Chapter 10

QUESTIONS OF AUTHENTICITY

Owing to the conditions of publication described in Chapter VII there are questions as to the authenticity of a number of the poems and plays ascribed to Shakespeare. Of the poems, "The Ph[oe]nix and the Turtle" and "A Lover's Complaint" have been sometimes rejected as unworthy, but there is no other evidence against the ascription to him by the original publishers. The case of _The Passionate Pilgrim_ is different and is interesting as illustrating the methods of piracy practised by booksellers and as affording the only record of a protest by Shakespeare against the free use which they made of his name. This anthology was published by W. Jaggard in 1599 as "by W. Shakespeare." The third edition in 1612 added two pieces by Thomas Heywood. Heywood immediately protested and in the postscript to his _Apologie for Actors_, 1612, declared that Shakespeare was "much offended with M. Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name." Of the twenty poems that made up the volume, only five are certainly by Shakespeare, two appearing also in _The Sonnets_ and three in _Love's Labour's Lost_. Six others can be assigned to contemporary poets. The authorship of the remaining nine is unknown, but probably only one or two are by Shakespeare.

[Page Heading: The Shakespeare Apocrypha]

In addition to the thirty-seven plays now included in all editions of Shakespeare, some forty others have been, for one reason or another, attributed to him. The First Folio contained thirty-six plays; and it is a strong evidence of the honesty and information of its editors, Heming and Condell, that subsequent criticism has been satisfied to retain the plays of their choice and to make but one addition, _Pericles_. Of these plays, however, it is now generally agreed that a number are not entirely the work of Shakespeare, but were written by him in part in collaboration with other writers, _e.g._, _Titus Andronicus_, _1_, _2_, and, _3 Henry VI_, _Timon of Athens_, _Pericles_, and _Henry VIII_. Of two of these, _Titus Andronicus_ and _1 Henry VI_, some students refuse to give Shakespeare any share. Of the forty doubtful plays, there is not one which in its entirety is now credited to Shakespeare; and only three or four in which any number of competent critics see traces of his hand. Only in the case of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ is there any weight of evidence or opinion that he had a considerable share.

The second Folio kept to the thirty-six plays of the First Folio; but the second printing of the third Folio (1664) added seven plays: _Pericles Prince of Tyre_, _The London Prodigal_, _The History of Thomas Lord Cromwell_, _Sir John Oldcastle_, _Lord Cobham_, _The Puritan Widow_, _A Yorkshire Tragedy_, _The Tragedy of Locrine_. These seven plays were also included in the fourth Folio, and as supplementary volumes to Rowe's, Pope's, and some later editions. They were all originally published in quarto as by W. S., or William Shakespeare, but except in the case of _Pericles_, this has been regarded as a bookseller's mistake or deception without warrant. _Locrine_, "newly set forth, overseen, and corrected by W. S., 1595," is a play of about the date of _Titus Andronicus_, and is probably by Greene, Peele, or some imitator of Marlowe and Kyd. _Sir John Oldcastle_ appeared in 1600 in two quartos, one of which ascribed it to William Shakespeare, but it was clearly composed for the Admiral's men as a rival to the Falstaff plays which the Chamberlain's men had been acting. _Thomas Lord Cromwell_ (1602) and _The Puritan_ (1607) were ascribed to W. S., on their title-pages, but offer no possible resemblances to Shakespeare. _The London Prodigal_ (1605) and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ (1608) were both acted by Shakespeare's company, and bore his name on their first editions, and the latter also on a second edition, 1619. The external evidence for his authorship is virtually the same as in the case of _Pericles_, which also was acted by his company, appeared under his name during his lifetime, but was rejected by the editors of the First Folio. No one, however, can discover any suggestion of Shakespeare in _The London Prodigal_. _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ is a domestic tragedy in one act, dealing with a contemporary murder. It gives the conclusion of a story also treated in a play, _The Miseries of Enforced Marriage_ (1607) by George Wilkins, the author of a novel _The Painful Adventures of Pericles_, and sometimes suggested as a collaborator on the play _Pericles_. _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ is very unlike Shakespeare, but it has a few passages of extraordinarily vivid prose, which might conceivably owe something to him.

