Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

Could not if he would, for even the most devout believers in his visit to Italy place it after the date of “Romeo and Juliet” and before that of “The Merchant of Venice.” Now, to maintain that the poet evolved Italian local color out of his inner consciousness is merely a piece of the supernaturalism which infects Shakespearology. Schiller, by diligent study and conversations with Goethe, grasped the cruder local colors of Switzerland, but Shakespeare had no means or opportunity for such study, and no Goethe to aid him. By lifelong love two modern Englishmen have attempted to construct an Italy in their imagination; Rossetti quite successfully, Mr. Shorthouse more or less so. Shakespeare had neither the motives nor the means for attempting any such feat.

But further, had Shakespeare known Italy as well as Mr. Browning, he would still have refrained from loading “Romeo and Juliet” with local color. His audience did not want it, could not understand it, would have been bewildered by it. The very youth of Juliet (“she is not fourteen”) proves, it is said, that the poet thought of her as an early-developed Italian girl. Now, the physiological observation here implied is in itself questionable, and, had it conflicted with their pre-conceptions as to the due period of first love in girls, would have been incomprehensible, if not repellent, to an Elizabethan audience. We, though taught to regard it as “local color,” are, by our social conventions, so accustomed to place the marriageable age later, that in our imagination we always add three or four years to Juliet’s fourteen; and on the stage the addition is generally made in so many words. But the social conventions of Shakespeare’s time tended in precisely the opposite direction. Anne, daughter of Sir Peter Warburton, was only twelve when, in 1539, she was married to Sir Edward Fitton. In Porter’s “Angrie Women of Abington,” published in 1599, some five years after the probable date of “Romeo and Juliet,” it is explicitly stated that fifteen was the ordinary age at which girls married. That was the age of Lady Jane Grey at her marriage: the wife of Sir Simon d’Ewes was even younger; and a little research could easily supply a hundred other cases. In Johnson’s “Crowne Garland of Goulden Roses” (1612) a girl who is single at twenty expresses her despair of ever being married. Thus we find that this renowned proof of Juliet’s Italian nature resolves itself into a familiar trait of English social habit in the sixteenth century. Had it been otherwise, it would have been a fault and not a merit in a play which addressed itself, not to an ethnological society, but to a popular audience.

A touch which may possibly have conveyed to Shakespeare’s audience a peculiarly Italian impression, is Lady Capulet’s suggestion that Romeo should be poisoned. In the sixteenth century poisoning was commonly known in England as “the Italian crime,” and was probably connected with Italy in the popular mind as are macaroni and organ-grinders at the present day. But poison is part of the stock-in-trade of the tragic dramatist, and plays a prominent part in the two most distinctly northern of the poet’s works, “Hamlet” and “Lear,” Again, the Apothecary’s speech, —

Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s lawIs death to any he that utters them,

is held up as a peculiarly Italian touch, no such law appearing in the English statute-book of the time. The fact is that Shakespeare found the idea in Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,” and used it simply to heighten the terror of the situation.

The insult of “biting the thumb” is said, rather doubtfully, to be characteristically Italian; but what can be more English than the cry for “clubs, bills, and partisans” which immediately follows it? Lord Campbell, indeed, seeks to prove Shakespeare’s minute knowledge of English law by the frequent and accurate references to it in this opening scene. The “grove of sycamore” under which Romeo is described as wandering, is said to be of unmistakably Italian growth; why, then, does Schlegel, though one of the originators of the local-color theory, seek to make it still more Italian by translating it “Kastanienhain”? Had Shakespeare possessed either the will or the ability to transport his hearers into specifically Italian scenes, would he have confined himself to mentioning one tree, which is neither peculiar to Italy nor a particularly prominent feature in Italian landscapes? Where are the oranges and olives, the poplar, the cypress, and the laurel? Where are the rushing Adige and the gleaming Alps? Where is the allusion to the Amphitheatre, which could scarcely have been wanting had the poet known or cared anything about Verona except as the capital of his mythic love-land? It might as well be argued that he intended the local color to be peculiarly English because he makes Capulet call Paris an “Earl.”

