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THE SEARCH AND DISCOVERY
"Time's glory is to calm contending Kings,
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light."
(Lucrece 135)[105] AT this point I must ask for the reader's indulgence for a change in the method of exposition. What must be now stated is so purely a personal experience, that it will facilitate matters if, even at the risk of apparent egotism, I adopt frankly the First Person Singular. Perhaps, in view of certain admissions it will be necessary to make, it may become evident that there could be little ground for any egotism. At all events, the mode of presentation seems essential to the argument, and that, it appears to me, is all the justification it requires.
In accordance with the plan upon which the investigation had been instituted, the author had been characterized from an examination of his works. The next step was to proceed to search for him. The method of search was to select from the various features some one which, by furnishing a crucial test and standard of measurement, would afford the surest guidance. Now, if there had been any likelihood of his having left other dramas under his own name, this would certainly have been the best line to follow. A little reflection, however, soon convinced me that not much was to be hoped for in this direction; for already the experts have been able to discriminate to a very large extent between what is really his and what is not his, in writings that, for centuries, had been regarded as pure Shakespearean work; and this process is going on [106] progressively as the distinctive qualities of his work are being more clearly perceived. Consequently, had whole plays of his existed elsewhere it is natural to suppose that they would have been recognized before now.
The point which promised to be most fruitful in results, supposing he had left other traces of himself, was his lyric poetry. The reasons for this choice have already been indicated in the chapter in which the lyric powers of Shakespeare are discussed. It was, therefore, to the Elizabethan lyric poets that I must go.
This decision marked the second stage in the enquiry; I must now proceed to the third and most important, namely, the actual work of searching for the author.
Whether the scantiness of my own knowledge of this department of literature at the time was a hindrance or a help it is impossible now to say positively. Certainly, it was the very imperfection of my knowledge that decided the method of search, and this, along with a fortunate chance, was the immediate cause of whatever success has been achieved. In addition to "Shakespeare's" works, parts of Edmund Spenser's and Philip Sidney's poems were all that I could claim to know of Elizabethan poetry at the time. Beyond this I had only a dim sense of a vast, rich literary region that I had not explored, but in which a number of names were indiscriminately scattered.
To plunge headlong into this unexplored domain in search of a man, who, on I poetic grounds alone — for that I deemed to be essential - might be selected as the possible author of the world's greatest dramas, seemed, at first, a well-nigh hopeless task. The only way was to compensate, if possible, my lack of knowledge by the adoption of some definite system. What was possibly a faulty piece of reasoning served at this point in good stead. I argued that when he entered upon the path of anonymity, wherein he had done his real life's work, he had probably ceased altogether to publish in his own name; and that, dividing his [107] work into two parts, we should find the natural point of contact between the two, the point, therefore, at which discovery was most likely to take place, just where his anonymous work begins. Now the poet himself comes to our aid at this juncture. He calls his "Venus and Adonis," published in 1593, under the name of William Shakespeare, "the first heir of my invention" (see the dedication to the Earl of Southampton). I must, therefore, try to work from this poem, to the work of some lyric writer of the same period.
Turning to this "first heir" I read a number of stanzas with a vague idea that the reading might suggest some line of action. As I read, with the thought uppermost in my mind of it being an early work, kept in manuscript for some years and now published for the first time, I soon came to feel that the expression "first heir" was to be interpreted somewhat relatively; being possibly the first work of any considerable size: whereas the writer had as a matter of fact already become a practised hand in the particular form of stanza he employed. Except for the fact that "Shakespeare" has proved too blinding a light for most men's eyes we should long ago have rejected the idea that he actually "led off" on his literary career with so lengthy and finished a work as "Venus and Adonis." At any rate the facility with which he uses the particular form of stanza employed in this poem pointed to his having probably used it freely in shorter lyrics. I decided, therefore, to work, first of all, on the mere form of the stanza. This may appear a crude and mechanical way of setting about an enquiry of this kind. It was, at any rate, a simple instrument and needed little skill in handling. All that was necessary was to observe the number and length of the lines — six lines, each of ten syllables — and the order of the rhymes: alternate rhymes for the first four lines, the whole finishing with a rhymed couplet.
