Part 1

Transcribed from the 1891 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email [email protected]

CITATION AND EXAMINATION OF William Shakspeare

EUSEBY TREEN JOSEPH CARNABY AND SILAS GOUGH CLERK

BEFORE THE WORSHIPFUL

SIR THOMAS LUCY KNIGHT

TOUCHING DEER-STEELING

_On the Nineteenth Day of September in the Year of Grace 1582_

NOW FIRST PUBLISHED FROM ORIGINAL PAPERS

TO WHICH IS ADDED

A Conference of Master Edmund Spenser A GENTLEMAN OF NOTE WITH THE EARL OF ESSEX TOUCHING THE STATE OF IRELAND A.D. 1595

BY WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1891

EDITOR’S PREFACE.

“IT was an ancestor of my husband who _brought out_ the famous Shakspeare.”

These words were really spoken, and were repeated in conversation as most ridiculous. Certainly such was very far from the lady’s intention; and who knows to what extent they are true?

The frolic of Shakspeare in deer-stealing was the cause of his _Hegira_; and his connection with players in London was the cause of his writing plays. Had he remained in his native town, his ambition had never been excited by the applause of the intellectual, the popular, and the powerful, which, after all, was hardly sufficient to excite it. He wrote from the same motive as he acted,—to earn his daily bread. He felt his own powers; but he cared little for making them felt by others more than served his wants.

The malignant may doubt, or pretend to doubt, the authenticity of the _Examination_ here published. Let us, who are not malignant, be cautious of adding anything to the noisome mass of incredulity that surrounds us; let us avoid the crying sin of our age, in which the “Memoirs of a Parish Clerk,” edited as they were by a pious and learned dignitary of the Established Church, are questioned in regard to their genuineness; and even the privileges of Parliament are inadequate to cover from the foulest imputation—the imputation of having exercised his inventive faculties—the elegant and accomplished editor of Eugene Aram’s apprehension, trial, and defence.

Indeed, there is little of real history, excepting in romances. Some of these are strictly true to nature; while histories in general give a distorted view of her, and rarely a faithful record either of momentous or of common events.

Examinations taken from the mouth are surely the most trustworthy. Whoever doubts it may be convinced by Ephraim Barnett.

The Editor is confident he can give no offence to any person who may happen to bear the name of Lucy. The family of Sir Thomas became extinct nearly half a century ago, and the estates descended to the Rev. Mr. John Hammond, of Jesus College, in Oxford, a respectable Welsh curate, between whom and him there existed at his birth eighteen prior claimants. He took the name of Lucy.

The reader will form to himself, from this “Examination of Shakspeare,” more favourable opinion of Sir Thomas than is left upon his mind by the dramatist in the character of Justice Shallow. The knight, indeed, is here exhibited in all his pride of birth and station, in all his pride of theologian and poet; he is led by the nose, while he believes that nobody can move him, and shows some other weaknesses, which the least attentive observer will discover; but he is not without a little kindness at the bottom of the heart,—a heart too contracted to hold much, or to let what it holds ebulliate very freely. But, upon the whole, we neither can utterly hate nor utterly despise him. Ungainly as he is.—

Circum præcordia ludit.

The author of the “Imaginary Conversations” seems, in his “Boccacio and Petrarca,” to have taken his idea of _Sir Magnus_ from this manuscript. He, however, has adapted that character to the times; and in _Sir Magnus_ the coward rises to the courageous, the unskilful in arms becomes the skilful, and war is to him a teacher of humanity. With much superstition, theology never molests him; scholarship and poetry are no affairs of his. He doubts of himself and others, and is as suspicious in his ignorance as Sir Thomas is confident.

With these wide diversities, there are family features, such as are likely to display themselves in different times and circumstances, and some so generically prevalent as never to lie quite dormant in the breed. In both of them there is parsimony, there is arrogance, there is contempt of inferiors, there is abject awe of power, there is irresolution, there is imbecility. But Sir Magnus has no knowledge, and no respect for it. Sir Thomas would almost go thirty miles, even to Oxford, to see a fine specimen of it, although, like most of those who call themselves the godly, he entertains the most undoubting belief that he is competent to correct the errors of the wisest and most practised theologian.

