Numbers in bold brackets [] indicate original page numbers.
I
MANHOOD OF EDWARD DE VERE
FINAL OR SHAKESPEAREAN PERIOD
(1590-1604)
[307] "I THINK the best judgment not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, that Shakespeare is the chief of all poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of literature." THOMAS CARLYLE, Heroes.
We have now reached a stage in our argument at which the study of dates becomes of paramount importance. Indeed, we are tempted to think that the failure to appreciate the precise significance of certain dates has gone far towards preventing an earlier discovery of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. We can quite believe that other investigators have actually thought of the Earl of Oxford in connection with the problem, and have dismissed the idea because of certain chronological considerations, which may have been thought to stand in the way, but which, if carefully examined, would have actually been found to support and confirm the theory. If, therefore, in this and succeeding chapters we dwell at some length on the question of dates, it is because what at first blush might give rise to doubts, when correctly estimated is found to furnish one of the strongest links in our chain of argument. When, then, we come to these chronological matter's we ask for them a very close and patient attention.
[308] In entering upon the final and, as we believe, the most important period in the life of Edward de Vere, we must first describe briefly the position in which he then found himself in respect to certain matters not directly literary. Although we have only the barest indications upon which to work, we judge that for the first two or three years of this period things were not going well with him. It is not improbable that the suspension of his dramatic activities was due, in part at any rate, to the exhaustion of his material resources. His tendency to spend lavishly is unmistakable, and his playacting and literary associates would provide an almost unlimited field for the exercise of his generosity. His own absorption in these interests must, moreover, have tended to place his financial affairs at the mercy of agents, and to throw them into confusion. To this must be added the almost royal state which he seems to have maintained in some respects. For at one point we get a glimpse of him travelling en famille with a retinue of twenty-eight servants. Suggestions of this kind of thing, we note in passing, are found in "The Taming of the Shrew," treated much more from the point of view of the master than of the servant.
The need for ready cash must often have been pressing, and this need he seems to have satisfied by selling estates "at ruinously low rates." Like the man with a "trick of melancholy" mentioned in "All's Well," he sold many "a goodly manor for a song," and possibly at the same time developed that contempt for "land-buyers" expressed by Hamlet in the grave-digging scene. It is interesting to notice that when Iago, who, we have supposed, represented Oxford's receiver, urges upon one of his victims: "put money in thy purse;" he meets immediately with the response, "I will sell my lands." What Oxford's exact financial position may have become we cannot say, but it was evidently very low, for we are told that, after Lady Oxford's death, Burleigh refused to give any [309] further assistance to his son-in-law. The implication is, of course, that Burleigh had been assisting him before this. No, particulars of such assistance are given, and we may perhaps be pardoned if we are somewhat sceptical upon the matter. In any case it must always be borne in mind that we depend chiefly upon Burleigh's own account of these things. It is clear, at any rate, that although one of the foremost of the aristocracy, and originally a man of great wealth, he had by the time of which we are now treating found himself in reduced circumstances.
Like Bassanio in "The Merchant of Venice" he had seriously
"disabled (his) estate,
By something showing a more, swelling port
Than (his) ... means would grant continuance."And, like Bassanio, he also, in some measure, repaired his fortunes by marriage with "a lady richly left." Whether, like Portia, she was "fair, and fairer than that word, of wondrous virtues" we are not told; but if our theory of the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare is maintained, it is evident that the years he spent with her were to himself years of great productivity, whilst their importance in the history of the world's literature can hardly be overestimated. The exact date of this marriage is not given, but from the context we judge it to have taken place either at the end of 1591 or during 1592.
As Sir Sidney Lee suggests that it is improbable that any of Shakespeare's plays made their appearance before 1592, we may take the marriage of Edward de Vere with Elizabeth Trentham as synchronizing with the advent of the Shakespearean dramas. If, however, we take 1592 as marking, in a general way, their first appearance, he would still have had two years of retirement after the events recorded in our last chapter by way of special preparation for his work; whilst if we take the year of his marriage as the [310] real beginning he had the advantage of four year's of retirement, preceded by a probable ten years, and a possible twelve years of active association with the drama — quite a considerable and appropriate preparation for the work upon which he was entering.