[Page Heading: The Two Noble Kinsmen]

_The Two Noble Kinsmen_ was registered April 8, 1634, and appeared in the same year with the following title-page "The Two Noble Kinsmen: Presented at the Blackfriars by the Kings Maiesties servants, with great applause: Written by the memorable Worthies of their time;

Mr. John Fletcher, and } } Gent. Mr. William Shakespeare}

Printed at London by the Tho. Cotes for Iohn Waterson; and are to be sold at the signe of the Crowne in Paul's Church-yard. 1634." The exclusion of the play from the First Folio may be explained on the same basis as the exclusion of _Pericles_; for in each play Shakespeare wrote the minor part. There is now general agreement that _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ was written by two authors with distinct styles, and that the author of the larger portion is Fletcher. The attribution of the non-Fletcherian part to Shakespeare has been upheld by Lamb, Coleridge, De Quincey, Spalding (in a notable Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, 1833), Furness, and Littledale (who edited the play for _The New Shakespeare Society_, Series II, 1, 8, 15, London, 1876-1885); but there are still many critics who do not believe that Shakespeare had any part in the play. This question will probably always remain a matter of opinion; but the evidence of various verse tests confirms esthetic judgment in assigning about two fifths of the verse to Shakespeare. The Shakespearean portion, here and there possibly touched by Fletcher, includes, I. i; I. ii; I. iii; I. iv. 1-28; III. i; III. ii; V. i. 17-73; V. iii. 1-104; V. iv, and perhaps the prose II. i and IV. iii.

The dance in the play is borrowed from an anti-masque in Beaumont's _Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn_, presented at court, February 20, 1613. This fixes the date of composition for the play in 1613, the same year as _Henry VIII_, on which it is now generally agreed that Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborated. On both of the plays the collaboration seems to have been direct; _i.e._, after making a fairly detailed outline, each writer took certain scenes, and, to all intents, completed these scenes after his own fashion.

One other play must be mentioned in connection with _The Two Noble Kinsmen_. _Cardenio_, entered on the Stationers' Register, 1653, was described as "by Fletcher and Shakespeare." It seems probably identical with a _Cardenno_ acted at court by the King's men in May, 1613, and a _Cardenna_ in June, 1613. Attempts have been made to connect it with _Double Falsehood_, assigned to Shakespeare by Theobald on its publication in 1728.

[Page Heading: Last Ascriptions]

Other non-extant plays ascribed to Shakespeare after 1642 require no attention, nor do a number of Elizabethan plays assigned to him in certain of their later quartos. Among these are _The Troublesome Reign of King John_, on which Shakespeare's _King John_ was based; _The First Part of The Contention_, and (the Second Part) _The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York_ (versions of _2 Henry VI_ and _3 Henry VI_); and _The Taming of a Shrew_, the basis of Shakespeare's play. The relation of Shakespeare's plays to these earlier versions is discussed in the introductions to the respective volumes of the Tudor Shakespeare. Other plays assigned, without grounds, to Shakespeare by late seventeenth-century booksellers are _The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Arraignment of Paris, Fair Em, Mucedorus_, and _The Birth of Merlin_.

A few other anonymous plays have been ascribed to Shakespeare by modern critics. Of chief note are _Arden of Feversham_, 1592, first attributed to Shakespeare by Edward Jacob in 1770; _Edward III_, 1596, included with other false attributions to Shakespeare in a bookseller's list of 1659, and edited and assigned to Shakespeare by Capell in 1760; _Sir Thomas More_, an old play of about 1587, preserved in manuscript until edited by Dyce in 1844 and assigned to Shakespeare by Richard Simpson in 1871. There is no evidence for the ascription of various portions of these plays to Shakespeare, except that certain passages seem to some critics characteristic of him. But at the date when the three plays were written his style had not attained its characteristic individuality; and the assignment of these anonymous plays to any particular author neglects the obvious fact that many writers of that period present similar traits of versification and imagery. The attribution to Shakespeare of the Countess of Salisbury episode in _Edward III_, parts of the insurrection scenes in _Sir Thomas More_, and a few passages in _Arden of Feversham_ has scarcely any warrant beyond the enthusiastic admiration of certain critics for these passages.

Thus only one play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha has any considerable claim to admission into the canon. The evidence for his participation in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ is about as strong as in _Pericles_, and the part assigned to him is fairly comparable with his contribution to _Henry VIII_.

