.
There were patriotic remarks and greased-pig exercises at Whalen's Grove last year on the Fourth, all of which, according to the Sandy Mush Record-Statesman, passed off with marked success. From the opening prayer to the base-ball contest and greased-pole doings, everything was harmonious, and the receipts were satisfactory. Col. L. Forsyth Heeley acted as marshal of the day, wearing a maroon sash, and mounted on his well-known horse, Mambrino King. A serious accident in the early morning was happily averted by Col. Heeley's coolness and self-possession. A lady from Lower Hominy, whose name could not be ascertained, while actively