What Is Man?

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> What Is Man?


Upon this Lord Penzance commends: "It cannot be doubted that Lord
Campbell was right in this. No young man could have been at work in an
attorney's office without being called upon continually to act as a
witness, and in many other ways leaving traces of his work and name."
There is not a single fact or incident in all that is known of
Shakespeare, even by rumor or tradition, which supports this notion of a
clerkship. And after much argument and surmise which has been indulged
in on this subject, we may, I think, safely put the notion on one side,
for no less an authority than Mr. Grant White says finally that the idea
of his having been clerk to an attorney has been "blown to pieces."

It is altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he,
nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth. "That Shakespeare was in early
life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office may be correct. At
Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of Record sitting every
fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the town clerk, belonging to it,
and it is certainly not straining probability to suppose that the young
Shakespeare may have had employment in one of them. There is, it is
true, no tradition to this effect, but such traditions as we have about
Shakespeare's occupation between the time of leaving school and going to
London are so loose and baseless that no confidence can be placed in
them. It is, to say the least, more probable that he was in an
attorney's office than that he was a butcher killing calves 'in a high
style,' and making speeches over them."

This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There is, as we
have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher's
apprentice. John Dowdall, who made a tour of Warwickshire in 1693,
testifies to it as coming from the old clerk who showed him over the
church, and it is unhesitatingly accepted as true by Mr.
Halliwell-Phillipps. (Vol. I, p. 11, and Vol. II, pp. 71, 72.) Mr.
Sidney Lee sees nothing improbable in it, and it is supported by Aubrey,
who must have written his account some time before 1680, when his
manuscript was completed. Of the attorney's clerk hypothesis, on the
other hand, there is not the faintest vestige of a tradition. It has
been evolved out of the fertile imaginations of embarrassed
Stratfordians, seeking for some explanation of the Stratford rustic's
marvelous acquaintance with law and legal terms and legal life. But Mr.
Churton Collins has not the least hesitation in throwing over the
tradition which has the warrant of antiquity and setting up in its stead
this ridiculous invention, for which not only is there no shred of
positive evidence, but which, as Lord Campbell and Lord Penzance pointed
out, is really put out of court by the negative evidence, since "no young
man could have been at work in an attorney's office without being called
upon continually to act as a witness, and in many other ways leaving
traces of his work and name." And as Mr. Edwards further points out,
since the day when Lord Campbell's book was published (between forty and
fifty years ago), "every old deed or will, to say nothing of other legal
papers, dated during the period of William Shakespeare's youth, has been
scrutinized over half a dozen shires, and not one signature of the young
man has been found."

Moreover, if Shakespeare had served as clerk in an attorney's office it
is clear that he must have served for a considerable period in order to
have gained (if, indeed, it is credible that he could have so gained) his
remarkable knowledge of the law. Can we then for a moment believe that,
if this had been so, tradition would have been absolutely silent on the
matter? That Dowdall's old clerk, over eighty years of age, should have
never heard of it (though he was sure enough about the butcher's
apprentice) and that all the other ancient witnesses should be in similar
ignorance!

But such are the methods of Stratfordian controversy. Tradition is to be
scouted when it is found inconvenient, but cited as irrefragable truth
when it suits the case. Shakespeare of Stratford was the author of the
Plays and Poems, but the author of the Plays and Poems could not have
been a butcher's apprentice. Anyway, therefore, with tradition. But the
author of the Plays and Poems MUST have had a very large and a very
accurate knowledge of the law. Therefore, Shakespeare of Stratford must
have been an attorney's clerk! The method is simplicity itself. By
similar reasoning Shakespeare has been made a country schoolmaster, a
soldier, a physician, a printer, and a good many other things besides,
according to the inclination and the exigencies of the commentator. It
would not be in the least surprising to find that he was studying Latin
as a schoolmaster and law in an attorney's office at the same time.

However, we must do Mr. Collins the justice of saying that he has fully
recognized, what is indeed tolerable obvious, that Shakespeare must have
had a sound legal training. "It may, of course, be urged," he writes,
"that Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, and particularly that branch
of it which related to morbid psychology, is equally remarkable, and that
no one has ever contended that he was a physician. (Here Mr. Collins is
wrong; that contention also has been put forward.) It may be urged that
his acquaintance with the technicalities of other crafts and callings,
notably of marine and military affairs, was also extraordinary, and yet
no one has suspected him of being a sailor or a soldier. (Wrong again.
Why, even Messrs. Garnett and Gosse "suspect" that he was a soldier!)
This may be conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy. To
these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but
with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was
simply saturated. In season and out of season now in manifest, now in
recondite application, he presses it into the service of expression and
illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from
it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his
dramas, nay, in some of them, a single scene, the diction and imagery of
which are not colored by it. Much of his law may have been acquired from
three books easily accessible to him--namely, Tottell's PRECEDENTS
(1572), Pulton's STATUTES (1578), and Fraunce's LAWIER'S LOGIKE (1588),
works with which he certainly seems to have been familiar; but much of it
could only have come from one who had an intimate acquaintance with legal
proceedings. We quite agree with Mr. Castle that Shakespeare's legal
knowledge is not what could have been picked up in an attorney's office,
but could only have been learned by an actual attendance at the Courts,
at a Pleader's Chambers, and on circuit, or by associating intimately
with members of the Bench and Bar."