[108] With this in mind I turned to an anthology of sixteenth-century poetry, and went through it, marking off each piece written in the form of stanza identical with that employed by Shakespeare in his "Venus and Adonis." They turned out to be much fewer than I had anticipated. These I read through several times, familiarizing myself with their style and matter, rejecting first one and then another as being unsuitable, until at last only two remained. One of these was anonymous; consequently I was left ultimately with only one: the following poem on "Women," by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford — the only poem by this author given in the anthology and also the only poem of his, as I afterwards noticed, that Palgrave gives in his "Golden Treasury."
"If women could be fair and yet not fond,
Or that their love were firm not fickle, still,
I would not marvel that they make men bond,
By service long to purchase their good will,
But when I see how frail those creatures are,
I muse that men forget themselves so far."To mark the choice they make, and how they change,
How oft from Phoebus do, they flee to Pan,
Unsettled still like haggards wild they range,
These gentle birds that fly from' man to man,
Who would not scorn and shake them from the fist
And let them fly, fair fools, which way they list?"Yet for disport we fawn and flatter both,
To pass the time when nothing else can please,
And train them to our lure with subtle oath,
Till, weary of their wiles, ourselves we ease;
And then we say, when we their fancy try,
To play with fools, Oh what a fool was I."I give this poem in full because of its importance to the history of English literature if the chief contention of this treatise can be established. Had I read it singly or with no such special aim as I then had, its distinctive qualities might not have impressed me as they did. But, reading [109] it in conjunction with a large amount of contemporary verse whilst the cadences of the "Venus" stanzas were still running in my mind, its distinctive qualities were, on the one hand, enhanced by the force of contrast with other work of the same period, and on the other hand emphasized by a sense of its harmony with Shakespeare's work. Having, therefore, fixed provisionally on this poem I must first of all follow up the enquiry along the line it indicated until that line should prove untenable.
Although the selection had been in a measure a personal exercise of literary judgment, it was part of the original plan that I should not, at any critical part of the investigation, rest upon my own private judgment where the issue was purely literary; and as this was a matter for the expert I must first of all seek for some kind of an endorsement of my selection from literary authorities. Meanwhile the choice must be considered tentative. To those who are specialists in the literature of that age it may appear like the confession of colossal ignorance when I say that, far from having prepossessions in favour of Edward de Vere, although I must have come across his name before, it had never arrested my attention; and, so far as any knowledge of his, personality and history is concerned, I had either never possessed it, or had quite forgotten everything I had ever known. Nor was I wishful to know more until the choice had been duly tested on purely poetic grounds. The name De Vere I knew to be that of an ancient house; the Earls of Oxford I remembered had appeared in English history in certain secondary connections; and the dates of the poet's birth and death (1550 and 1604), the only piece of information vouchsafed in the anthology, accorded sufficiently well, for the time being, with the general theory I had formed of the production and the issuing of the plays. He would be about forty years of age at the time when the plays began to appear, and, according to the generally accepted dating of them, the [110] most and best of the work would be given to the world before his death. Still these considerations might apply with equal force to others whose poems appeared in the collection, and therefore must not be allowed to exercise undue weight at this stage.
Turning to the literary section of several text books, and standard works of English history with varying amounts of reference to literature, I found all as silent as the grave in reference to the Earl of Oxford. Creighton's "Age of Elizabeth" has a special chapter on Elizabethan literature, but not a single word on this particular poet. Beesly's "Queen Elizabeth" barely mentions his name in a footnote of quite insignificant import that has nothing to do with poetry or literature. Altogether, I got the impression at first that he was almost an unknown man. So far the result was discouraging and I turned again to the anthology to try some of the other poems. None of them seemed to have the same Shakespearean grip as this one. In addition to the identity in the form of the stanza with that of "Venus and Adonis," there was the same succinctness of expression, the same compactness and cohesion of ideas, the same smoothness of diction, the same idiomatic wording which we associate with "Shakespeare"; there was the characteristic simile of the hawks, and finally that peculiar touch in relation to women that I had noted in the sonnets.