The truth is that when the reader’s imagination is heated to a certain point, the colors which subtle associations have implanted in it flush out of their own accord, with no stronger stimulus from the poet than is involved in the mere mention of a name. There is a strict analogy in the Elizabethan theatre. Given poetry and acting which powerfully excited the feelings, and the placard bearing the name of “Agincourt” made all the glaring incongruities vanish, and conjured up in the mind of each hearer such a picture of the tented field as his individual imagination had room for. So it is with the Italy of “Romeo and Juliet.” Our fancy being quickened by the mere glow of the poetry, the very name “Verona” places before us a vivid picture composed of all sorts of reminiscences of art, literature, and travel. The pulsing life of the two lovers – types of pure-humanity as general as ever poet fashioned – easily puts on a southern physiognomy with their Italian names. The might of a name has power to cloak even openly incongruous details. It is only on reflection, for instance, that we recognize in Mercutio a most un-Italian and distinctly Teutonic figure, an “angelsächsisch-treuherzig” humorist, as Kreyssig truly says, who is even made to ridicule Italian manners and phrases with the true Englishman’s provincial intolerance. Thus all of us, in reading “Romeo and Juliet,” are haunted by visions of Italy, whose origin the commentators strive to find in individual touches of local color and costume, instead of in the powerful stimulus given to all sorts of latent associations by the whole force of the poet’s genius. Even apart from travel, pictures and descriptions which do actually aim at local color have made us far more familiar with Italy than any Elizabethan audience can possibly have been. It is scarcely paradoxical to maintain that the least imaginative among us gives to the love-land of “Romeo and Juliet” far more accurately Italian hues than it wore in the imagination of Shakespeare himself. In the same way I, for my part, never read Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta” without forming a vivid picture of the narrow, sultry stairways of Valetta (which I have never seen), conjured up, not certainly by any individual touches of description in the text, but by the mere imaginative vigor of the whole presentation. Conversely, too, a work of small vitality, a second-rate French tragedy for instance, may be full of accurate local and historical allusion, and may yet transport us no whither beyond the cheerless steppes of frigid alexandrines. There is an art, and a high art, to which definite local color is essential, but Shakespeare’s is of another order. If we want a masterpiece of strictly Italian coloring we must go, not to “Romeo and Juliet,” but to Alfred de Musset’s “Lorenzaccio.”

Shakespeare, in short, presents us with so much, or so little, of the Italian manners depicted in Brooke and Paynter as would be readily comprehensible to his audience. The fact, too, that the whole love-poetry of the period was influenced by Cisalpine models gave to the forms of expression in certain portions of his work a slightly Italian turn. For the rest, he imbued the great erotic myth with the warmest human life, and left it to create an atmosphere and scenery of its own in the imagination of the beholder. No atmosphere or scenery can be more appropriate than those of an Italian summer, and therefore it is right that our scenic artists should strain their resources to reproduce its warm luxuriance of color. “For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring,” says Benvolio, and if we choose to call this hot air a scirocco, why not? But Shakespeare knew nothing of scirocco or tramontana; he knew that warmth is the life-element of passion, and made summer in the air harmonise with summer in the blood. That is the whole secret of his “local color.” —Gentleman’s Magazine.