During part of the time immediately preceding his second marriage he was living in apartments in London; an arrangement suggestive of that seclusion which we deem one of the essentials for the production of work of the distinctive character of Shakespeare's plays. For we must state here, what must be emphasized later, that the Shakespearean dramas, as we have them now, are not to be regarded as plays written specially to meet the demands of a company of actors. They are stage plays that have been converted into literature. This we hold to be their distinctive character, demanding in their author two distinct phases of activity, if not two completely separate periods of life for their production. And, for the production of such a literature as this, freedom from distractions is a most important condition. The seclusion of De Vere, which we believe Spenser at this very time to have been lamenting in the "Tears of the Muses," has all the appearance, therefore, of a condition imposed upon himself, as necessary to the fulfilment of his purpose.
Now we must draw attention to what is probably as significant a fact as any we have met. From the time of his second marriage till the time of his death in 1604, the record we have of him is almost a complete blank. In Sir Sidney Lee's account of him one very short paragraph covers the whole of these twelve years. We are told that he was living in retirement: not, however, in the country, but in London or its suburb, Hackney, where, therefore, he would be in direct contact with the theatre life of Shoreditch and that great movement of dramatic and literary rebirth, so aptly described by Dean Church: but of which Spenser in 1590 [311] had evidently detected no promise. Two public appearances alone are recorded of him during the whole of this time. But as even these were in the last two years of his life we have a period of ten years which may be considered void of all important record; and the two events recorded of the last two years involve no appreciable encroachment upon his time and energies.
This then is the position: In 1592 he is placed in comfortable circumstances. He is just forty-two years of age and therefore entering upon the period of the true maturity of his powers. He has behind him a poetic and a dramatic record of a most exceptional character. His poems are by far the most Shakespearean in quality and form of any of that time. His dramatic record places him in the forefront of play writers. Then a silence of an additional twelve years succeeds the four years of apparent idleness, and this twelve years of comfort and seclusion exactly corresponds to the period of the amazing outpouring of the great Shakespearean dramas. Unless, therefore, we are to imagine the complete stultification of every taste and interest he had hitherto shown, he must have been, on any theory of Shakespearean authorship, one of the most interested spectators of this culmination of Elizabethan literature, and he himself the natural connecting link between it and the past. Yet never for one moment does he appear in it all. His own record for these years is a blank, and "no specimens of his dramatic productions survive."
In weighing evidence, in certain cases, what may be called negative evidence is frequently of a more compelling force than the more positive kind. If such a dramatic and literary outburst had had no original connection with De Vere it must inevitably have swept him within its influence. But the very man who had the greatest affinities with this particular type of production, and who, up to within a year or two of the first appearance of William Shakspere, had been amongst the foremost to encourage and patronize [312] literary men, is never once heard of either in connection with William Shakspere or the Shakespearean drama. So far as these momentous happenings in his own peculiar domain are concerned, he might have been supposed to have been already dead.
We have, therefore, a most remarkable combination of silences; a silence as to his own occupations during these important years, and a silence as to any manifestation of interest in a work which, under any circumstances, must have touched him deeply. We can only suppose that he did not wish to be seen in the matter; and the only feasible explanation of such a wish is the theory of authorship we are now urging. As a matter of fact the real blank in his records, so far as any adequate occupation is concerned, is one of sixteen years; from 1588 to 1604. This vast lacuna must now, we believe, be filled in by the Shakespearean literature. For he, who was supposed to be sitting in "idle cell," had already spoken of himself, in an early lyric, as one
"Tha't never am less idle, lo!
Than when I am alone."We would add, at this point, certain particulars respecting his domiciliation and life in or near London, that are not without interest in respect to our problem.
He resided for some years at Canon Row, Westminster, and this would put him, by means of the ferry, in direct touch with theatrical activities on Bankside; and thence, by an easy walk with Newington Butts, the scene of many of the dramatic activities of the Lord Admiral's company. This company is associated with the performance of plays by Marlowe, to whom "Shakespeare" acknowledges indebtedness. It also performed in the early years of this period plays bearing titles afterwards borne by "Shakespeare" plays. The following passage from a letter by one Anthony Atkinson, showing us the Earl of Oxford in relationship with the Lord Admiral (Charles [313] Howard of Effingham, Earl of Nottingham: of Spanish Armada fame) has some interest for us:"The Lord Admiral doth credit Captain Fenner, who excuses Elston and . . . the Earl of Oxenford sent word by Cawley that Elston was a dangerous man." The events do not concern us; it is the mere fact of personal dealings which matters.
