Part 12 (1/2)
. . ” Davenant was notoriously the main link between ”the first and second Temple,” the theatre of Shakespeare whom, as a boy, he knew, and the Restoration theatre. Devoted to the traditions of the stage, he collected Shakespearean and other anecdotes; he revived the theatre, cautiously, during the last years of Puritan rule, and told his stories to the players of the early Restoration. As his Book- keeper with the Duke of York's Company, Downes heard what Davenant had to tell; he also, for his Roscius Anglica.n.u.s, had notes from Charles Booth, prompter at Drury Lane. On May 28, 1663, Davenant reproduced Hamlet, with young Betterton as the Prince of Denmark.
Davenant, says Charles Booth, ”had seen the part taken by Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, and Taylor had been instructed by the author, (not Bacon but) ”Mr. William Shakespeare,” and Davenant ”taught Mr. Betterton in every particle of it.” Mr. Elton adds, ”We cannot be sure that Taylor was taught by Shakespeare himself. He is believed to have been a member of the King's Company before 1613, and to have left it for a time before Shakespeare's death.” {201a} His name is in the list in the Folio of ”the princ.i.p.all Actors in all these plays,” but I cannot pretend to be certain that he played in them in Will's time.
It is Mr. Pepys (December 30, 1668) who chronicles Davenant's splendid revival of Henry VIII, in which Betterton, as the King, was instructed by Sir William Davenant, who had it from old Mr. Lowen, that had his instruction ”from Mr. Shakespear himself.” Lowin, or Lowen, joined Shakespeare's Company in 1604, being then a man of twenty-eight. Burbage was the natural man for Hamlet and Henry VIII; but it is not unusual for actors to have ”understudies.”
The stage is notoriously tenacious of such traditions.
When we come with you to Mr. W. Fulman, about 1688, and the additions to his notes made about 1690-1708, we are concerned with evidence much too remote, and, in your own cla.s.sical style, ”all this is just a little mixed.” {201b} With what Mr. Dowdall heard in 1693, and Mr.
William Hall (1694) heard from a clerk or s.e.xton, or other illiterate dotard at Stratford, I have already dealt. I do not habitually believe in what I hear from ”the oldest aunt telling the saddest tale,”--no, not even if she tells a ghost story, or an anecdote about the presentation by Queen Mary of her portrait to the ancestor of the Laird,--the portrait being dated 1768, and representing her Majesty in the bloom of girlhood. Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on Betterton's information), in 1709, about Shakespeare's schooling; nor for what Dr. Furnivall said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody said that Sir John Mennes (Menzies?) said. But I do care for what Ben Jonson and Shakespeare's fellow-actors said; and for what his literary contemporaries have left on record. But this evidence you explain away by aetiological guesses, absolutely modern, and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not more valuable as history than other explanatory myths.
What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was men's impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their knowledge, if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often bad reprints, in quartos, of about half of the plays. Men also had Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly, and I do not wonder at it. Of the genius of Shakespeare England could form no conception, till the publication of the Folio (1623), not in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in 1664.
The engouement about the poet, the search for personal details, did not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty years after 1664--and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless.
What could have been picked up, by 1680-90, about Bacon at Gorhambury, or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.
CHAPTER XI: THE FIRST FOLIO
”The First Folio” is the name commonly given to the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. The volume includes a Preface signed by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait. The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the a.s.sent of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.
The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The t.i.tle-page says that ALL the contents are published ”according to the true original copies.” If ONLY MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by MSS. The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), {207a} speaking in the name of the two actors who sign it. They say that Shakespeare's friends ”have collected and published” the plays, have so published them ”that whereas you were abus'd with divers stolne and surrept.i.tious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: EVEN THOSE” (namely, the pieces previously ill-produced by pirates) ”are now offered to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and ALL THE REST” (that is, all the plays which had not been piratically debased), ”absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them.” So obscure is the Preface that not ALL previously published separate plays are explicitly said to be stolen and deformed, but ”DIVERS stolen copies” are denounced. Mr.
Pollard makes the same point in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, p. 2 (1909).
Now, as a matter of fact, while some of the quarto editions of separate plays are very bad texts, others are so good that the Folio sometimes practically reprints them, with some tinkerings, from ma.n.u.scripts. Some quartos, like that of Hamlet of 1604, are excellent, and how they came to be printed from good texts, and whether or not the texts were given to the press by Shakespeare's Company, or were sold, or stolen, is the question. Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds almost certain, that ”we have strong prima facie evidence that the sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the Stationers' Registers was regulated by their lawful owners.”
{208a}
The Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately printed texts were good, but says that ”divers” of them were stolen and deformed. My view of the meaning of the Preface is not generally held. Dr. H. H. Furness, in his preface to Much Ado about Nothing (p. vi), says, ”We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare a.s.sert in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the Author's ma.n.u.scripts, and in the same breath denounce the Quartos as stolen and surrept.i.tious.” I cannot see, I repeat, that the Preface denounces ALL the Quartos. It could be truly said that DIVERS stolen and maimed copies had been foisted on ”abused” purchasers, and really no more IS said. Dr. Furness writes, ”When we now find them using as 'copy' one of these very Quartos” (Much Ado about Nothing, 1600), ”we need not impute to them a wilful falsehood if we suppose that in using what they knew had been printed from the original text, howsoever obtained, they held it to be the same as the ma.n.u.script itself . . . ” That WAS their meaning, I think, the Quarto of Much Ado had NOT been ”maimed” and ”deformed,” as divers other quartos, stolen and surrept.i.tious, had been.
