Part 7 (1/2)
Genius, says Mr. Morgan, ”did not guide Burns's untaught pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.” No! that was not Burns's lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote The Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his friend. The public of 1780-90 did not want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full of the mediaeval legends of Troy and Athens. But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the mediaeval legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, NOT of Homer, Will made his market. Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch's Lives; of Homer, he (or the author of Troilus and Cressida) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman's new translation (1598). For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton's Destruction of Troy, still reprinted as a POPULAR book as late as 1713. Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, ”reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and pa.s.sed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten. . . ” He bestowed the manners of mediaeval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks. He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.
Look at his notion of ”the very manners” of early post-Roman Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear! Concerning ”the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings” the author of Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith's bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends. The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of ”matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!”
Mon Dieu! do historians NOT treat of ”matters of curious research”
and of statutes and of treaties? As for ”old romances,” they were current and popular. The ”occult” sources of King Lear are a popular tale attached to legendary ”history” and a story in Sidney's Arcadia.
Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as ”a letterless peasant lad,” or the Author, whoever he was, is not ”invested with all the love” (sic, v.1. ”lore”), ”which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten.”
”Our friend's style has flowery components,” Mr. Greenwood adds to this deliciously eloquent pa.s.sage from his American author, ”and yet Shakespeare who did all this,” et caetera. But Shakespeare did NOT do ”all this”! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which ”Delphos” is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North's Plutarch, done out of the French; older plays, and the rest of it. Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle- plays to the State Papers. Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up ”clasped books, buried and forgotten.” There is no original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day.
Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence. And the common Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.
But Mr. Greenwood asks ”what was the poetic output?” in Burns's case.
{100a} It was what we know, and THAT was what suited his age and his circ.u.mstances. It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who pa.s.sed but one winter in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.
Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre.
I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all- pervading cla.s.sicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet of the cla.s.sics,--with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current popular Morte d'Arthur and Destruction of Troy.
I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that ”Genius is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and what it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it is a.s.sociated, and the opportunities that are open to it--in a word, on the circ.u.mstances of its environment.” {101a}
Of course by ”moral qualities,” a character without spot or stain is not intended: we may take that for granted. Otherwise, I agree; and think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that what it produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it, and with ”the circ.u.mstances of its environment.” Without the ”environment,” no Jeanne d'Arc,--without the environment, no Shakespeare.
To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of ”the light people,” the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the productions of their pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and, above all, the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers'
tales, the seamen's company, the vision of the Court, the gallants, the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak in the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly was. Not as an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple literary man, William does not like, though he thoroughly understands, the mob. Like Alceste (in Le Misanthrope of Poquelin), he might say,
”L'Ami du genre humain n'est point du tout mon fait.”
In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his mob. This reminds one to ask, how did the Court-haunting, or the study- haunting, or law-court, and chamber of criminal examination-rooms haunting Bacon make acquaintance with Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, and drawers, and carters, and Bardolph, and Pistol, and copper captains, and all Shakespeare's crowd of people hanging loose on the town?
It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone and manners of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely poetic and conventional), than to find out where Bacon got his immense knowledge of what is called ”low life.”
If you reply, as regards Bacon, ”his genius divined the Costards and Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and drawers, and Bardolphs, and carters, from a hint or two, a glance,” I answer that Will had much better sources for THEM in his own experience of life, and had conventional poetic sources for his courtiers--of whom, in the quick, he saw quite as much as Moliere did of his Marquis.
But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of accounting for Bacon's pictures of rude rustic life, and he is backed by Lord Penzance, that aged Judge. The way is short. These pictures of rural life and character were interpolated into the plays of Bacon by his collaborator, William Shakspere, actor, ”who prepared the plays for the stage.” This brilliant suggestion is borrowed from Mr.
Appleton Morgan. {103a}
Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it IS difficult to see how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects of character which he could scarcely draw ”from the life.” I am willing to ascribe miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians cited give the honour to the actor, ”who prepared the plays for the stage.”
Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe as I believe in ”Genius.” Shakespeare and Moliere did not live in ”Society,” though both rubbed shoulders with it, or looked at it over the invisible barrier between the actor and the great people in whose houses or palaces he takes the part of Entertainer. The rest they divined, by genius.
Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs.
Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not at Court, not in the study, did he meet them. How then did he create his mult.i.tude of very low-lived persons? Rustics and rural constables he MAY have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company. So you have to admit ”Genius,”--the miracle of ”Genius” in your Bacon,--to an even greater extent than I need it in the case of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will collaborated with Bacon.
Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very different genius, education, and environment. Burns could easily get at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics. Suppose him to be a poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist. Tradition at Stratford says something about the humorist, and tradition, IN SIMILAR CIRc.u.mSTANCES, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy years.
Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged to a.s.sume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney. Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so lightly as Burns did,--some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he a.s.sailed other deer, and was in troubles many. Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main chance. Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory. His opinion of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.
Something must be done! Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have seen and talked with them, and been attracted. He was a practical man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising a small brigade of boys as his deputies. According to Ben Jonson he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent, that terrible bar! The actors find that out; he is admitted within the house as a ”servitor”--a call-boy, if you like; an apprentice, if you please.
By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, ”Shakescene” thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene's three author friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.
Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say, five years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with the stage. Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a good deal of very mixed society--writing men, bookish young blades, young blades who haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the custom of the gallants.
What follows? Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps, after the play, if an actor seems to be good company. This is quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to stand aloof from any amusing company. They found it among prize- fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the fact that he was a lord. Moreover there were no women on the stage to distract the attention of the gallants. The players, says Asinius Lupus, in Jonson's Poetaster, ”corrupt young gentry very much, I know it.” I take the quotation from Mr. Greenwood. {106a} They could not corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate with them.