Oxford's residence at Hackney, the London suburb immediately adjacent to Shoreditch, then the scene of Burbage's theatrical enterprises and the centre of the theatrical life of London, has already been mentioned. A somewhat more interesting detail concerns Bishopsgate: continuous with Shoreditch towards the south. Although, so far as we know, Oxford never resided in this district, we find him, in 1595, addressing a letter to Burleigh from Bishopsgate (Hatfield MSS.). Evidence points to William Shakspere being resident there at the time, and to his having next year removed to Southwark, which was soon to take the place of Shoreditch as the theatrical centre of London.
Thus we see him moving quite close to the "Shakespeare" work, but never in it. Yet, during these years, his letters show unmistakably the clearness and vigour of his intellect. The published documents do not supply the full text in all cases, but little Shakespearean touches appear.
"Words in faithful minds are tedious," is one expression, already quoted in our "Troilus" argument.
"His shifts and jugglings are so gross and palpable" is another; clearly suggestive of "this palpable gross play" in "A Midsummet Night's Dream" (V. 1) or "such juggling and such knavery" in Troilus and Cressida (II. 3). The letters are, for the most part, formal and businesslike; but the poet's tendency to express himself in similes and metaphors is irrepressible.
Not only is there abundant evidence of unimpaired mental power, there is also evidence of is, being closely occupied with some work. A letter addressed to him by a [314] member of another branch of the family apologises, in a way which does not seem conventional, for breaking in upon his occupations; so that, whatever his pursuits may have been, he was not regarded, by those who were in a position to know, as a man spending his leisure altogether in amusements or in idleness. Yet, there is no external evidence, with one interesting exception, of his interesting himself in dramatic work of any kind during these years; though curiously enough, Meres as late on as 1598, when Oxford had apparently been dead to the dramatic world for ten years, places his name at the head of those dramatists who were "best for Comedy."
One of the greatest obstacles to the acceptance of our theory of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays will be a certain established conception of the mode in which they were produced and issued; a conception which arose of necessity out of the old theory. William Shakspere being but a young man at the time when the issue of the poems and plays began, and having to write, it is supposed, in order to supply the immediate needs of what has been unwarrantably called his company of play-actors, it has been necessary to assume that each play was begun, finished and staged by itself, in a definite period of time, and that no sooner was this done in respect to one play than the next must be put in preparation. A man with no accumulated reserves, immersed, it is assumed, in all the business of directing his company, and building up his own private fortune at the same time, would be compelled to finish off, and have completely done with, each play-writing task just as it presented itself. This he is supposed to have accomplished in a manner which can only be described as miraculous. And, seeing the large number of plays which are understood to have existed before a certain date, not only could there be no intervals for recuperation and the freshening of his conceptions whilst the flood of dramas was at its height, but there has been a real difficulty in finding reasonable spaces of time for [315] them all to be written. Consequently, the supposition that these plays were written by William Shakspere of Stratford involves the belief in a series of stupendous creative efforts within definitely assignable dates, and this conception of a fixed order of production, with settled dates for the different plays, from 1592 onward, the rapid succession of which betokened a genius of almost superhuman fecundity, is bound to follow us into the discussion of a theory of authorship to which it does not apply.
All the mass of data that has been collected with much labour respecting the first appearance of plays or the date of their registration or publication, comes to have a totally different significance, and indeed loses a large part of its value, when severed from the supposed miraculous productivity of the Stratford man. Perhaps its chief value may now consist in illustrating the folly of ever supposing that so prodigious an achievement could have taken place. Such a change in the personality and antecedents of the author as we now propose, alters the significance of all that Shakespearean erudition in which mere inference has been passed off as established fact, and demands a difficult revolution in mental attitude towards the question of the manner and times of the production of the work.