WILLIAM SMITH AND WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE

In the year 1856 Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakspeare Society, received one day a little pamphlet bearing the at that time astounding title, “Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakspeare’s Plays?” The writer’s name was Smith. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 76 Harley Street, writer on Shakspeare, is the style he goes by in the Catalogue of the British Museum, to distinguish him from others of the name, whose works fill no less than eight volumes of that Catalogue, and have a special index all to themselves, thereby nobly confirming the truth of our Mr. Smith’s answer to some irreverent critics who had jested on his patronym, that it was “a name which some wise and many worthy men have borne – which though not unique, is perfectly genteel.” What Lord Ellesmere, either in his presidential or merely human capacity, thought of the pamphlet, we do not know; but Lord Palmerston (who had passed the threescore years then) is said to have declared himself convinced by it, though he is also said to have added that he cared not a jot who the author of the plays might have been provided he was an Englishman. By some of the critics poor Mr. Smith was very roughly handled, and what seems to have galled him most was an insinuation by Nathaniel Hawthorne (then at Liverpool as American Consul) that he had merely taken for his own the ideas of Miss Delia Bacon, whose book was not published till the year after Mr. Smith’s pamphlet, but of whose speculation some rumors had before that come “across the Atlantic wave.” This Mr. Smith (in his next publication, Bacon and Shakspeare; an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth, 1857) most emphatically denied. He had never heard the name of Miss Bacon till he saw it in a review of his pamphlet: he could not for a long while find what or where she had written, and when he did so the alleged insinuation seemed to him too preposterous to be worth notice. Out of courtesy to Mr. Hawthorne, however, he made his denial public; Mr. Hawthorne returned the courtesy of acceptance, and so this part of the great Baconian controversy slept in peace. In 1866 appeared in New York, a book called The Authorship of Shakspeare, the work of a Mr. Nathaniel Holmes, which so enchanted Mr. Smith that he vowed “Providence had provided exactly the champion the cause required,” and that for him it remained only “to retire to the rear of this unexpected American contingent,” and to “make himself useful in the commissariat department.” This American book had, among its other striking merits, this unique one – of being such that no man could possibly quarrel with it. “If argument,” says Mr, Smith, “is ever to outweigh preconception and prejudice, the preponderance can only be in one direction” – perhaps the only judgment ever formulated by mortal man which it would be literally impossible to traverse. In this rearward position Mr. Smith modestly abode for eighteen years; but now – “now that the triumph seems so near at hand, we cannot resist coming to the front to congratulate those that have fought the battle upon their success, and, we candidly own, to show ourselves as a veteran who has survived the campaign, and is ready to give an honest account of the stores which still remain on his hands.” This congratulation and these stores may be read and seen in another little pamphlet just published by Mr. Smith, and to be bought at Mr. Skeffington’s shop in Piccadilly.

It is in no spirit of cavil or disparagement that we overhaul those stores, but solely out of curiosity. We have read Mr. Smith’s last pamphlet, and read again his two earlier ones, with the most lively interest and amusement. Indeed, we have never for our part, been able to see the necessity for that “lyric fury” into which some of Mr. Smith’s opponents have lashed themselves. His theory has amused thousands of readers – readers of Bacon (both Francis and Delia), of Shakspeare, and of Mr. Smith; it has harmed nobody; it has added fresh lustre to the memories of two great men. Surely, then, we should do ill to be angry, and to be angry with one so courteous and good-humored as Mr. Smith would be a twofold impossibility. Moreover, we have always felt that there was a great deal to be said for the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the plays printed under the name of William Shakspeare, just as there is a great deal to be said for the converse of the theory, or for any other speculation with which the restless mind of man chooses for the moment to concern itself. After a certain lapse of years there can be no proof positive, no mathematical proof, that any man did or did not write anything. The mere fact of a work having gone for any length of time under such or such a name proves nothing; that the manuscript is confessedly in a particular man’s handwriting, or the undisputed receipt of a manuscript from a particular man, really, when one comes to consider it, proves nothing, so far as authorship is concerned. Take the excellent ballad of “Kafoozleum,” for instance. That, like Shakspeare’s plays, was known and popular before it was printed; like those, it was printed anonymously; no manuscript of it is known to exist; the authorship is unknown. A hundred years hence who will be able to prove it was not written by Lord Tennyson, let us say? One line in it runs “A sound there falls from ruined walls.” Why should not some speculative Smith a hundred years hence point to this line as proof conclusive that it must be the work of him who wrote, “The splendor falls on castle walls”? The parallel would be at least incomparably closer than any of those as yet found in the undisputed writings of Bacon and the alleged writings of Shakspeare. Let this be, however; we are not now concerned with any attempt to destroy Mr. Smith’s theory, for which, we repeat, we still feel, as we have always felt, there is very much to be said – very much to be said, of course, on both sides; the puzzle is how very little Mr. Smith, and those about him, have found to say on their side.

