Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861
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[Footnote L: See _Putnam's Magazine_, October, 1853, and _Shakespeare's
Scholar_, 1854, p. 74.]
[Footnote M: See the London _Athenaeum_ of January 8th, 1853:--"We
cannot hesitate to infer that there must have been _something more than
mere conjecture_,--some authority from which they were derived.... The
consideration of the nine omitted lines stirs up Mr. Collier to a little
greater boldness on the question of authority; but, after all, we do not
think he goes the full length which the facts would warrant."
Compare this with the following extracts from the same journal of July
9th, 1859;--"The folio never had any ascertained external authority.
All the warrant it has ever brought to reasonable critics is internal."
"If anybody, in the heat of argument, ever claimed for them [the MS.
readings] a right of acceptance beyond the emendations of Theobald,
Malone, Dyce, and Singer, (that is, a right not justified by their
obvious utility or beauty,) such a claim must have been untenable, by
whomsoever urged."]
Other points sought to be established against Mr. Collier and the
genuineness of his manuscript authorities must be noticed in an article
which aims at the presentation of a comprehensive view of this subject.
These are based on certain variations between Mr. Collier's statements
as to the readings of his manuscript authorities and a certain supposed
"philological" proof of the modern origin of one of those authorities,
the folio of 1632. Upon all these points the case of Mr. Collier's
accusers breaks down. It is found, for instance, that in the folio an
interpolated line in "Coriolanus," Act iii. sc. 2, reads,--
"To brook _controul_ without the use of anger,"
and that so Mr. Collier gave it in both editions of his "Notes and
Emendations," in his fac-similes made for private distribution, in his
vile one-volume Shakespeare, and in the "List," etc., appended to the
"Seven Lectures." But in his new edition of Shakespeare's Works (6 vols.
1858) he gives it,--
"To brook _reproof_ without the use of anger,"
and hereupon Dr. Ingleby asks,--"Is it not possible that here Mr.
Collier's remarkable memory is too retentive, and that, though second
thoughts may be best, first thoughts are sometimes inconveniently
remembered to the prejudice of the second?"[N] Here we see a palpable
slip of memory or of the pen, by which an old man substituted one word
for another of similar import, as many a younger man has done before
him, tortured into evidence of forgery. Such an objection is worthy of
notice only as an example of the carping, unjudicial spirit in which
this subject is treated by some of the British critics.
[Footnote N: _The Shakespeare Fabrications_, p. 45.]
Mr. Collier is accused at least of "inaccuracy" and "ignorance" on
account of some of these variations. Thus, in Mrs. Alleyn's Letter, she
says that a boy "would have borrowed x's." (ten shillings); and this Mr.
Collier reads "would have borrowed x'li." (ten pounds). Whereupon Mr.
Duffus Hardy, Assistant Keeper of the Public Records, produces this as
one of "the most striking" of Mr. Collier's inaccuracies in regard to
this letter, and says that it "certainly betrays no little ignorance,
as 10_l_. in those days would have equalled about 60_l_. of our present
money." "A strange youth," he adds, "calls on Mrs. Alleyn and asks the
loan of 10_l_. as coolly as he would ask for as many pence!" Let us
measure the extent of the ignorance shown by this inaccuracy, and
estimate its significance by a high standard. In one of the documents
which Mr. Collier has brought forward--an account by Sir Arthur
Mainwayring, auditor to Sir Thomas Egerton, in James I.'s reign, which
is pronounced to be a forgery, and which probably is one--is an entry
which mentions the performance of "Othello" in 1602. The second part of
this entry is,[O]--
"Rewards; to m'r. Lyllyes man w'ch }
brought y'e lotterye boxe to }
x's. Harefield: p m'r. Andr. Leigh." }
[Footnote O: See the fac-simile in Dr. Ingleby's _Complete View_. p.
262.]
Mr. Lyllye's man got ten shillings, then, for his job,--very princely
pay in those days. But Mr. Hardy[P] prints this entry,--"Rewarde to Mr.