What is necessary, in the first place, is to put aside all mere inference, to look at the facts that have been established respecting the issuing of the plays in the light of the quality and content of the work, and to determine whether all these taken together are more suggestive of an author working under William Shakspere's or Edward de Vere's conditions; whether the work is suggestive of a hasty enforced production amid a multiplicity of other activities, or of painstaking concentration of mind on the part of a writer relieved from material and other anxieties; and whether it suggests a writer living as it were "from hand to mouth" in the production of his dramas, or of one who began the issue with large reserves already in hand.
[316] In dealing with the dating of Shakespeare's plays, apart from the system of inferential dates that has grown up around Shakespearean study, we stand on most uncertain ground. We have dates of the registration of certain works, dates of printing and publication, dates on which it is known that certain plays were performed, and we have contemporary lists of plays that show us, that certain dramas were in existence at the time the lists were compiled; but such a thing as an authoritative record of the actual writing of a play does not exist so far as is yet known. All that the facts bear witness to, is that some of the works existed at certain dates; though whether they had existed five, ten, or twenty years before then is all a matter of conjecture — conjecture which may be made very reliable when it concerns, William Shakspere of Stratford, but which may be entirely astray when another author is substituted. Nevertheless, if we accept in a general way the dates that have been assigned, we find that, starting with "Love's Labour's Lost" in 1590 or 1592 (the early years of Oxford's retirement) and finishing with Othello in 1604 (the year of Oxford's death), we have in these an overwhelming preponderance of the greatest of the Shakespearean dramas. This is then succeeded by a period in which there is greater uncertainty attached to the suggested dates, and a larger admixture of non-Shakespearean work. For in these later years we are assured that the dramatist had reverted to an earlier practice of collaborating with others.
What does seem clearly established, however, is that during the period of what may be called the main Shakespearean flood, two and sometimes three plays appeared in the course of a single year, at the same time that great poems like "Venus" and "Lucrece" were also making their appearance. Meanwhile revised and enlarged editions were appearing of plays that had already been issued. Sir Sidney Lee's statement that Shakspere had no hand in these various [317] publishing operations we accept. The idea that the author had no hand in them we reject entirely, as almost an outrage upon common sense. The two plays which are assigned to the years immediately following the death of Edward de Vere are "King Lear" and "Macbeth." If, then, we assume that these had not been played before (by no means a necessary concession) we may regard them as being in the hands of the actor's when De Vere died. Including them, therefore, in the main period, we find that according to Professor Dowden's list, out of the thirty-seven dramas attributed to Shakespeare all but eight had already been produced, and even this small residue includes such works as "Henry VIII," "Timon of Athens" and "Pericles," which, in their present state, we might well imagine the author was not very eager to send forth.
Upon the Stratfordian view it is necessary, of course, to find spaces for the writing of what are called Shakespeare's later plays after the year 1604; for the whole of William Shakspere's time before that was fully, and more than fully occupied, and so we have, what must always have appeared something of an anomaly, the spectacle of the world's greatest dramatist, when but forty years of age, and after producing masterpieces like "Hamlet" and "Othello," resorting to a practice suited only to his literary nonage, that of collaborating with writers inferior to himself. No such necessity attaches to the supposition of Edward de Vere being the author of these later plays. His work during the years, 1590-1604 would not consist entirely, or even chiefly, in the production of new plays for the stage; and he would be under no necessity of working at a breakneck pace. In his case works issued after 1604 might have been not only begun but actually completed many years before; and when we find that certain plays, issued after that date, were completed by other writers, the situation involves no such anomaly as belongs to the Stratfordian view: that a living writer of first rank could so allow his own creations to be marred. The staging [318] of his dramas would be to him only a secondary, though doubtless a fascinating consideration; but he must have seen that he was doing something much greater than supplying contemporary audiences with a few hours' amusement. To William, Shakspere, on the other hand, the provision of plays for his company of actors (assuming that he was responsible for its direction) would have made it impossible that he should, at any time, be producing dramas much in advance of their presentation on the stage. In his case, therefore, the date of the actual writing of a play might be inferred with considerable certainty from the date of its appearing.