This is excellent. But what is Mr. Collins's explanation? "Perhaps the
simplest solution of the problem is to accept the hypothesis that in
early life he was in an attorney's office (!), that he there contracted a
love for the law which never left him, that as a young man in London he
continued to study or dabble in it for his amusement, to stroll in
leisure hours into the Courts, and to frequent the society of lawyers.
On no other supposition is it possible to explain the attraction which
the law evidently had for him, and his minute and undeviating accuracy in
a subject where no layman who has indulged in such copious and
ostentatious display of legal technicalities has ever yet succeeded in
keeping himself from tripping."

A lame conclusion. "No other supposition" indeed! Yes, there is another,
and a very obvious supposition--namely, that Shakespeare was himself a
lawyer, well versed in his trade, versed in all the ways of the courts,
and living in close intimacy with judges and members of the Inns of
Court.

One is, of course, thankful that Mr. Collins has appreciated the fact
that Shakespeare must have had a sound legal training, but I may be
forgiven if I do not attach quite so much importance to his
pronouncements on this branch of the subject as to those of Malone, Lord
Campbell, Judge Holmes, Mr. Castle, K.C., Lord Penzance, Mr. Grant White,
and other lawyers, who have expressed their opinion on the matter of
Shakespeare's legal acquirements. . . .

Here it may, perhaps, be worth while to quote again from Lord Penzance's
book as to the suggestion that Shakespeare had somehow or other managed
"to acquire a perfect familiarity with legal principles, and an accurate
and ready use of the technical terms and phrases, not only of the
conveyancer's office, but of the pleader's chambers and the Courts at
Westminster." This, as Lord Penzance points out, "would require nothing
short of employment in some career involving CONSTANT CONTACT with legal
questions and general legal work." But "in what portion of Shakespeare's
career would it be possible to point out that time could be found for the
interposition of a legal employment in the chambers or offices of
practicing lawyers? . . . It is beyond doubt that at an early period he
was called upon to abandon his attendance at school and assist his
father, and was soon after, at the age of sixteen, bound apprentice to a
trade. While under the obligation of this bond he could not have pursued
any other employment. Then he leaves Stratford and comes to London. He
has to provide himself with the means of a livelihood, and this he did in
some capacity at the theater. No one doubts that. The holding of horses
is scouted by many, and perhaps with justice, as being unlikely and
certainly unproved; but whatever the nature of his employment was at the
theater, there is hardly room for the belief that it could have been
other than continuous, for his progress there was so rapid. Ere long he
had been taken into the company as an actor, and was soon spoken of as a
'Johannes Factotum.' His rapid accumulation of wealth speaks volumes for
the constancy and activity of his services. One fails to see when there
could be a break in the current of his life at this period of it, giving
room or opportunity for legal or indeed any other employment. 'In 1589,'
says Knight, 'we have undeniable evidence that he had not only a casual
engagement, was not only a salaried servant, as may players were, but was
a shareholder in the company of the Queen's players with other
shareholders below him on the list.' This (1589) would be within two
years after his arrival in London, which is placed by White and
Halliwell-Phillipps about the year 1587. The difficulty in supposing
that, starting with a state of ignorance in 1587, when he is supposed to
have come to London, he was induced to enter upon a course of most
extended study and mental culture, is almost insuperable. Still it was
physically possible, provided always that he could have had access to the
needful books. But this legal training seems to me to stand on a
different footing. It is not only unaccountable and incredible, but it
is actually negatived by the known facts of his career." Lord Penzance
then refers to the fact that "by 1592 (according to the best authority,
Mr. Grant White) several of the plays had been written. 'The Comedy of
Errors' in 1589, 'Love's Labour's Lost' in 1589, 'Two Gentlemen of
Verona' in 1589 or 1590," and so forth, and then asks, "with this
catalogue of dramatic work on hand . . . was it possible that he could
have taken a leading part in the management and conduct of two theaters,
and if Mr. Phillipps is to be relied upon, taken his share in the
performances of the provincial tours of his company--and at the same time
devoted himself to the study of the law in all its branches so
efficiently as to make himself complete master of its principles and
practice, and saturate his mind with all its most technical terms?"

