Complete Plays, The (82 page)

There are two speeches of Prospero, in particular, where the reader is inclined to believe he is listening to Shakespeare's own voice. In one, Prospero puts a sudden end to his pageant of the spirits, and compares life itself to the transitory play. In the other, Prospero bids farewell to his magic art. These are often interpreted as Shakespeare's own farewell to the stage and to his art,—with what justification every reader must decide for himself.

In this last play there is, it should be said, not the slightest hint of a weakening of the poetic or the dramatic faculty. The falling in love of Miranda, the wonderful and wondering child of purity and nature; the tempting of Sebastian by the crafty Antonio; and the creation of Caliban, half-man, half-devil, with his elemental knowledge of nature, and his dull cunning, and his stunted faculties,—all these are the work of  a genius still in the full pride of power. Shakespeare's dramatic work ends suddenly, "like a bright exhalation in the evening."

Date
.—Edmund Malone's word, unsupported by other evidence, puts the play as already in existence in the autumn of 1611. The play certainly is later than the wreck of Somers's ship, in 1609. It was acted during the marriage festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, when other plays were revived.

Sources
.—Two accounts by Sylvester Jourdan and William Strachey told, soon after the event, of the casting away upon the Bermuda Islands of a ship belonging to the Virginia expedition of Somers in 1609. From these Shakespeare drew for many details. His island, however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land. Other details have been traced from various sources. Ariel is a name of a spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne's
Essays
, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's
History of Travaile
(1577). The rest of the story, which is nine-tenths of the whole, is probably Shakespeare's own, though the central theme of an exiled prince, whose daughter marries his enemy, who has an attendant spirit, and who through magic compels the captive prince to carry logs, may come from some old folk tale; since a German play,
Die Schöne Sidea
, by Jakob Ayrer of Nuremberg (died 1605), possesses all these details. The relations, if any, between the two plays are remote.

The Life of Henry the Eighth
, the last of the historical plays, in date of composition as in the history it pictures, suffers from the very fact that it boasts in its second title,
All is True
. The play might have been built around any one of the half-dozen persons which in turn claim our chief interest,—Buckingham, Queen Katherine, Anne Bullen; the King, Wolsey, or  Cranmer; but fidelity to history, while it did not hinder some slight alteration of incident and time, required that each of these should in turn be distinguished, if a complete picture of the times of Henry VIII were to be given. The result was a complete abandonment of anything like unity of theme.

It is, of course, a disappointment to one who has just read
I Henry IV
. On the other hand, this play may be regarded as a kind of pageant, as the word is used nowadays in England and America. It presents, in the manner of a modern pageant, a series of brilliant scenes telling of Buckingham's fall, of Wolsey's triumph and ruin, of Katherine's trial and death, of Anne Bullen's coronation, and of Cranmer's advancement, joined together by the well-drawn character of the King, powerful, masterful, selfish, and vindictive, but not without a suggestion of better qualities. The gayety of the Masque, in the first act, where King Henry first meets Anne Bullen, is also in perfect harmony with the modern pageant, which always employs music and dancing as aids to the picture.

In Queen Katherine we have a suffering and wronged woman, gifted with queenly grace and dignity, and with strong sympathies and a keen sense of justice. From her first entrance, when she ventures, Esther-like, into the presence of the king to intercede for an oppressed people, through all her vain struggle against the King's wayward inclination and the Cardinal's wiles, up to the very moment when she is stricken with mortal illness, she holds our sympathy. If in her great trial scene she is weaker and more impulsive than Hermione in hers, yet the circumstances are  different; she is not keyed up to so high an endeavor as that lady, nor in so much danger for herself or her children.

Authorship
.—Differences in style and meter, and the fragmentary quality of the whole play have long confirmed the theory that Shakespeare in
Henry VIII
engaged in a very loose sort of collaboration. Only the Buckingham scene (I, i,), the scenes of Katherine's entrance and trial (I, ii, II, iv), a brief scene of Anne Bullen (II, iii), and the first half of the scene in which Wolsey's schemes are exposed and Henry alienated from him (III, i, 1-203) are confidently ascribed to Shakespeare. The rest of the play fits best the style and metrical habit of John Fletcher, at this time one of the most popular dramatists of London.

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.

S
CENE
IV. T
HE
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

The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
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?