EDITOR’S APOLOGY.

A PART only of the many deficiencies which the reader will discover in this book is attributable to the Editor. These, however, it is his duty to account for, and he will do it as briefly as he can.

The _fac-similes_ (as printers’ boys call them, meaning _specimens_) of the handwriting of nearly all the persons introduced, might perhaps have been procured had sufficient time been allowed for another journey into Warwickshire. That of Shakspeare is known already in the signature to his will, but deformed by sickness; that of Sir Thomas Lucy is extant at the bottom of a commitment of a female vagrant, for having a sucking child in her arms on the public road; that of Silas Gough is affixed to the register of births and marriages, during several years, in the parishes of Hampton Lucy and Charlecote, and certifies one death,—Euseby Treen’s; surmised, at least, to be his by the letters “E. T.” cut on a bench seven inches thick, under an old pollard-oak outside the park paling of Charlecote, toward the northeast. For this discovery the Editor is indebted to a most respectable, intelligent farmer in the adjoining parish of Wasperton, in which parish Treen’s elder brother lies buried. The worthy farmer is unwilling to accept the large portion of fame justly due to him for the services he has thus rendered to literature in elucidating the history of Shakspeare and his times. In possession of another agricultural gentleman there was recently a very curious piece of iron, believed by many celebrated antiquaries to have constituted a part of a knight’s breast-plate. It was purchased for two hundred pounds by the trustees of the British Museum, among whom, the reader will be grieved to hear, it produced dissension and coldness; several of them being of opinion that it was merely a gorget, while others were inclined to the belief that it was the forepart of a horse-shoe. The Committee of Taste and the Heads of the Archæological Society were consulted. These learned, dispassionate, and benevolent men had the satisfaction of conciliating the parties at variance,—each having yielded somewhat and every member signing, and affixing his seal to the signature, that, if indeed it be the forepart of a horse-shoe, it was probably Ismael’s,—there being a curved indentation along it, resembling the first letter of his name, and there being no certainty or record that he died in France, or was left in that country by Sir Magnus.

The Editor is unable to render adequate thanks to the Rev. Stephen Turnover for the gratification he received in his curious library by a sight of Joseph Carnaby’s name at full length, in red ink, coming from a trumpet in the mouth of an angel. This invaluable document is upon an engraving in a frontispiece to the New Testament. But since unhappily he could procure no signature of Hannah Hathaway, nor of her mother, and only a questionable one of Mr. John Shakspeare, the poet’s father,—there being two, in two very different hands,—both he and the publisher were of opinion that the graphical part of the volume would be justly censured as extremely incomplete, and that what we could give would only raise inextinguishable regret for that which we could not. On this reflection all have been omitted.

The Editor is unwilling to affix any mark of disapprobation on the very clever engraver who undertook the sorrel mare; but as in the memorable words of that ingenious gentleman from Ireland whose polished and elaborate epigrams raised him justly to the rank of prime minister,—

“White was not _so very_ white,”—

in like manner it appeared to nearly all the artists he consulted that the sorrel mare was not _so sorrel_ in print.

There is another and a graver reason why the Editor was induced to reject the contribution of his friend the engraver; and this is, a neglect of the late improvements in his art, he having, unadvisedly or thoughtlessly, drawn in the old-fashioned manner lines at the two sides and at the top and bottom of his print, confining it to such limits as paintings are confined in by their frames. Our spirited engravers, it is well-known, disdain this thraldom, and not only give unbounded space to their scenery, but also melt their figures in the air,—so advantageously, that, for the most part, they approach the condition of cherubs. This is the true aërial perspective, so little understood heretofore. Trees, castles, rivers, volcanoes, oceans, float together in absolute vacancy; the solid earth is represented, what we know it actually is, buoyant as a bubble, so that no wonder if every horse is endued with all the privileges of Pegasus, save and except our sorrel. Malicious carpers, insensible or invidious of England’s glory, deny her in this beautiful practice the merit of invention, assigning it to the Chinese in their tea-cups and saucers; but if not absolutely new and ours, it must be acknowledged that we have greatly improved and extended the invention.