And, in truth, little as Mr. Smith had found to say in 1856-57 he has found still less to add now in 1884. His “stores” are still very scanty. He has, indeed, satisfied himself (he had “an intuitive idea” of it in 1856) that Shakspeare could neither read nor write, beyond scrawling most illegibly his own name (the reading he passes by), and curiously enough on the evidence, or rather hypothesis, of another Smith one William James! But, of course, as no scrap of Shakspeare’s handwriting is known to exist beyond six signatures, all tolerably like each other, this hypothesis cannot stand for very much. Yet really this is the only fresh “fact” Mr. Smith has added to his stores in all these seven-and-twenty years. He recapitulates his old “facts” and, we must add, some of his old blunders, when he says “there is no record of his having been in any way connected with literature until the year 1600,” forgetful of the mention of Shakspeare’s name as author of The Rape of Lucrece in the prelude to Willobie’s Avisa (1594), the marginal reference to the same work in Clarke’s Polimanteia (1595), and the long catalogue of the works then attributed to Shakspeare, as well as the very high praise given to him and them in Meres’s Palladis Tamia, 1598. The allusions in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit and Chettle’s Kind-Harts Dreame we put by as hypotheses merely; but how curious it is to find the champions of this theory so strangely ignorant, or careless of facts familiar, we will not say to every student of Shakspeare’s writings, because the word student in connexion with those works has come to have a rather distasteful sound in these Alexandrian days, but to every one who has ever had any curiosity about the man to whom these marvellous works are commonly attributed. Nor is this knowledge within the reach only of those who have money, leisure, or learning. Any one who is able to procure a ticket of admission to the Reading-Room of the British Museum may get it at first hand for himself; numberless books exist any one of which at the cost of a few shillings will furnish him with it at second-hand. We remember to have been much struck last year, when turning over the leaves of Mrs. Pott’s edition of the Promus, with many proofs of the same ignorance of what one may call the very alphabet of the subject. Coleridge, as we all know now blundered much in the same way in his lectures on Shakspeare; but our knowledge both of the poet and his times has very greatly increased since Coleridge lectured. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Pott cannot now soothe themselves with the thought that it is better to err with Coleridge than to shine with Mr. Halliwell-Phillips or Mr. Furnivall; they have only themselves to blame if the world declines to take seriously a theory which its champions have been at so little serious pains to examine and support.

The well-known passage in the Sonnets (Bacon’s or Shakspeare’s)

And almost thence my nature is subduedTo what it works in, like the dyer’s hand,

receives curious confirmation from Mr. Smith’s writings. He has studied Bacon’s works so closely and long that he has insensibly infected himself with some of that great man’s peculiarities. It is the vice, says Bacon, in the Novum Organum, of high and discursive intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances, a vice which leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. Mr. Smith quotes this saying; yet how must this vice have got possession of his intellect when he drew up that list of “Parallel passages, and peculiar phrases, from Bacon and Shakspeare,” which may be read in his Bacon and Shakspeare! Take one instance only: – In the Life of Henry VII. occurs this passage: “As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him”; in Richard II. is this line, “Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee”; and in Hamlet this, “And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Is it possible that Mr. Smith would seriously have us draw any inference from the fact that in these three passages the word “knee” occurs and in two of them the word “heart”? Really, he might as well insist that, because Mr. Swinburne has written “Cry aloud; for the old world is broken” and because Mr. Arnold has declared himself to be “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,” the author of Dolores and the author of the Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse must be one and the same man! Again, Macaulay has noticed how, contrary to general custom, the later writings of Bacon are far superior to the earlier ones in richness of illustration. It is the same with Mr. Smith. His first pamphlet, though direct and lucid enough, was singularly free from all illustration or ornament of any kind. His next contains passages of wonderful richness and imagination. Bacon, he says, is like an orange-tree, “where we may observe the bud, the blossom, and the fruit in every stage of ripeness, all exhibited in one plant at the same time.” And he goes on in a strain of splendid eloquence: – “The stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, restoring his voice with the luscious fruit, continues his harangue to the applauding multitude, little reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by its side, and was gathered at the same time, decorates the fair brow of the fainting bride in the far-off village church.” Never surely before has the familiar fruit of domestic life been so poetized since “Bon Gaultier” wrote of the subjects of the Moorish tyrant how they would fain have sympathized with his Christian prisoner: —