I have cited this passage from Lord Penzance's book, because it lay
before me, and I had already quoted from it on the matter of
Shakespeare's legal knowledge; but other writers have still better set
forth the insuperable difficulties, as they seem to me, which beset the
idea that Shakespeare might have found them in some unknown period of
early life, amid multifarious other occupations, for the study of
classics, literature, and law, to say nothing of languages and a few
other matters. Lord Penzance further asks his readers: "Did you ever
meet with or hear of an instance in which a young man in this country
gave himself up to legal studies and engaged in legal employments, which
is the only way of becoming familiar with the technicalities of practice,
unless with the view of practicing in that profession? I do not believe
that it would be easy, or indeed possible, to produce an instance in
which the law has been seriously studied in all its branches, except as a
qualification for practice in the legal profession."

This testimony is so strong, so direct, so authoritative; and so
uncheapened, unwatered by guesses, and surmises, and maybe-so's, and
might-have-beens, and could-have-beens, and must-have-beens, and the rest
of that ton of plaster of Paris out of which the biographers have built
the colossal brontosaur which goes by the Stratford actor's name, that it
quite convinces me that the man who wrote Shakespeare's Works knew all
about law and lawyers. Also, that that man could not have been the
Stratford Shakespeare--and WASN'T.

Who did write these Works, then?

I wish I knew.

----- 1. From Chapter XIII of THE SHAKESPEARE PROBLEM RESTATED. By
George G. Greenwood, M.P. John Lane Company, publishers.



IX

Did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare's Works? Nobody knows.

We cannot say we KNOW a thing when that thing has not been proved. KNOW
is too strong a word to use when the evidence is not final and absolutely
conclusive. We can infer, if we want to, like those slaves. . . . No, I
will not write that word, it is not kind, it is not courteous. The
upholders of the Stratford-Shakespeare superstition call US the hardest
names they can think of, and they keep doing it all the time; very well,
if they like to descend to that level, let them do it, but I will not so
undignify myself as to follow them. I cannot call them harsh names; the
most I can do is to indicate them by terms reflecting my disapproval; and
this without malice, without venom.

To resume. What I was about to say was, those thugs have built their
entire superstition upon INFERENCES, not upon known and established
facts. It is a weak method, and poor, and I am glad to be able to say
our side never resorts to it while there is anything else to resort to.

But when we must, we must; and we have now arrived at a place of that
sort. . . . Since the Stratford Shakespeare couldn't have written the
Works, we infer that somebody did. Who was it, then? This requires some
more inferring.

Ordinarily when an unsigned poem sweeps across the continent like a tidal
wave whose roar and boom and thunder are made up of admiration, delight,
and applause, a dozen obscure people rise up and claim the authorship.
Why a dozen, instead of only one or two? One reason is, because there
are a dozen that are recognizably competent to do that poem. Do you
remember "Beautiful Snow"? Do you remember "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,
Rock Me to Sleep"? Do you remember "Backward, turn, backward, O Time, in
thy flight! Make me a child again just for tonight"? I remember them
very well. Their authorship was claimed by most of the grown-up people
who were alive at the time, and every claimant had one plausible argument
in his favor, at least--to wit, he could have done the authoring; he was
competent.

Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven't. There was good
reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time
who was competent--not a dozen, and not two. A long time ago the
dwellers in a far country used now and then to find a procession of
prodigious footprints stretching across the plain--footprints that were
three miles apart, each footprint a third of a mile long and a furlong
deep, and with forests and villages mashed to mush in it. Was there any
doubt as to who made that mighty trail? Were there a dozen claimants?
Where there two? No--the people knew who it was that had been along
there: there was only one Hercules.

There has been only one Shakespeare. There couldn't be two; certainly
there couldn't be two at the same time. It takes ages to bring forth a
Shakespeare, and some more ages to match him. This one was not matched
before his time; nor during his time; and hasn't been matched since. The
prospect of matching him in our time is not bright.

The Baconians claim that the Stratford Shakespeare was not qualified to
write the Works, and that Francis Bacon was. They claim that Bacon
possessed the stupendous equipment--both natural and acquired--for the
miracle; and that no other Englishman of his day possessed the like; or,
indeed, anything closely approaching it.

Macaulay, in his Essay, has much to say about the splendor and
horizonless magnitude of that equipment. Also, he has synopsized Bacon's
history--a thing which cannot be done for the Stratford Shakespeare, for
he hasn't any history to synopsize. Bacon's history is open to the world,
from his boyhood to his death in old age--a history consisting of known
facts, displayed in minute and multitudinous detail; FACTS, not guesses
and conjectures and might-have-beens.