Such are the reasons why the little volume here laid before the public is defective in those decorations which the exalted state of literature demands. Something of compensation is supplied by a Memorandum of Ephraim Barnett, written upon the inner cover, and printed below.

The Editor, it will be perceived, is but little practised in the ways of literature; much less is he gifted with that prophetic spirit which can anticipate the judgment of the public. It may be that he is too idle or too apathetic to think anxiously or much about the matter; and yet he has been amused, in his earlier days, at watching the first appearance of such few books as he believed to be the production of some powerful intellect. He has seen people slowly rise up to them, like carp in a pond when food is thrown into it; some of which carp snatch suddenly at a morsel, and swallow it; others touch it gently with their barb, pass deliberately by, and leave it; others wriggle and rub against it more disdainfully; others, in sober truth, know not what to make of it, swim round and round it, eye it on the sunny side, eye it on the shady, approach it, question it, shoulder it, flap it with the tail, turn it over, look askance at it, take a pea-shell or a worm instead of it, and plunge again their heads into the comfortable mud. After some seasons the same food will suit their stomachs better.

EXAMINATION, ETC., ETC.

ABOUT one hour before noontide the youth WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, accused of deer-stealing, and apprehended for that offence, was brought into the great hall at Charlecote, where, having made his obeisance, it was most graciously permitted him to stand.

The worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, seeing him right opposite, on the farther side of the long table, and fearing no disadvantage, did frown upon him with great dignity; then, deigning ne’er a word to the culprit, turned he his face toward his chaplain, Sir Silas Gough, who stood beside him, and said unto him most courteously, and unlike unto one who in his own right commandeth,—

“Stand out of the way! What are those two varlets bringing into the room?”

“The table, sir,” replied Master Silas, “upon the which the consumption of the venison was perpetrated.”

The youth, William Shakspeare, did thereupon pray and beseech his lordship most fervently, in this guise:—

“Oh, sir! do not let him turn the tables against me, who am only a simple stripling, and he an old codger.”

But Master Silas did bite his nether lip, and did cry aloud,—

“Look upon those deadly spots!”

And his worship did look thereupon most staidly, and did say in the ear of Master Silas, but in such wise that it reached even unto mine,

“Good honest chandlery, methinks!”

“God grant it may turn out so!” ejaculated Master Silas.

The youth, hearing these words, said unto him,—

“I fear, Master Silas, gentry like you often pray God to grant what _he_ would rather not; and now and then what _you_ would rather not.”

Sir Silas was wroth at this rudeness of speech about God in the face of a preacher, and said, reprovingly,—

“Out upon thy foul mouth, knave! upon which lie slaughter and venison.”

Whereupon did William Shakspeare sit mute awhile, and discomfited; then turning toward Sir Thomas, and looking and speaking as one submiss and contrite, he thus appealed unto him:—

“Worshipful sir! were there any signs of venison on my mouth, Master Silas could not for his life cry out upon it, nor help kissing it as ’twere a wench’s.”

Sir Thomas looked upon him with most lordly gravity and wisdom, and said unto him, in a voice that might have come from the bench:

“Youth, thou speakest irreverently;” and then unto Master Silas: “Silas! to the business on hand. Taste the fat upon yon boor’s table, which the constable hath brought hither, good Master Silas! And declare upon oath, being sworn in my presence, first, whether said fat do proceed of venison; secondly, whether said venison be of buck or doe.”

Whereupon the reverend Sir Silas did go incontinently, and did bend forward his head, shoulders, and body, and did severally taste four white solid substances upon an oaken board; said board being about two yards long, and one yard four inches wide,—found in, and brought thither from, the tenement or messuage of Andrew Haggit, who hath absconded. Of these four white solid substances, two were somewhat larger than a groat, and thicker; one about the size of King Henry the Eighth’s shilling, when our late sovereign lord of blessed memory was toward the lustiest; and the other, that is to say the middlemost, did resemble in some sort, a mushroom, not over fresh, turned upward on its stalk.

