Numbers in bold brackets [] indicate original page numbers.
The Stratfordian View
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[64] We may now summarize the results of our examination of the middle or London period of William Shakspere's career.
1. He was purely passive in respect to all the publication which took place under his name.
2. There is the greatest uncertainty respecting the duration of his sojourn in London and the strongest probability that he was actually resident at Stratford whilst the plays were being published.
3. Nothing is known of his doings in London, and there is much mystery concerning his place of residence there.
4. After Greene's attack and Chettle's apology the "man" and the "actor" was ignored by contemporaries.
5. Before the printing of the dramas began in 1598 contemporary references were always to the poet - the author of "Venus" and "Lucrece" - never to the dramatist.
6. Only after 1598, the date when plays were first printed with "Shakespeare's" name, are there any contemporary references to him as a dramatist.
7. The public knew "Shakespeare" in print, but knew nothing of the personality of William Shakspere.
8. The sole anecdote recorded of him is rejected by the general consensus of authorities, and even the contemporary currency of this anecdote is consistent with the idea of his being personally unknown.
9. He has left no letter or trace of personal intercourse with any London contemporary or public man. He received no letter from any patron or literary man. The only letter known to have been sent to him was concerned solely with the borrowing of money. [65]
10. Edmund Spenser quite ignores him.
11. Although the company with which his name is associated toured frequently and widely in the provinces, and much has been recorded of their doings, no municipal archive, so far as is known, contains a single reference to him.
12. There is no contemporary record of his ever appearing in a "Shakespeare" play.
13. The only plays with which as an actor his name was associated during his lifetime are two of Ben Jonson's plays.
14. The accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber show only one irregular reference to him three years before the period of his greatest fame, and none at all during or after that period.
15. The Lord Chamberlain's Books, which would have furnished the fullest records of his doings during these years, are, like the "Shakespeare" manuscripts, missing.
16. His name is missing from the following records of the Lord Chamberlain's company in which other actors' names appear:
(1) The cast of Jonson's "Every Man out of his Humour" in which all the other members of the company appear.
(2) The record of proceedings respecting the Essex Rebellion and the company.
(3) The company's attendance on the Spanish Ambassador in 1604.
(4) The company's litigation in 1612.
(5) The company's participation in the installation of the Prince of Wales.
(6) References to the burning of the Globe Theatre.
(17) Even rumour assigns him only an insignificant role as an actor.
[66] We must now ask the reader to bring all these various considerations carefully into focus, and see them in their natural relationship to one another. He ought to have no difficulty in realizing that so completely negative a record is altogether inconsistent with the career William Shakspere is supposed to have enjoyed. We place him above Edmund Spenser as a poet, yet Spenser's biography is no mere tissue of learned fancies and generous conjectures. We place him above Jonson as a writer of plays, yet Jonson's literary life and social relationships make up a very real and tangible biography. We attempt to class him with Burbage as an actor, yet Burbage is a very living and substantial figure in the history of the English stage. But he, the one man who is supposed to have combined in a remarkable way the powers and vocations of all three; the contemporary of Spenser: the protégé of the Burbages - for we are now told it was they who discovered and brought out Shakspere - the idol of Jonson, and the greatest genius that has appeared in English literature, leaves behind in all literary and dramatic concerns but the elusive and impalpable record we have been considering.
The genial spirit of Spenser kept pouring itself out in verse until crushing disaster came upon him, and death approached: his last verses indeed seem to have been written with death before his eyes. To the end Ben Jonson kept writing and publishing: his last and posthumous work being the expression of his latest thoughts. The central figure on the English stage at the time when Richard Burbage died was Burbage himself. But William Shakspere, possessed of a genius so compelling as to have raised him from a level quite below his literary contemporaries to a height far above them, abandons his vocation at the age of forty, retires to the uncultured atmosphere of Stratford, devotes his powers to land, houses, malt and money, leaving unfinished literary masterpieces in the hands of actors and theatre managers to be finished by the pens of strangers; [67] ultimately dying in affluence but in total dissociation from everything that has made his name famous.
Had the work attributed to him been merely average literature, his record, once grasped in its ensemble, would have justified the strongest doubts as to the genuineness of his claims. Being what it is, however, the unique character of the work, and the record, equally unique but opposite in character, justifies the complete rejection of his pretensions. To borrow Emerson's metaphor on the subject, we "cannot marry" the life record to the literature. We are compelled, therefore, to make a very clear separation between the writer "Shakespeare" and the man William Shakspere. As soon as this is done we are able to coordinate this middle period of the life of William Shakspere with the two extremes we have previously considered. We thus arrive at the conception of a man of very ordinary powers and humble purposes, the three parts of whose career become perfectly homogeneous. In the place of the tremendous mass of Stratfordian incongruities and impossibilities, we get a sane and consistent idea of a man in natural relationship with human experience and normal probabilities - a man who played a part and had his reward. His motives were no doubt like those of the average amongst us, a mixture of high and low; and, seeing that no one else was being injured by the subterfuge, he might, if he were capable of apprizing the work justly, have felt honoured in being trusted by "Shakespeare" in furthering his literary purposes. But that he was himself the author of the great poems and dramas stands altogether outside the region of natural probabilities, and he must now yield for the adornment of a worthier brow the laurels he has worn so long.