An account of the Shakespeare Apocrypha is, however, incomplete without reference to the forgeries of documents or plays. Theobald published _Double Falsehood_ in 1728, as based on a seventeenth-century manuscript which he conjectured to be by Shakespeare. John Jordan, a resident of Stratford, forged the will of Shakespeare's father, and probably some other papers in his _Collections_, 1780; William Henry Ireland, with the aid of his father, produced in 1796 a volume of forged papers purporting to relate to Shakespeare's career, and on April 2, 1796, Sheridan and Kemble presented at Drury Lane the tragedy of _Vortigern_, really by Ireland, but said by him to have been found among Shakespeare's manuscripts. Ireland was exposed by Malone, and he published a confession of his forgeries in 1805. More skilful and far more disturbing to Shakespearean scholarship are the forgeries of John Payne Collier, extending over a period from 1835 to 1849. These included manuscript corrections in a copy of the second Folio, and many documents concerning the biography of Shakespeare and the history of the Elizabethan theater. These forgeries have vitiated many of Collier's most important publications, as his _Memoirs of Edward Alleyn_, and _History of English Dramatic Poetry_.

[Page Heading: Forgeries]

We turn now from attempts to increase Shakespeare's writings to an extraordinary effort to deny him the authorship of all his plays. Doubts on this score seem to have been raised by Joseph C. Hart in his _Romance of Yachting_, 1848, and by an article in _Chambers' Journal_, August 7, 1852. In 1856, Mr. W. H. Smith first proposed Bacon's authorship in a letter to Lord Ellesmere, "Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakespeare's plays?" These were followed by an article by Miss Delia Bacon in _Putnam's Monthly_, 1856, and a volume, _The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare unfolded by Delia Bacon_. Since Miss Bacon's book, her hypothesis has resulted in the publication of hundreds of volumes and pamphlets supporting many variations of the theory. Some are content to view the authorship as a mystery, assigning the plays to an unknown author. Others attribute the authorship to a club of distinguished men, or to Sir Anthony Shirley, or the Earl of Rutland, or another. Others give Bacon only a portion of the plays, as those containing many legal terms. The majority, however, are thoroughgoing "Baconians," and the most prodigious cases of misapplied ingenuity have been the efforts to find in the First Folio a cipher, by which certain letters are selected which proclaim Bacon's authorship; as _The Great Cryptogram_, 1887, by Ignatius Donnelly, and _The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon_, 1900, by Mrs. Gallup. Such cyphers are mutually destructive, and their absurdity has been repeatedly demonstrated. Either they will not work without much arbitrary manipulation, or they work too well and are found to indicate Bacon's authorship of literature written before his birth and after his death. Yet similar 'discoveries' continue to be announced.

The evidences supporting Shakespeare's authorship have been set forth sufficiently in this volume and offer no basis for an attitude of skepticism. A few considerations may be recalled as correctives for a partial or mistaken reading of the evidence. (1) Though the records of Shakespeare's life are meager, they are fuller than for any other Elizabethan dramatist. Indeed we know little of the biography of any men of the sixteenth century unless their lives affected church or politics and hence found preservation in the records. There is no 'mystery' about Shakespeare. (2) Records amply establish the identity between Shakespeare the actor and the writer. Moreover, the plays contain many words and phrases natural to an actor, many references to the actor's art, and show a wide and detailed knowledge of the ways and peculiarities of the theater. (3) The extent of observation and knowledge in the plays is, indeed, remarkable, but it is not accompanied by any indication of thorough scholarship, or a detailed connection with any profession outside of the theater, or a profound knowledge of the science or philosophy of the time. (4) The law terms are numerous, and usually correct, but do not establish any great knowledge of the law. Elizabethan London was full of law students who were among frequent patrons of the theater. Through acquaintance with these gentlemen Shakespeare might have readily acquired all the law that he displays. Moreover Shakespeare had an opportunity to gain a considerable familiarity with the law through the frequent litigations in which he and his father were concerned. (5) The dedication, commendatory poems, and address to the readers prefixed to the First Folio ought in themselves to be sufficient to remove the skepticism as to Shakespeare's authorship.

[Page Heading: The "Baconian" Question]

The following considerations apply to the attribution to Bacon, so far as that rests on any tangible basis: (1) Sir Tobie Matthews writes in a letter to Bacon, written some time later than January, 1621, "The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another." The sentence probably refers to Father Thomas Southwell, a Jesuit, whose real surname was Bacon. There is nothing to connect it with Shakespeare. (2) The parallelisms between passages in Shakespeare and Bacon deal with phrases in common use and fail to establish any connection between the two men. (3) The few surviving examples of Bacon's verse suggest no ability as a poet. (4) Bacon's life is well known, and it offers no hint of connection with the theaters and no space in its crowded annals for the production of Shakespeare's plays. In fact, if we had to find an author for Shakespeare's plays among writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Bacon would be about the last person conceivable.