Difference between book

learning

and insight.

tion and sympathy, came into play. Many a schoolboy might correct the historical statements and implications of Macbeth. Any university professor could point out anachronisms and impossibilities by the score in King Lear, The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline. But where was the school, and where were the books, from which the poet learned to describe the workings of Macbeth's soul under the strain of the impulse to murder, and under the ever-deepening horror of the sense of guilt? It is probable that Shakespeare mistook the narrative of King Lear, which Holinshed handed on to him from Geoffrey of Monmouth, for sober history.2 There is nothing to show that he considered it any more fabulous than the narratives on which Macbeth and Julius Caesar were founded. Even if Geoffrey's fiction had been historical, Shakespeare nevertheless makes of it, as he does of the historical material of many of his plays, one huge and mountainous anachronism.

Book-learning will account for knowledge, but not for wisdom and insight. The latter are given, if at all, only by that wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth. Wisdom and insight are as exceptional and surprising in a man who has had

2 Down to the beginning of the eighteenth century the majority of scholars believed Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum to be a veritable history. Though this view of it is utterly baseless, the quaint old book is well worth reading as a specimen of early mediaeval romancing; and, as furnishing the material of Lear and Cymbeline, it is entitled to respect. The first English translation of it appeared in 1718. This was the work of one Aaron Thompson, of Queen's College, Oxford, who quite believed in his author's veracity. It is now easily accessible in the fourth volume of Bohn's Antiquarian Library, containing "Six Old English Chronicles," edited by J. A. Giles (London, 1848), and in Dent's "Everyman" series.

the highest educational opportunities which his age and country can offer, as they are in a man who by his own powers has risen from obscurity through the conquest of disadvantages. The unacknowledged assumption, the implicit premise, of those who affirm the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays, is that the insight into life which those plays manifest would not be surprising or exceptional in the case of a man of Bacon's antecedents and academic training. The orthodox Shakespearean may perfectly well answer that these qualities would be just as amazing in Bacon as in any glover's son from any country town in England. Prove, if you can, that the plays are Bacon's, and you add many cubits to his stature. But you do not dissipate any shred of the mystery.

The amount of knowledge revealed by the plays, however, is not mysterious; or, at all events, it will not seem so to anybody who contemplates the facts in a realistic and unromantic spirit, and remembers what information the unschooled Browning showed in Paracelsus at twenty-three and in Sordello at twenty-eight. Shakespeare, or whoever else, was writing for more than twenty years. The mere quantity of his output is not abnormally great. It is probable that he never produced more than two plays in any one year, and it is certain that he did. not average even two a year. If, then, we think of any given play as representing six months' study and thought, the learning it displays will cease to seem surprising. Indeed, the moment we drop the fantastic habit of totalizing the knowledge displayed by these works as a whole, we get a view of the mental acquirements of their author which makes him cease to seem, in this respect, exceptional.

The plays cover a twenty years.

period of

The unique gift of the poet and seer not being here in question, any man's experience may fairly be brought into illustrative parallelism. Let me accordingly cite the case of an old and intimate friend of my own-one Ignoratio E. Postpropter, a laborious pedant of various acquirements. During the past ten years it has been his fate to give several hundreds of lectures, covering an enormous range of subject-matter. For every one of these, I can warrant that he took all possible pains to master and to marshal his facts. If he were now to gather up his piles of lecture-notes and make them into books, those books would display a vast deal more knowledge than he consciously possesses at the present time. If his readers treated him to any degree of the naïve reverence of the Shakespearean idolater, they would falsely conclude that he is a desperately learned person. To push the parallel one step farther: it may be imagined that some people, astonished at so much information, might think it worth while to hunt up poor old Ignoratio's antecedents. They would then discover that he had very little schooling, and that his avocations from early youth to mature years were such as (ostensibly) to leave no margin of opportunity for supplementing the rudimentary scraps of knowledge which he picked up at school. Would not the conclusion be irresistible, that Mr. Postpropter could not possibly be the author of his own books? Would not the weird habits of mind peculiar to the Baconian tribe set some of them upon the quest of another person, who might possibly have done a work of which he was demonstrably incapable?

This leads us to a further important consideration. We have perhaps disposed of the illusion

need not

of knowledge:

that the amount of mere learning manifested in Shakespeare is abnormally great. Turn we now to the other assumption which lies implicit in all arguments against the Shakespearean authorship of the plays. This is the idea that because Shakespeare Paucity of had but little schooling, he cannot possibly have had schooling much knowledge. Is it not strange that such an mean paucity idea should be entertained, in face of the obtrusive fact that much of the time of college students is spent in studying the work of people who never went to colleges? Are we really so accustomed to exhibitions of gigantic knowledge on the part of people who have had academic training, and of such alone, that we have a genuine right to be sceptical of the possibility of extensive information in a man who has picked his own way through life? All the Nor vice arguments based on Shakespeare's scanty schooling which are employed to prove that he cannot have written his own plays would be equally valid if used to show that Browning could not have written his poems or Dickens his novels. Who was Dickens? This child of an insolvent and impris

The work of writing this chapter is relieved by reading in a Chicago newspaper a "legal decision," to the effect that "William Shakespeare was an impostor. Francis Bacon was the author of all the literary works hitherto ascribed to Shakespeare." In the course of this decisive judgment, his Honour propounded the news that "Shakespeare was not an educated man, while Bacon was a scholar with an education equal or superior to any in his age. Because literary people were frowned upon in England in his time [that is, in the days when Queen Elizabeth spoke a leash of languages, and the youthful Lady Jane Grey read Plato in the original!], Bacon went to Paris and found favour there. Shortly after Shakespeare's death the works now attributed to him were published, and history credited him with the authorship."— Chicago Evening Post, April 21, 1916. Comment is not superfluous, but it would need a Samuel Butler to do justice to the theme.

versâ.

have shown

the curious ignorance betrayed by the plays?

oned debtor, who was working in a Southwark blacking factory when he should have been at school, whence can he have got the knowledge and the insight possessed by the writer of Martin Chuzzlewit and the Tale of Two Cities?

The difficulty of accounting for Shakespeare's knowledge vanishes the moment we take account of a few facts, which become self-evident when we look into our own experience instead of suffering our judgment to be perverted by baseless preconceptions.

But if, after all, we feel that there is a residual difficulty in attributing to Shakespeare so much information as the author of these plays at various times possessed, what is this as compared with the immeasurable difficulty which those who believe in Could Bacon the Baconian authorship must find in the ignorance they display? I am here dealing only with quite superficial considerations. There is a fundamental reason for holding that, whoever else may have written the plays, Bacon cannot have done so. This, however, lies deeper, and will be dealt with later. At present we are concerned only with the contention that this supreme glory of English literature must have been the work of a man of profound and accurate scholarship. Now the fact is that the plays reveal, on the one hand, a knowledge of what is commonly called "low life" impossible to a man of aristocratic family and surroundings and full (as Bacon was) of caste-pride. On the other hand, they display an all-pervading ignorance or carelessness, of a kind which does not in the slightest degree detract from their value, but which in a man like Bacon would have been inconceivable.

I do not rest this argument solely upon the