“And what sayest thou, Master Silas?” quoth the knight.

In reply whereunto Sir Silas thus averred:—

“Venison! o’ my conscience! Buck! or burn me alive!

The three splashes in the circumference are verily and indeed venison; buck, moreover,—and Charlecote buck, upon my oath!”

Then carefully tasting the protuberance in the centre, he spat it out, crying,—

“_Pho_! _pho_! _villain_! _villain_!” and shaking his fist at the culprit.

Whereat the said culprit smiled and winked, and said off-hand,—

“Save thy spittle, Silas! It would supply a gaudy mess to the hungriest litter; but it would turn them from whelps into wolvets. ’T is pity to throw the best of thee away. Nothing comes out of thy mouth that is not savoury and solid, bating thy wit, thy sermons, and thy promises.”

It was my duty to write down the very words, irreverent as they are, being so commanded. More of the like, it is to be feared, would have ensued, but that Sir Thomas did check him, saying, shrewdly,—

“Young man! I perceive that if I do not stop thee in thy courses, thy name, being involved in thy company’s, may one day or other reach across the county; and folks may handle it and turn it about, as it deserveth, from Coleshill to Nuneaton, from Bromwicham to Brownsover. And who knoweth but that, years after thy death, the very house wherein thou wert born may be pointed at, and commented on, by knots of people, gentle and simple! What a shame for an honest man’s son! Thanks to me, who consider of measures to prevent it! Posterity shall laud and glorify me for plucking thee clean out of her head, and for picking up timely a ticklish skittle, that might overthrow with it a power of others just as light. I will rid the hundred of thee, with God’s blessing!—nay, the whole shire. We will have none such in our county; we justices are agreed upon it, and we will keep our word now and forevermore. Woe betide any that resembles thee in any part of him!”

Whereunto Sir Silas added,—

“We will dog him, and worry him, and haunt him, and bedevil him; and if ever he hear a comfortable word, it shall be in a language very different from his own.”

“As different as thine is from a Christian’s,” said the youth.

“Boy! thou art slow of apprehension,” said Sir Thomas, with much gravity; and taking up the cue, did rejoin,—

“Master Silas would impress upon thy ductile and tender mind the danger of evil doing; that we, in other words that justice is resolved to follow him up, even beyond his country, where he shall hear nothing better than the Italian or the Spanish, or the black language, or the language of Turk or Troubadour, or Tartar or Mongol. And, forsooth, for this gentle and indirect reproof, a gentleman in priest’s orders is told by a stripling that he lacketh Christianity! Who then shall give it?”

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

“Who, indeed? when the founder of the feast leaveth an invited guest so empty! Yea, sir, the guest was invited, and the board was spread. The fruits that lay upon it be there still, and fresh as ever; and the bread of life in those capacious canisters is unconsumed and unbroken.”

SIR SILAS (_aside_).

“The knave maketh me hungry with his mischievous similitudes.”

SIR THOMAS.

“Thou hast aggravated thy offence, Wil Shakspeare! Irreverent caitiff! is this a discourse for my chaplain and clerk? Can he or the worthy scribe Ephraim (his worship was pleased to call me worthy) write down such words as those, about litter and wolvets, for the perusal and meditation of the grand jury? If the whole corporation of Stratford had not unanimously given it against thee, still his tongue would catch thee, as the evet catcheth a gnat. Know, sirrah, the reverend Sir Silas, albeit ill appointed for riding, and not over-fond of it, goeth to every house wherein is a venison feast for thirty miles round. Not a buck’s hoof on any stable-door but it awakeneth his recollections like a red letter.”

