PART VI.--THE NEW THEORY, {290}A play called "Duke Humphrey," attributed

to Shakespeare, was amongst the dramatic manuscripts destroyed by the carelessness of Warburton's servant, in the early part of the last century, as appears by the list preserved in the British Museum--MS. Lans-downe, 849.

Leaving out these plays mentioned by Meres, we then have twenty-one entirely new plays, which never appeared in William Shakespeare's life, first appearing in Heminges and Condell's edition.

It appearing, then, that, of some forty-two plays credited to William Shakespeare during his lifetime, Heminges and Condell selected only twenty-five, and printed and hound up with those twenty-five nine plays which nobody had ever heard of in print or on the stage or anywhere else, until William Shakespeare had been dead and in his grave seven years, besides the "Othello," which was first heard of five years after his death: it follows either that Heminges and Condell knew that William Shakespeare was in the habit of allowing plays to be called by his name which he never wrote, or that Heminges and Condell's collection of "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, published according to the true original copies," is nothing more or less than a collection of plays written prior to the year 1623, and not earlier than the reign of Elizabeth. The Shakes-peareans may take either horn of the dilemma they please. "Pericles," one of the plays rejected by Heminges and Condell has since been restored to favor, and no editor now omits it. Surely, under the circumstances, we are justified in asking the question: "If William Shakespeare ever wrote any plays or {291}poems, which of the above did he write, and which are 'doubtful?5"

'Whether the hand that wrote the "Hamlet" also composed the "Fair Em;" or the classicist who produced the "Julius Cæsar" and the "Coriolanus" at about the same time achieved "The Merry Devil" and "The London Prodigal," is a question lying within that sacred, peculiar realm of "criticism" which has "established" and forever "proved" so many wonderful things about "our Shakespeare"--a realm beyond our purview in these papers, and wherein we should be a trespasser. Fortunately, however, the question has been settled for us by those to whom criticism is not ultra vies, and may safely be said to be at rest now and forever. The burden of the judgment of the whole critical world is of record that the only true canon of "William Shakespeare" consists of the plays first brought together in one book by Heminges and Condell, plus the "Pericles;" and that certain of the above-mentioned plays, known to have been published under the name of William Shakespeare are "spurious;" that, during the lifetime of William Shakespeare, and in the city where he dwelt--under his very nose, that is to say--divers and sundry plays did appear from time to time which he did not write, but which he fathered. Whether, in pure philanthrophy and charity, he regarded these as little Japhets in search of a father, and so, pitying their abandoned and derelict condition, assumed their paternity, or, whether he took advantage of their bastardy for mere selfish and ill-gotten gain, the critical world find it unprofitable to speculate. But there can be no reasonable doubt that, in London in {292}the days of Elizabeth, in the name of "William Shakespeare" there was much the same sort of common trade-mark as exists, in Cologne, in the days of Victoria, in the name "Jean Maria Farina"--that it was at everybody's service. And if William Shakespeare farmed ont his name to playwrights, just as the only original Farina farms out his to makers of the delectable water of Cologne, wherein shall we find fault? If, two hundred years after, a lesser Sir Walter of Abbotsford, be acquitted of moral obliquity in denying his fatherhood of "Waverly," for the sake of the offspring, surely the elastic ethics of authorship, for the sale of the great book, will stretch out far enough to cover the case of a Shakespeare, who neither affirmed nor denied, but only held his peace! William Shakespeare, at least in the days when Lord Coke lays that a play-actor was, in contemplation of law, a vagabond and a tramp, * never had to shift for his living. He always had money to spend, and money to lend, in the days when we know many of his contemporaries in the theatrical and dramatic line were "in continued and utter extremity, willing to barter exertion, name, and fame for the daily dole that gets the daily dinner. ** Of all the co-managers--and, among them, one Burbage was the Booth or Forrest of his day--William Shakespeare is the only one whose pecuniary success enables him to retire to become a landed gentleman with a purchased "Esquire" to his name.

* "The fatal end," he says, "of these fire is beggary--the alchiemyst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer, and the poetaster." A "play-actor," he elsewhere affirms, was a fit subject for the grand jury, as a "vagrant."

** "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852. p. 88.

{293}No wonder Robert Greene, a well-known contemporary actor, but "who led the skeltering life peculiar to his trade! and who had either divined or shared the secret of the "Shakespearean" dramas, raised his voice in warning of the masquerade in borrowed plumes! Was William Shakespeare a shrewd masquerader, who covered his tracks so well that the search for a fragment of Shakespearean manuscript or holograph, which has been as thorough and ardent as ever was search for the philosopher's stone, has been unable to unearth them? Certainly no scrap or morsel has been found. The explanation of all this mystery, according to the New Theory, is of very little value, except in so far as it throws light upon what otherwise seems inexplicable, namely, that these magnificent philosophical dramas (which are more precious in our libraries as text-book and poems than as stage shows wherewith to pass an idle evening in our enlightened day) should have been popular with the coarse audiences of the times from which they date. Rut, if, to conceal their real authors, these magnificent productions were simply sent out under a name that was at every body's disposal, the discovery is of exceeding interest. From the lofty masterpiece of the "Hamlet" to what M. Taine calls "a debauch of imagination... which no fair and frail dame in London should be without" *--the "Venus and Adonis"--it was immaterial what they printed as his, so this William Shakespeare earned his fee for his silence. As for young Southampton--then just turned of nineteen--his part in the covert work of the {294}junta might, and, indeed, seems to have been, the accepting of the famous dedication.

* Crawley, quoted by Taine, "English Literature," book ii.,