The writer of these dramas must have known that what he was giving to the world was destined to live primarily as literature, or, more precisely, as poetry. He might, therefore, in pursuance of such a purpose have chosen, except for material considerations, to have had every one of his works published posthumously. This hypothesis enables us to see that in such work dates of publication have no necessary correspondence with dates of writing, and makes us realize how completely all inferences with regard to the years in which the several plays were written may be upset by the substitution of another author for William Shakspere of Stratford. In the case of Lyly's plays, for example, we have seen that in some cases many years, and in all cases a number, of years intervened between the writing and the publication.
By way of illustrating the strange but inevitable results of attributing the works to the Stratford man, we shall take a particular period and consider the writings assigned to it. Although the Shakespearean dramas had been appearing since 1590 or 1592, it was not until the year 1598 that any of them appeared with Shakespeare's name attached: in itself a curious and suspicious fact. It may have no significance, but we mention in passing that this is the year of Burleigh's death and also the year following the death of James Burbage who had staged [319] the first "Shakespeare" plays. Oxford, we have said, died in 1604. In the six years intervening between these two dates, according to Professor Dowden's classification of Shakespeare's plays, William Shakspere wrote all the following:
1. The Merry Wives of Windsor.
2. Much Ado about Nothing.
3. As You Like It.
4. Twelfth Night.
5. All's Well that Ends Well
6. Measure for Measure.
7. Troilus and Cressida.
8. Henry IV. (part 2).
9. Henry V.
10. Julius Caesar.
11. Hamlet.
12. Othello.Nor had this followed upon a period of rest; for, according to particulars we have compiled from the Biographical Notes to the Falstaff Edition of Shakespeare, during the preceding year (1597) he had written two new plays and published three others that had been previously acted.
In addition to all the new work produced in these few years the same Notes represent him as having also published for the first time:
1. The Merchant of Venice.
2. A Midsummer Night's Dream.There was also published a "newly corrected and augmented" edition of "Love's Labour's Lost"; at least one other edition of "Hamlet"; (which was also revised and augmented); two fresh editions of "Henry IV," part 1; a second edition of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; a new edition of "Richard II," two new editions of "Richard II" and a new edition of "Romeo and Juliet."
[320] When every allowance has been made for a fair proportion of those pirated and surreptitious issues which has characterized Shakespearean publication, and also for mere reprints, in which the author may have had no hand, it will still be admitted that the output was enormous.
If he had done nothing more than write the twelve new plays, even supposing they had been mere ephemeral things intended only for the stage, the achievement would have been extraordinary. When, however, we turn from quantity to the consideration of literary quality, it is difficult to understand how such an accomplishment could ever have been credited. Yet all this new creative work is supposed to have been produced pari passu with an extraordinary amount of other literary labour in the issue of new editions of former plays, much administrative work connected with the direction of the company, the more material occupations of land and property speculations and litigation, entailing much mental distraction and the consumption of time and energy in journeys between London and Stratford. This, we make bold to claim, constitutes a complete reductio ad absurdum of the Stratfordian theory of authorship.
It is much more reasonable, then, to suppose that what was actually happening in these six years was the speeding up of the finishing-off process, as though the writer were either acting under a premonition that his end was approaching, or the time had now arrived for giving to the world a literature at which he had been working during the whole of his previous life. Everything suggests the rushing out of supplies from a large accumulated stock; and, therefore, instead of seeing any difficulty in the appearing of other Shakespearean plays after the death of De Vere, it is a matter of surprise that, according to the dates that have been assigned to the plays by the best authorities, so small a proportion of the purely Shakespearean work remained to be presented. (We are not now speaking of its being actually printed: this is [321] another matter which must be discussed later.) At the same time, we are struck with the amount of doubtful and collaborated work which is assigned to the period subsequent to De Vere's death. Certainly the last seven or eight years of De Vere's life are, according to the orthodox dating, marked by an extraordinary output of Shakespeare's plays, whilst his death marks an equally striking arrest in the issuing, printing and reprinting of these dramas.