Shakspere, unlike most of the other playwrights, was a member of his Company. I presume that his play was thus the common good of his Company and himself. If they sold a copy to the press, the price would go into their common stock; unless they, in good will, allowed the author to pocket the money.
It will be observed that I understand the words of the Preface otherwise than do the distinguished Editors of the Cambridge edition.
They write, ”The natural inference to be drawn from this statement”
(in the Preface) ”is that ALL the separate editions of Shakespeare's plays were 'stolen,' 'surrept.i.tious' and imperfect, AND THAT ALL THOSE PUBLISHED IN THE FOLIO WERE PRINTED FROM THE AUTHOR'S OWN Ma.n.u.sCRIPTS” (my italics). The Editors agree with Dr. Furness, not with Mr. Pollard, whose learned opinion coincides with my own.
Perhaps it should be said that I reached my own construction of the sense of this pa.s.sage in the Preface by the light of nature, before Mr. Pollard's valuable book, based on the widest and most minute research, came into my hands. By the results of that research he backs his opinion (and mine), that some of the quartos are surrept.i.tious and bad, while others are good ”and were honestly obtained.” {210a} The Preface never denies this; never says that all the quartos contain maimed and disfigured texts. The Preface draws a distinction to this effect, ”even those” (even the stolen and deformed copies) ”are now cured and perfect in their limbs,”--that is, have been carefully edited, while ”ALL THE REST” are ”absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” This does not allege that all the rest are printed from Shakespeare's own holograph copies.
Among the plays spoken of as ”all the rest,” namely, those not hitherto published and not deformed by the fraudulent, are, Tempest, Two Gentlemen, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All's Well, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, Henry VI, iii., Henry VIII, Coriola.n.u.s, Timon, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. Also Henry VI, i., ii., King John, and Taming of the Shrew, appeared now in other form than in the hitherto published Quartos bearing these or closely similar names. We have, moreover, no previous information as to The Shrew, Timon, Julius Caesar, All's Well, and Henry VIII. The Preface adds the remarkable statement that, whatever Shakespeare thought, ”he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
It is plain that the many dramas previously unpublished could only be recovered from ma.n.u.scripts of one sort or another, because they existed in no other form. The Preface takes it for granted that the selected ma.n.u.scripts contain the plays ”absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” But the Preface does not commit itself, I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed from Shakespeare's own handwriting. After ”as he conceived them,” it goes on, ”Who, as he was a most happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
This may be meant to SUGGEST, but does not AFFIRM, that the actors HAVE ”all the rest” of the plays in Shakespeare's own handwriting.
They may have, or may have had, some of his ma.n.u.scripts, and believed that other ma.n.u.scripts accessible to them, and used by them, contain his very words. Whether from cunning or design, or from the Elizabethan inability to tell a plain tale plainly, the authors or author of the Preface have everywhere left themselves loopholes and ways of evasion and escape. It is not possible to pin them down to any plain statement of facts concerning the sources for the hitherto unpublished plays, ”the rest” of the plays.
These, at least, were from ma.n.u.script sources which the actors thought accurate, and some may have been ”fair copies” in Shakespeare's own hand. (Scott, as regards his novels, sent his prima cura, his first writing down, to the press, and his pages are nearly free from blot or erasion. In one case at least, Sh.e.l.ley's first draft of a poem is described as like a marsh of reeds in water, with wild ducks, but he made very elegant fair copies for the press.) Let it be supposed that Ben Jonson wrote all this Preface, in accordance with the wishes and instructions of the two actors who sign it. He took their word for the almost blotless MSS. which they received from Shakespeare. He remarks, in his posthumously published Discoveries (notes, memories, brief essays), ”I remember the players have OFTEN mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line.” And Ben gives, we shall later see, his habitual reply to this habitual boast.
As to the sources of such plays as had been ”maimed and deformed by injurious impostors,” and are now ”offered cur'd and perfect of their limbs,” ”it can be proved to demonstration,” say the Cambridge Editors, ”that several plays in the Folio were printed from earlier quarto editions” (but the players secured a retreat on this point), ”and that in other cases the quarto is more correctly printed, or from a better ma.n.u.script than the Folio text, and therefore of higher authority.” Hamlet, in the Folio of 1623, when it differs from the quarto of 1604, ”differs for the worse in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better in twenty places.”
Can the wit of man suggest any other explanation than that the editing of the Folio was carelessly done; out of the best quartos and MSS. in the theatre for acting purposes, and,--if the players did not lie in what they ”often said,” and if they kept the originals,--out of some MSS. received from Shakspere? Whether the two players themselves threw into the press, after some hasty botchings, whatever materials they had, or whether they employed an Editor, a very wretched Editor, or Editors, or whether the great Author, Bacon, himself was his own Editor, the preparation of a text was infamously done. The two actors, probably, I think, never read through the proof-sheets, and took the word of the man whom they employed to edit their materials, for gospel. The editing of the Folio is so exquisitely careless that twelve printer's errors in a quarto of 1622, of Richard III, appear in the Folio of 1623. Again, the Merry Wives of the Folio, is nearly twice as long as the quarto of 1619, yet keeps old errors.
How can we explain the reckless retention of errors, and also the large additions and improvements? Did the true author (Bacon or Bungay) now edit his work, add much matter, and go wrong forty-seven times where the quarto was right, and go right twenty times when the quarto was wrong? Did he, for the Folio of 1623, nearly double The Merry Wives in extent, and also leave all the errors of the fourth quarto uncorrected?