Whereby it appears that he was born of a race of statesmen, and had a
Lord Chancellor for his father, and a mother who was "distinguished both
as a linguist and a theologian: she corresponded in Greek with Bishop
Jewell, and translated his APOLOGIA from the Latin so correctly that
neither he nor Archbishop Parker could suggest a single alteration." It
is the atmosphere we are reared in that determines how our inclinations
and aspirations shall tend. The atmosphere furnished by the parents to
the son in this present case was an atmosphere saturated with learning;
with thinkings and ponderings upon deep subjects; and with polite
culture. It had its natural effect. Shakespeare of Stratford was reared
in a house which had no use for books, since its owners, his parents,
were without education. This may have had an effect upon the son, but we
do not know, because we have no history of him of an informing sort.
There were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do
and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to the
dead languages. "All the valuable books then extant in all the
vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a single
shelf"--imagine it! The few existing books were in the Latin tongue
mainly. "A person who was ignorant of it was shut out from all
acquaintance--not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but with the most
interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time"--a
literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his fictitious
reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works would begin to use it
wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than
out of his teens and into his twenties.

At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years
there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English Ambassador,
and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and
the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years. A total of six
years spent at the sources of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of
men. The three spent at the university were coeval with the second and
last three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school
supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing to
infer from. The second three of the Baconian six were "presumably" spent
by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the thugs
presume it--on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way, when they
want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business purposes,
all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also know how
to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is
better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom
into a fact when THEY have the handling of it. They know by old
experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not
going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to develop
him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on
his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and
come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a
thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud. The
thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where reasoning
convinces but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not even if--but never mind
about that, it has nothing to do with the argument, and it is not noble
in spirit besides. If I am better than a thug, is the merit mine? No,
it is His. Then to Him be the praise. That is the right spirit.

They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the
Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also "presume"
that the butcher was his father. They don't know. There is no written
record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it would have helped
their case any, they would have apprenticed him to thirty butchers, to
fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers--all by their patented method
"presumption." If it will help their case they will do it yet; and if it
will further help it, they will "presume" that all those butchers were
his father. And the week after, they will SAY it. Why, it is just like
being the past tense of the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent
hypodermic irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the
expression which the grammarians call Verb. It is like a whole ancestry,
with only one posterity.

To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and mastered
that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his life he was daily
in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as a casual onlooker in
intervals between holding horses in front of a theater, but as a
practicing lawyer--a great and successful one, a renowned one, a
Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in the high brotherhood
of the legal Table Round; he lived in the law's atmosphere thenceforth,
all his years, and by sheer ability forced his way up its difficult
steeps to its supremest summit, the Lord-Chancellorship, leaving behind
him no fellow-craftsman qualified to challenge his divine right to that
majestic place.

When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the other
illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal aptnesses,
brilliances, profundities, and felicities so prodigally displayed in the
Plays, and try to fit them to the historyless Stratford stage-manager,
they sound wild, strange, incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in
the mouth of Bacon they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural
and rightful place, they seem at home there. Please turn back and read
them again. Attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford they are meaningless,
they are inebriate extravagancies--intemperate admirations of the dark
side of the moon, so to speak; attributed to Bacon, they are admirations
of the golden glories of the moon's front side, the moon at the full--and
not intemperate, not overwrought, but sane and right, and justified. "At
ever turn and point at which the author required a metaphor, simile, or
illustration, his mind ever turned FIRST to the law; he seems almost to
have THOUGHT in legal phrases; the commonest legal phrases, the commonest
of legal expressions, were ever at the end of his pen." That could
happen to no one but a person whose TRADE was the law; it could not
happen to a dabbler in it. Veteran mariners fill their conversation with
sailor-phrases and draw all their similes from the ship and the sea and
the storm, but no mere PASSENGER ever does it, be he of Stratford or
elsewhere; or could do it with anything resembling accuracy, if he were
hardy enough to try. Please read again what Lord Campbell and the other
great authorities have said about Bacon when they thought they were
saying it about Shakespeare of Stratford.



X

The Rest of the Equipment

The author of the Plays was equipped, beyond every other man of his
time, with wisdom, erudition, imagination, capaciousness of mind, grace,
and majesty of expression. Everyone one had said it, no one doubts it.
Also, he had humor, humor in rich abundance, and always wanting to break
out. We have no evidence of any kind that Shakespeare of Stratford
possessed any of these gifts or any of these acquirements. The only
lines he ever wrote, so far as we know, are substantially barren of them
--barren of all of them.

Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones And curst be he yt moves my bones.