Lillye's man, which brought the lotterye box to Harefield x'li."--ten
_pounds_!--the same sum that Mr. Collier made Mr. Chaloner's boy ask
of Mrs. Alleyn. In other words, according to Mr. Hardy, Sir Arthur
Mainwayring gave a serving-man, for carrying a box, ten pounds as coolly
as he would have given as many pence! Now, Mr. Hardy, "as 10_l_. in
those days would have equalled about 60_l_. of our present money," on
your honor and your palaeographical reputation, does it betray "no
little ignorance" to mistake, or, if you please, to misprint, 10's. for
ten 10'li.? If no, so much the better for poor Mr. Collier; but if ay,
is not the Department of Public Records likely to come to grief?[Q]
[Footnote P: _A Review_, etc., p. 60.]
[Footnote Q: We could point out numerous other similar failures and
errors in the publications in which Mr. Collier is attacked; but we
cannot spare time or space for these petty side-issues.]
A very strong point has been made upon the alteration of "so eloquent as
a _chair_" to "so eloquent as a _cheer_" in Mr. Collier's folio. It is
maintained by Mr. Arthur Edmund Brae, and by Dr. Ingleby, that "cheer"
as a shout of "admirative applause" did not come into use until
the latter part of the last century. This is the much vaunted
philologico-chronological proof that the manuscript readings in that
folio are of very recent origin. Dr. Ingleby devotes twenty pages to
this single topic. Never was labor more entirely wasted. For the
result of it all is the establishment of these facts in regard to
"cheer":--that shouts of encouragement and applause were called "cheers"
as early, at least, as 1675, and that in the middle of the century
1500, if not before, "to cheer" meant to utter an audible expression of
applause. The first appears from the frequent use of the noun in the
Diary of Henry Teonge, a British Navy Chaplain, dated 1675-1679, by
which it appears that "three cheers" were given then, just as they are
now; the second, from a passage in Phaer's Translation of the "Aeneid,"
published in 1558, in which "_Excipiunt plausu pavidos_" is rendered
"The Trojans them did _chere_." And now will it be believed that
an LL.D. of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a professed student of
Shakespeare, seeks to avoid the force of these facts by pleading, that,
although Teonge speaks of "three cheers," it does not follow that there
was such a thing known in his day as a cheer; that "three cheers" was
a recognized phrase for a certain naval salute; and that "to confound
_three cheers_ with _a cheer_ would be as ignorant a proceeding as
to confound the phrases 'manning the yards' and 'manning a
yard'"?--Exactly, Dr. Ingleby,--just as ignorant; but three times one
are three; and when one yard is manned the sailors have manned a yard,
and while they are a-doing it they are manning a yard. What did the
people call one-third of their salute in 1675? And are we to suppose
that they were never led to give "one more" cheer, as they do nowadays?
And have the LL.D.s of Cambridge--old Cambridge--yet to learn that the
compound always implies the preexistence of the simple, and that "a
cheer" is, by logical necessity, the antecedent of "three cheers"?
Can they fail to see, too, as "cheer" meant originally face, then
countenance, then comfort, encouragement, that, before it could be used
as a verb to mean the _expression_ of applause, it must have previously
been used as a noun to mean applause? And finally, has an intelligent
and learned student of Shakespeare read him so imperceptively as not to
know, that, if "cheer," or any other word, had been used in his time
only as a verb, he would not have hesitated a moment about using it as a
noun, if it suited his purpose to do so? That the original text in the
passage in question, "so eloquent as a chair," is correct, we have no
doubt; but the attempt to make the introduction of "cheer" into Mr.
Collier's folio a chronological test of the good faith of its MS.
readings has failed entirely.
But Mr. Collier's accusers fall short of their aim upon other and no
less important points. It seems more than doubtful that the spuriousness
of all the marginal readings in the notorious folio and all the
documents brought forward by Mr. Collier has been established. Under
ordinary circumstances, when palaeographers like Sir Frederic Madden,
Sir Francis Palgrave, and Mr. Duffus Hardy, tell us that a manuscript,
professing to be ancient and original, is a modern fabrication, we
submit at once. A judgment pronounced by such experts commands the
unquestioning deference of laymen; unless, indeed, the doctors differ;
and then the humblest and most ignorant of us all must endeavor
to decide between them. And when a court, under extraordinary
circumstances,--and those of the present case are very extraordinary,--
not only pronounces judgment, but feels compelled to assign the reasons
for that judgment, thinking men who are interested in the question under
consideration will examine the evidence and weigh the arguments for
themselves.