The above considerations ought to prepare us for a complete break-up of the seriatim conception of the creation of the "Shakespeare" dramas. We have laboured the point because of the difficulty of the mental revolution involved. If we assume an author who for ten or twelve years had been actively occupied with theatre work; whose great wealth had been spent ungrudgingly upon it, engaging talented and educated men to assist him and to relieve him of much of the drudgery of theatre management; thus leaving him free to concentrate his distinctive powers upon the literary part of the work; then, with the literary capital he had thus amassed, beginning another period of fourteen to sixteen years of comparative quiet and seclusion, in which to give a higher finish to plays already written, as well, possibly, as to produce new works, the whole aspect of the issue of this literature becomes changed. To all the advantages of education and association with the highest classes of society, Edward de Vere was by this time able to bring to the task, on the one hand these stores of dramas which are supposed to have perished, and on the other hand the maturity of his own mental powers, as well as poetic gifts of a high order that had been amply exercised. Contrasted with the Stratfordian view or any other theory of authorship yet propounded, the supposition that Edward de Vere is "Shakespeare" places the appearance of this literature for the first time within the category of natural and human achievements.
That "Shakespeare" had this faculty of secretiveness [322] and reserve in respect to the production of great masterpieces holding them back until either they were fit or the time opportune for their issue is no mere guesswork. He tells us so in the plainest terms. For he had already been putting great dramas before the public when he published the poetic masterpiece which he calls "the first heir of (his) invention." Evidently then, according to his own account, it had lain in manuscript for years before its appearance. William Shakspere is supposed to have produced it before he left Stratford, and, as it was not published until 1593, even he must be supposed to have it by him for a number of years. And as "Lucrece" was published the following year, it too must have been well advanced at the time when "Venus" appeared.
Everything points to "Shakespeare" being given to storing, elaborating, and steadily perfecting his productions before issuing them, when his mind was bent on producing something worthy of his powers. "Love's Labour's Lost," which is placed somewhere between 1590 and 1592, was not issued in its final form until 1598, and every line of it bears marks of most careful and exacting revision. "Hamlet," too, there is evidence, underwent similar treatment. How it could ever have been believed that the finished lines of Shakespeare were the rapid and enforced production of a man immersed in many affairs will probably be one of the wonders of the future. Everything bespeaks the loving and leisurely revision of a writer free from all external pressure; and this, combined with the amazing rapidity of issue, confirms the impression of "a long foreground somewhere."
Andrew Lang, in his posthumously published work on "Shakespeare and the Great Unknown," finds an argument in favour of the rapidity of Shakespearean production in a comparison with the literary output of Scott. He ought, rather, to have found in Scott a warning example of the [323] consequences of rapid writing; and, by contrast with Scott's verbosity, have found in Shakespeare's compression a clear evidence of the latter's careful and persistent elaboration of his lines. Now this tendency to revert to his work in order to further improve it is typical of Edward de Vere. Variant copies of his small lyrics are extant, and these furnish unquestionable proof that he was accustomed to turn back to poems, even after their publication, in order to enrich and perfect them. He was a precisionist the very ease and lucidity of whose lines was the consummation of an art which hid its own laboriousness. His nicety in speech and that careful attention to details of personal dress which frequently marks the man who strives after exactness, were, indeed, the subject of Gabriel Harvey's lampoon. These things may justify us in supposing carefulness in a detail like penmanship. His handwriting is accessible and this surmise may be put to the test. Now we know that Shakespeare's MSS. for the use of the printers were clearly written, and a passage in "Hamlet" points to its being a detail to which the author was attentive. As, therefore, there are some very strange mysteries connected with the Shakespearean manuscripts, it is quite possible that the dangers of his handwriting being recognized may have determined their strict custody until everything was printed, and that then the writings themselves were deliberately destroyed. We shall naturally, therefore, be interested to know whether any of the interpolations into Anthony Munday's play seem to be in the handwriting of the Earl of Oxford.
The question of the relationship of stage plays to literature is one which touches our problem very closely. That the two things are quite distinct in themselves from a certain point of view is evident on the face of it. When the audience in a theatre wishes to see the unravelling of a plot, with all its entanglements in external circumstances and in the complexities of human nature, the elements of [324] novelty, suspense and surprise must enter very largely into the performance. This need of a continued succession of sensations demands a bold and broad treatment; the deeper effects being attained not by the subtleties of condensed sentences, which rest but a moment in the mind, but by the total and general impression conveyed by whole situations.