Again I consulted my books. Although Green, in the part of the "Short History" dealing with Elizabethan literature, makes no mention of the poet, I found in another part of his work the following sentence. Speaking of the Jesuit mission to England under Campion and Parsons, he says, "The list of nobles reconciled to the old faith by these wandering apostles was headed by Lord Oxford, Cecil's own son-in-law and the proudest among English peers." It was impossible to avoid a touch of excitement in reading these words; for the first indications of the man justified the selection on two of the points of my characterization. Still it was not what [111] I was immediately in search of; and until the vital question of his acknowledged lyrical eminence was settled it was important not to be led away by what might turn out to be only a specious coincidence. All the other points were to be so many tests held in reserve as it were, to be applied only when his lyric credentials had been duly presented. For the time being then all available resources had been exhausted. The next step must be to consult such larger works as might be found in a reference library.
On consulting the Dictionary of National Biography and turning to the Veres, or more properly the De Veres, I found myself confronted with quite a formidable number of them. By means of the Christian name and the dates, the one for whom I was seeking was speedily recognized: Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford; the article being contributed by the Editor of the work, Sir Sidney Lee. This is perhaps as fitting a point as any at which to remark that, both by his biography of Edward de Vere in the article from which I am about to quote, as well as by his invaluable work, "A Life of William Shakespeare," Sir Sidney Lee, convinced Stratfordian though he is, has furnished more material in support of my constructive argument than any other single modern writer. Although differing widely from his general conclusions I do not wish therefore in any way to stint my acknowledgment of indebtedness to his researches and opinions upon important questions of Shakespearean literature.
Skimming lightly over the article at first, with the attention directed towards the one thing for which I was searching, I nevertheless felt some elation as I ran up against new facts bearing upon other aspects of the enquiry. Then came the following sentences, every word of which, in view of the conception I had formed of "Shakespeare," read like a complete justification of the selection I had made.
[112] "Oxford, despite his violent and perverse temper, his eccentric taste in dress, and his reckless waste of substance, evinced a genuine taste in music and wrote verses of much lyric beauty. . . .
"Puttenham and Meres reckon him among the best for comedy in his day; but though he was a patron of players, no specimens of his dramatic productions survive.
"A sufficient number of his poems is extant to corroborate Webbe's comment, that he was the best of the courtier poets of the early days of Queen Elizabeth, and that 'in the rare devices of poetry he may challenge to himself the title of the most excellent amongst the rest.'"
I venture to say that if only such of those terms as are here used to describe the character and quality of his work were submitted without name or leading epithet to people, who only understood them to apply to some Elizabethan poet, it would be assumed immediately that Shakespeare was meant. We have in these words a contemporary opinion that he was the best of these poets, and we have a modern authority of no less weight than Sir Sidney Lee corroborating this judgment from a consideration of the poems themselves.
All that I wanted, for the time being, on the first issue, I had found; and so I was at liberty to go over the whole of the article, to see to what extent the Earl of Oxford fulfilled the other conditions belonging, as I had judged, to the authorship of Shakespeare's works. In making the selection the enquiry had passed its third stage. The fourth was the testing of the selection by reference to the characterization outlined in the first stage.
Although, in the course of subsequent enquiries, difficulties have presented themselves, as was inevitable, none of these has ever raised any insurmountable objections to the theory of Edward de Vere being the author of Shakespeare's works; whilst, as we shall see, the evidence in favour of the theory has steadily accumulated. Other names, too, have [113] presented themselves or have been suggested by other writers, as possible alternatives, and I have not hesitated to consider such cases most carefully. These, however, have always in my own view broken down readily and completely, and their very failure has only served to add weight to the claims of De Vere. Such cases I do not, as a rule, discuss in full, and thus an important element of negative evidence will be missed so far as the reader is concerned. It is of first importance, however, that he should realize the precise extent of the evidence upon which the choice was made; the great mass of the evidence we shall have presently to submit, coming as it did subsequently to the selection, forms such a sequence and accumulation of coincidences, that if the manner of its discovery is clearly apprehended, only one conclusion seems possible.