In the present case reasons have been given by Sir Frederic Madden, Mr.
Hardy, and Dr. Ingleby, the chief-justice and two puisne judges of our
court. The first says, (in his letter of March 24th, 1860, to the London
"Critic,") that, on examining the folio with Mr. Bond, the Assistant
Keeper of his Department, they were both "struck with the very
suspicious character of the writing,"--certainly the work of one hand,
but presenting varieties of forms assignable to different periods,--the
evident painting of the letters, and the artificial look of the ink.
Mr. Hardy speaks more explicitly to the same purpose; and we must quote
him at some length. He says,--
"The handwriting of the notes and alterations in the Devonshire folio
[Mr. Collier's] is of a mixed character, varying even in the same page,
from the stiff, labored Gothic hand of the sixteenth century to the
round text-hand of the nineteenth, a fact most perceptible in the
capital letters. It bears unequivocal marks also of laborious imitation
throughout.
"In their broader characteristics, the features of the handwriting of
this country, from the time of the Reformation, may be arranged under
four epochs, sufficiently distinct to elucidate our argument:--
"1. The stiff upright Gothic of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.
"2. The same, inclining and less stiff, as a greater amount of
correspondence demanded an easier style of writing, under Elizabeth.
"3. The cursive, based on an Italian model, (the Gothic becoming more
flexible and now rapidly disappearing,) in the reign of James I., and
continuing in use for about a century.
"4. The round hand of the schoolmaster, under the House of Hanover,
degenerating into the careless, half-formed hands of the present day.
"Now it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession
may have been practised by the same person.... That the first and third
or the second and fourth should be coexistent is very improbable. That
all, or that the first, second, and fourth, should be found together, as
belonging to one and the same era, we hold to be utterly impossible.
"Yet this is a difficulty that Mr. Collier has to explain; as the
handwritings of the MS. corrections in the Devonshire folio, including
those in pencil, vary as already said, from the stiff, upright,
labored, and earlier Gothic, to the round text-hand of the nineteenth
century."[R]
[Footnote R: A _Review_, etc., pp. 6, 7.]
On this point Dr. Ingleby says, succinctly and decidedly, "The primal
evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone";[S]
but he expressly bases this dictum upon the decisions of the professed
palaeographers of the British Museum and the Record Office. He goes on,
however, to assign important collateral proof of the forgery, both of
the readings in the folio and the documents brought forward by Mr.
Collier, by connecting them with each other. Thus he says, that whoever
will compare the fac-similes of the document known as "The Certificate
of the Blackfriars Players" with those which he gives of two passages in
the folio "will surely entertain no doubt that one hand wrote both."[T]
He expresses also the same confidence that "there can be but one
intelligent opinion" that another important document, known as "The
Blackfriars Petition," was, as Mr. Hamilton believes, "executed by the
same hand" as that to which we owe the Certificate, and, consequently,
the folio readings.[U] Again, with regard to another of these documents,
known as "The Daborne Warrant," Dr. Ingleby says,--"Mr. Hamilton
remarks, what must be plain to every one who compares the fac-simile
of the Daborne Warrant with those of the manuscript emendations in the
Perkins folio, that the same hand wrote both. In particular the
letters E, S, J, and C are formed in the same peculiar pseudo-antique
manner."[V] And finally, Mr. Hamilton decides, and Dr. Ingleby concurs
with him, that a certain List of Players appended to a letter from the
Council to the Lord Mayor, in which Shakespeare's name stands third, is
"done by the same hand" which produced the professed contemporary copy
of a letter signed H.S. about Burbage and Shakespeare, supposed to be
from the Earl of Southampton. Giving his reason for this opinion, Dr.