It would therefore be an irrational and wasteful expenditure of force to put into a play intended primarily to meet the theatre-goer's demand for recreative novelty and sensation, a large amount of carefully elaborated detail and subtlety of thought, which could only be appreciated after reflection and long continued familiarity. To pack with weighty significance each syllable of a work meant only to amuse or to supply thrills for two or three hours would, moreover, defeat its own ends. On the other hand, the amplified form of statement, so necessary with spoken words in handling novel situations becomes tedious in printed utterances intended to endure and be pondered over. These considerations by no means exhaust the question of the distinction between mere stage plays, and dramatic literature. They are intended merely to emphasize the distinction and are sufficient for that purpose.
When, therefore, familiar dramatic literature is staged, as it may very properly be, it owes its interest on the stage to entirely different considerations, and makes its appeal, if not to a different set of people, at any rate to a different phase of their mental activities from what an ordinary stage play does. The true purpose of such a stage setting is to offer an exposition of the literature to which it is itself subordinate. The frequently repeated remark that "Shakespeare does not pay on the stage," instead of being taken as a reflection upon the public taste, ought to indicate that there is some fundamental difference between Shakespeare's and the other plays with which they are put into competition; and that these great English dramas are being viewed in a wrong light, [325] and sometimes, possibly, put to a use for which they are not altogether suited.
The fact is that his matchless lines, crowded with matter and intellectual refinements, demand not only maturity of mind in the auditor, but a willingness to turn again and again to the same passages, the significance of which expands with every enlargement of life's experiences. This is one reason why, in order to enjoy fully the best contents of a play of Shakespeare's on the stage, it is necessary first to have read it; and the more familiar one is with it beforehand the greater becomes the intellectual enjoyment, if the play is at all capably handled. In this case the acting becomes a kind of commentary on the literature; a work of interpretation, bringing to the surface and unfolding its deeper significance. On the other hand, to have read and become familiar with many an ordinary stage play before seeing it would diminish interest in the performance. This implies no necessary slight upon these productions, but is meant merely to draw into clearer light the radical difference between those plays and the plays of "Shakespeare." When writings have taken the form and won the position of the latter, they cease to be the special possession of play-goers and actors, and take their place amongst the imperishable treasures of literature.
Notwithstanding this fact, it yet remains true that, even as stage-plays, Shakespeare's dramas have been made to do yeoman service, and will no doubt continue to do so. Superb literature though his masterpieces undoubtedly are, they nevertheless rest upon a foundation of real stage play. And when this is brought into prominence, embellished with touches of his literary workmanship, effective results can be secured. It is almost absurd to have to emphasize the fact that the writing of even a very moderate stage-play demands something more than literary capacity. The production of such work is a highly technical matter, requiring an easy familiarity with all the mechanism of stage directions, and the [326] adjustments of "entrances" and "exits"; and this would be specially so in those early days of dramatic pioneering.
Now, it is the unique combination of this technical and spectacular quality with their supreme literary position, that gives to Shakespeare's writings, one, at least, of their distinctive features. Without unduly labouring the point it will be necessary to determine the relationship which these two elements bear to each other in his most finished productions. Here, however, we may say that mankind has already settled the question for us. For it is upon their merits as literature that the fame and immortality of Shakespeare's dramas rest. Though the writer's first aim may have been to produce a perfect drama for stage purposes, in the course of his labours, by dint of infinite pains and the nature of his own genius, he produced a literature which has overshadowed the stage-play. It is difficult, therefore, to imagine that the relationship of these two elements in the same work represents a simultaneous product. And if we must choose between the theory of their being literature converted into plays, or plays converted into literature, on a review of the work no competent judge would hesitate to pronounce in favour of the latter supposition.
We feel justified in claiming then that the best of the dramas passed through two distinct phases, being originally stage-plays — doubtless of a high literary quality — which were subsequently transformed into the supreme literature of the nation. We further claim that the man who had the capacity to do this had the intelligence to know exactly what he was doing; and having created this literature he was not likely to have become so indifferent to its fate as he is represented by the Stratfordian tradition.