But they feared the grizzly despot and his myrmidons in steel,So their sympathy descended in the fruitage of Seville.

We cannot conclude without offering to Mr. Smith, in all humility, a little theory of our own, vague as yet and unsubstantial, but worth, we do venture to think, his consideration or the consideration of anybody who is in want of a theory to sport with. This is, that these plays, or at any rate a considerable number of them, were really and truly written by Walter Raleigh. We have not as yet had time to examine this theory very closely, or (like Mr. Smith with his) to find very much evidence in support of it. But of what we have done in that direction we freely make him a present. The following plays were all produced after the year 1603, the year when Raleigh was sent to the Tower for his alleged share in the Cobham plot: —Othello, Measure for Measure, Lear, Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Henry VIII., Taming of the Shrew. It has been allowed on Mr. Smith’s side that Bacon, amid all his variety of business, both public and private, must have been very hard put to it to find the mere time to write the plays. No man of that age could have had at that time so much leisure on his hands as Raleigh. But that is not all. In the ninth chapter of his Instructions to his Son, on the inconveniences arising from the immoderate use of wine, is a passage which might almost be described as a paraphrase of Cassio’s famous discourse on the same subject. Nor is this all. Raleigh had been in the Tower before, in 1592, on a rather delicate matter, in which Mistress Throckmorton, afterward Lady Raleigh, had a share. The injustice of his second imprisonment would naturally recall the first to his mind, equally or still more unjust as he probably thought. To the second he would hardly dare to allude; but what was more likely than that he should find a sort of melancholy pleasure in recalling the first? Now, if Mr. Smith will turn to the second scene of the first act of Measure for Measure (first acted in December 1604, and written therefore in the first year of Raleigh’s imprisonment), he will find an allusion to the unfortunate cause of his first disgrace obvious to the dullest comprehension. The apparently no less obvious allusion in Twelfth Night to Cole’s brutality at Raleigh’s trial cannot, unfortunately, stand, as we know for certain from John Manningham’s Diary that the comedy was played in the Middle Temple Hall in the previous year. But from such evidence as we have given (and, did time and space serve we could add to it) we think a very good case could be made out for Raleigh, and we commend the making of it to Mr. Smith, who seems to have plenty of time to spare on such matters. At any rate if he will not have Shakspeare for the author of these plays, he must really now begin to think of getting some other Simon Pure than Bacon, if within a quarter of a century and more he has been able to find no better warranty for his theory than that he has given us. But we must entreat him to be a little more careful of poor Raleigh, if he discard our suggestion, than he has been of poor Shakspeare, the only evidence of whose existence he has declared to be the date of his death! But perhaps he is only following Plutarch, whom Bacon praises for saying “Surely I had rather a great deal men should say there was no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say there was one Plutarch that would eat his children as soon as they were born.” —Saturday Review.

SOME SICILIAN CUSTOMS

BY E. LYNN LINTON

Naturally the most important events of human life are birth, marriage, death. Hence we find among all peoples who have emerged from primitive barbarism, ceremonies and customs special to these three supreme circumstances. These ceremonies and customs are of most picturesque observance and most quaint significance in the middle term of civilization; – amongst those who are neither savages not yet blocked out into fair form, nor educated gentlefolk smoothed down to the dead level of European civilization; but who are still in that quasi-mythical and fetichistic state, when usages have a superstitious meaning beyond their social importance, and charms, signs, omens, and incantations abound as the ornamental flourishes to the endorsement of the law.