Ingleby says,--"Among other similarities in the forms of the letters
to those characterizing the H.S. letter, is the very remarkable _g_ in
'Hemminges'."[W]
[Footnote S: A _Complete View_, p. 114.]
[Footnote T: _Ib._ p. 250.]
[Footnote U: _Ib._ p. 293.]
[Footnote V: _Ib._ p. 256.]
[Footnote W: _Ib._ p. 271.]
Let us examine the alleged grounds of these decisions,--"the varieties
of forms assignable to different periods," and the extension of those
varieties "from the stiff, labored Gothic hand of the sixteenth century
to the round-text hand of the nineteenth." This judgment is passed upon
_all_ the writing on the margins of the folio, including the pencil
memorandums. For the present we shall set aside the latter,--the pencil
memorandums,--as not properly belonging to this branch of the subject.
For this pencil writing, although it has a most important bearing
upon the question of the good faith of the marginal readings, has no
professed character, antique or modern: it is, of course, not set forth
directly or indirectly, either by the unknown writer of the marginalia,
or by Mr. Collier, as evidence of the date at which they were made. And
as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies
in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at
present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the
present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master,"
appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with
the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he
himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any two of these
hands in succession may have been practised by the same person," if
those who maintain the side of forgery fail to show that "the stiff
upright Gothic of Henry VIII. and Edward VI." appears upon the margins
of this folio, we shall only have the second and third styles enumerated
by Mr. Hardy, i.e., the hands of Elizabeth and James I., to take into
consideration; and the so-called "primal evidence of the forgery," in
the "varieties of forms assignable to different periods," falls to the
ground.
Now it is most remarkable, that, among all the numerous fac-similes
of the writing in this volume which have been published either by Mr.
Collier himself, or by his opponents, with the very purpose of proving
the forgery, not a word or a letter has appeared in a hand which was not
in common use from the latest years of Elizabeth's reign, through James
I.'s and Charles I.'s, down through the Commonwealth to and well past
the time of the Restoration,--a period, be it remembered, of only
between fifty and seventy-five years. We are prepared to show, upon
the backs of title-pages and upon the margins of various books printed
between 1580 and 1660, and in copy-books published and miscellaneous
documents dated between 1650 and 1675, writing as ancient in all its
characteristics as any that has been fac-similed and published with the
purpose of invalidating the genuineness of the marginal readings of Mr.
Collier's folio.
We are also prepared to show that the lack of homogeneousness (aside
from the question of period or fashion) and the striking and various
appearance of the ink even on a single page, which have been relied upon
as strong points against the genuineness of the marginal readings, are
matters of little moment, because they are not evidence either of an
assumed hand or of simulated antiquity; and even further, that the fact
that certain of the pencilled words are in a much more modern-seeming
hand than the words in ink which overlie them is of equally small
importance in the consideration of this question. Our means of
comparison in regard to the folio are limited, indeed, but they are none
the less sufficient; for we may be sure that Mr. Collier's opponents,
who have followed his tracks page by page with microscopes and chemical
tests, who hang their case upon pot-hooks and trammels, and lash
themselves into palaeographic fury with the tails of remarkable _g_-s,
have certainly made public the strongest evidence against him that they
could discover.
Among many old books, defaced after the fashion of old times with
writing upon their blank leaves and spaces, in the possession of the
present writer, is a copy of the second edition of Bartholomew Young's
translation of Guazzo's "Civile Conversation," London, 4to., 1586. This
volume was published without that running marginal abstract of the
contents which is so common upon the books of its period. This omission
an early possessor undertook to supply; and in doing so he left evidence
which forbids us to accept all the conclusions as to the Collier folio
and manuscripts which the British palaeographists draw from the premises
which they set forth. Upon the very first page of the Preface he writes,
in explanation of the phrase "hee which fired the temple of Diana," the
name "_Erostrato_" in a manner which brings to mind one point strongly
made by Dr. Ingleby against the genuineness of a Ralegh letter brought
forward by Mr. Collier, as well as of the manuscript readings in the two
folio Shakespeares, which he also brought to light. Dr. Ingleby says,
"I have given a copy of Mr. Collier's fac-simile in sheet No. II.,
and alongside of that I have placed the impossible E in the Ralegh
signature, and the almost exactly similar E which occurs in the
emendation _End, vice_ 'And,' in the Bridgewater Folio. By means of this
monstrous letter we are enabled to trace the chain of forgery from the
Perkins Folio through the Bridgewater Folio, to the perpetration of the
abomination at the foot of the Ralegh letter."[X]
[Footnote X: _Complete View_, p. 309.]