This wholesome reproof did bring the youth back again to his right senses; and then said he, with contrition, and with a wisdom beyond his years, and little to be expected from one who had spoken just before so unadvisedly and rashly,—

“Well do I know it, your worship! And verily do I believe that a bone of one being shovelled among the soil upon his coffin would forthwith quicken {8a} him. Sooth to say, there is ne’er a buckhound in the county but he treateth him as a godchild, patting him on the head, soothing his velvety ear between thumb and forefinger, ejecting tick from tenement, calling him ‘fine fellow,’ ‘noble lad,’ and giving him his blessing, as one dearer to him than a king’s debt to a debtor, {8b} or a bastard to a dad of eighty. This is the only kindness I ever heard of Master Silas toward his fellow-creatures. Never hold me unjust, Sir Knight, to Master Silas. Could I learn other good of him, I would freely say it; for we do good by speaking it, and none is easier. Even bad men are not bad men while they praise the just. Their first step backward is more troublesome and wrenching to them than the first forward.”

“In God’s name, where did he gather all this?” whispered his worship to the chaplain, by whose side I was sitting. “Why, he talks like a man of forty-seven, or more!”

“I doubt his sincerity, sir!” replied the chaplain. “His words are fairer now—”

“Devil choke him for them!” interjected he, with an undervoice.

“—and almost book-worthy; but out of place. What the scurvy cur yelped against me, I forgive him as a Christian. Murrain upon such varlet vermin! It is but of late years that dignities have come to be reviled. The other parts of the Gospel were broken long before,—this was left us; and now this likewise is to be kicked out of doors, amid the mutterings of such mooncalves as him yonder.”

“Too true, Silas!” said the knight, sighing deeply. “Things are not as they were in our glorious wars of York and Lancaster. The knaves were thinned then,—two or three crops a year of that rank squitch-grass which it has become the fashion of late to call the people. There was some difference then between buff doublets and iron mail, and the rogues felt it. Well-a-day! we must bear what God willeth, and never repine, although it gives a man the heart-ache. We are bound in duty to keep these things for the closet, and to tell God of them only when we call upon his holy name, and have him quite by ourselves.”

Sir Silas looked discontented and impatient, and said, snappishly,—

“Cast we off here, or we shall be at fault. Start him, sir!—prithee, start him.”

Again his worship, Sir Thomas, did look gravely and grandly, and taking a scrap of paper out of the Holy Book then lying before him, did read distinctly these words:—

“Providence hath sent Master Silas back hither, this morning, to confound thee in thy guilt.”

Again, with all the courage and composure of an innocent man, and indeed with more than what an innocent man ought to possess in the presence of a magistrate, the youngster said, pointing toward Master Silas,—

“The first moment he ventureth to lift up his visage from the table, hath Providence marked him miraculously. I have heard of black malice. How many of our words have more in them than we think of! Give a countryman a plough of silver, and he will plough with it all the season, and never know its substance. ’T is thus with our daily speech. What riches lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of the poorest and most ignorant! What flowers of Paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from having been daily trodden on! O, sir, look you!—but let me cover my eyes! Look at his lips! Gracious Heaven! they were not thus when he entered. They are blacker now than Harry Tewe’s bull-bitch’s!”

Master Silas did lift up his eyes in astonishment and wrath; and his worship, Sir Thomas, did open his wider and wider, and cried by fits and starts:—

“Gramercy! true enough! nay, afore God, too true by half! I never saw the like! Who would believe it? I wish I were fairly rid of this examination,—my hands washed clean thereof! Another time,—anon! We have our quarterly sessions; we are many together. At present I remand—”

And now, indeed, unless Sir Silas had taken his worship by the sleeve, he would may-hap have remanded the lad. But Sir Silas, still holding the sleeve and shaking it, said, hurriedly,—

“Let me entreat your worship to ponder. What black does the fellow talk of? My blood and bile rose up against the rogue; but surely I did not turn black in the face, or in the mouth, as the fellow calls it?”

Whether Master Silas had some suspicion and inkling of the cause or not, he rubbed his right hand along his face and lips, and, looking upon it, cried aloud,—

“Ho, ho! is it off? There is some upon my finger’s end, I find. Now I have it,—ay, there it is. That large splash upon the centre of the table is tallow, by my salvation! The profligates sat up until the candle burned out, and the last of it ran through the socket upon the board. We knew it before. I did convey into my mouth both fat and smut!”