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Updated: May 5, 2025
Ignatius Donnelly, so widely known by his publications regarding the authorship of Shakspere's writings; and on my asking him whether he was now engaged on any literary work, he informed me that he was about to publish a book which would leave no particle of doubt, in the mind of any thinking man, that the writings attributed to Shakspere were really due to Francis Bacon.
'Goetz von Berlichingen' had won its way into favor as a book for the reader. The dramatic works of Klinger, Lenz, Wagner and the like, were for the most part too extravagant and amorphous for representation, and Shakspere's day had not yet come.
Perhaps no greater nonsense has been talked upon any subject than this one, especially in relation to Shakspere's own marriage, by critics who seem to have thought that a fervent expression of acute moral feeling would replace and render unnecessary patient investigation.
As in no other of his plays, there is in Shakspere's 'Hamlet' the drama richest in philosophy a perfect wealth of life. Argument is pitted against argument; every turn of a phrase is a missile, sharp, and hitting the mark. In not a few cases, the aim and object is no longer recognisable. Here and there we believe we shall be able to shed the light of day upon some dark passages of the past.
In contradistinction to the manner hitherto in use of drawing conclusions from impressions only, our own matter-of-fact attempt will have this advantage, that the time spent in it will not be wholly wasted; for, in looking round on the scene of that eventful century, we shall become more intimate with its literature and the characters of Shakspere's contemporaries.
Those elements which in Shakspere are absent or dim, the belief in a divine rule and celestial destiny, and a high and fixed moral purpose, these appear in full strength in men of Shakspere's time, the men of religion; but in their minds inextricably blent with a scheme of the universe which it is plain was to Shakspere as unreal as the mythology of the Greeks, and which he treats in much the same way, merely borrowing it for a dramatic purpose.
Bearing this in mind, and also the facts that Shakspere's early training was effected in a little country village; that upon the verge of manhood, he came to London, where he spent his prime in contact with the bustle and friction of busy town life; and that the later years of his life were passed in the quiet retirement of the home of his boyhood there would be good ground for an argument, a priori, even were there none of a more conclusive nature, that his earlier works would be found impregnated with the country fairy-myths with which his youth would come in contact; that the result of the labours of his middle life would show that these earlier reminiscenses had been gradually obliterated by the gloomier influence of ideas that were the result of the struggle of opposed theories that had not then ceased to rage in the towns, and that the diabolic element and questions relating thereto would predominate; and that, finally, his later works, written under the calmer influence of Stratford life, would show a certain return to the fairy-lore of his earlier years.
I broadened, showing brilliant teeth, and grew into a noiseless laugh; and then I saw before me Dosso's jester, the type of Shakspere's fools, the life of that wild irony, now rude, now fine, which once delighted Courts. The laughter of the whole world and of all the centuries was silent in his face. What he said need not be repeated.
I find in Paul's writing the same artistic fault, with the same resulting difficulty, that I find in Shakspere's a fault that, in each case, springs from the admirable fact that the man is much more than the artist the fault of trying to say too much at once, of pouring out stintless the plethora of a soul swelling with life and its thought, through the too narrow neck of human utterance.
Michael, who says that, if his freedom were in the least encroached upon, or 'if the laws under which he lives threatened merely the tip of his finger, he would at once betake himself to any other place to find better ones; but who yet lets everything around him go out of joint without offering a helping hand for repair, because 'the maintenance of States is probably something beyond our powers of understanding' verily, to Shakspere's doughty friends, such a specimen of humanity as Montaigne must have been quite a new and strange phenomenon.
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