The Shakespearean Myth, Part I [pp. 112-126]

THE SH,AKESPEAREAN MYTH.
possessions, his chattels real and chattels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety bedstead under his roof. And we may be pretty
sure that it is an accurate and exhaustive list.
But if he were-as well as a late theatre-manager and country gentleman-an author and the
proprietor of dramas that had been produced
and found valuable, how about these plays?
Were not they of as much value, to say the least,
as a damaged bedstead? Were they not, as a
matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual
source of his wealth? How does he dispose of
them? Does our thrifty Shakespeare forget that
he has written them? Is it not the fact, and is
it not reason and common sense to conceive, that,
not having written them, they have passed out of
his possession along with the rest of his theatrical
property, along with the theatre whose copyrights
they were, and into the hands of others? This is
the greatest difficulty and stumbling-block for the
Shakespeareans. If their hero had written these
plays, of which the age of Elizabeth was so fond,
and in whose production he had amassed a fortune, that he should have left a will, in items, in
which absolutely no mention or hint of them
whatever should be made, even their most zealous pundits-even Mr. King himself-can not
step over, and so are scrupulous not to allude to it
at all. This piece of evidence is unimpeachable
and conclusive as to what worldly goods, chattels, chattel interests or things in action, William
Shakespeare supposed that he would die possessed of. Tradition is gossip. Records are
scant and niggard. Contemporary testimony is
conflicting and shallow, but here, attested in due
and solemn form, clothed with the foreshadowed
solemnity of another world, is the calm, deliberate, ante-mortem statement of the man himself.
We perceive what becomes of his secondhand bedstead. What becomes of his plays? Is
it possible that after all these years' experience
of their value-in the disposition of a fortune of
which they had been the source and foundation
-he should have forgotten their very existence?
But if, diverging from the scanty records, we
go to the testimony of contemporaries, what do
we find then? Very little more of the man William Shakespeare, but precisely the same dilemma as to his assumed authorship of the plays.
We find that the country lad William was
no milksop and no Joseph; that he was hailfellow with his fellows of equal age; that he
poached-shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned
their owner when punished for the offense;
went on drinking-bouts with his equals of the
neighboring villages; and, finally, wound up with
following a company of strolling players to the
metropolis, where he began his prosperous career
by holding gentlemen's horses at the theatre
door, while the gentlemen themselves went inside to witness the performance. We turn to
the stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting,
and the beer-drinking, with relief. It is pleasant
to think that the pennywise old man was-at
least in his youth-human. A little poaching
and a little beer do nobody any harm, and it is,
at all events, more cheerful reading than the
record of a parsimonious freeholder taking the
law of his poorer neighbor who defaults in the
payment of a few shillings for a handful of corn.
There is a village school in Stratford, and
Mr. De Quincey and all his predecessors and successors who have constructed pretty romances
around William Shakespeare's unknown and unrecorded youth unite in making their hero attend
its sessions. But he could not have attended
them very perseveringly, since he tumrns up in London at about the age that country lads first go to
school. In London he seems to have risen from
nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of
co-manager, along with a dozen others, of a theatre. Here, just as young lords and swells take
theatre-managers into their acquaintance to-day,
he became intimate with better men than himself, and go enlarged his skirts and his patronage
as it was the part of a thrifty man to do. At
this time there were no circulating libraries in
London, no libraries accessible to the general
public of any sort, in fact; no booksellers at every
corner, no magazines or reviews; no public educators, and no schools or colleges swarming with
needy students; even the literature of the age
was a bound-up book to all except professional
readers. But, for all that, this William Shakespeare, this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a
term at Stratford school (admitting that he went
where the romancers put him), cuts off to London at the heels of a crew of strolling players,
who begins business for himself as link-boy at a
theatre door, and by saving his pence works up
to be actually a part proprietor in two theatres.
and ultimately a rich man, begins to possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the Past which,
even to-day, with all our libraries, lyceums, serials, and booksellers, it would need a lifetime to
acquire. He did the work of a lifetime. Like
Mr. Stewart, in New York, he began penniless,
and by vigilance, shrewdness, and economy, rose
to respectability, affluence, and fortune.
But, as we could not imagine Mr. Stewart,
gentleman as he was, writing poems while slowly
coining his fortune, and revolving poetry in his
brain while overseeing the business that was
evolving it, so do we fail to conceive William
Shakespeare doing the same thing. How much
less can we conceive of this man composing,
not only poems of his own, but a literature of
his own, drawing his material from the classic
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