Below we give fac-similes of six E-s. No. I is from the margin of the
first page of the Preface to Guazzo, mentioned above; No. 2 from the
third, and No. 3 from the fifth page of the same Preface; No. 4 from
fol. 27 _b_ of the body of the work; No. 5 is the "monstrous letter"
of the Bridgewater folio; and No. 6 the "impossible E" of the Ralegh
signature.
[Illustration]
Now how monstrous the last two letters are is a matter of taste,--how
impossible, a matter of knowledge; but we submit that any man with a
passable degree of either taste or knowledge is able to decide, and
will decide that No. 6 is not more impossible than No. 1, or No. 4 more
monstrous than No. 2; while in Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, there is exhibited a
variation in the form of capital letters, instances of which Dr. Ingleby
intimates it is impossible to find in genuine handwriting, and the
existence of which in the Collier folio Mr. Hamilton sets forth as one
reason for invalidating the good faith of its marginal readings.[Y]
[Footnote Y: Inquiry, p. 23.]
But our copy of Guazzo is of further use to us in the examination of
this subject. It exhibits, within less than one hundred folios of
marginal annotations, almost all the characteristics (except, be it
remembered, those of the pencil writing) which are relied upon as proofs
of the forgery of the marginalia of Mr. Collier's folio. The writing
varies from a cursive hand which might almost have been written at the
present day to (in Mr. Duffus Hardy's phrase) "the cursive based on an
Italian model,"--that is, the "sweet Roman hand" which the Countess
Olivia wrote, as became a young woman of fashion when "Twelfth Night"
was produced; and from this again to the modified chancery hand which
was in such common use in the first half of the century 1600, and again
to a cramped and contracted chirography almost illegible, which went out
of general use in the last years of Elizabeth and the first of James I.
All these varieties of handwriting, except the last, were in use from
1600 to the Restoration. They will be found in the second edition of
Richard Gethinge's "Calligraphotechnia, or The Arte of Faire Writing,
1652." This, in spite of its sounding name, is nothing more than a
writing-master's copper-plate copy-book; and its republication in
1652, with these various styles of chirography, is important accessory
evidence in the present case.[Z]
[Footnote Z: Lowndes mentions no other edition than that of 1652; and
Mr. Bohn in his new edition of the Bibliographer has merely repeated the
original in this respect. But if Lowndes had seen only the edition of
1652, he might have found in it evidence of the date of the publication
of the book. It is dedicated to "Sir Francis Bacon Knight, his Ma'ties
Attorney Generall"; and as Bacon was made Attorney General in 1613 and
Lord Keeper in 1617, the book must have been published between those
dates; and one of the plates, the 18th, is dated "Anno 1615," and
another, the 24th, "1616."]
But to return to the margins of our Guazzo, from five pages of which we
here give fac-similes.
[Illustration]
The writer of the annotations began his work in that clear Italian hand
which came into vogue in the reign of James I., (see, for instance,
Gethinge, Plates 18 to 28,) of which fac-simile No. 1, "_Experience of
father_" is an example. In the course of the first few pages, however,
his chirography, on the one hand, shows traces of the old English
chancery-hand, and, on the other, degenerates into a careless, cursive,
modern-seeming style, of which fac-simile No. 2, "_England_," is a
striking instance. But he soon corrects himself, and writes for twenty
folios (to the recto of folio 27) with more or less care in his clear
Roman hand. Thence he begins to return rapidly, but by perceptible
degrees, to the old hand, until, on the recto of folio 31, and a page
or two before it, he writes, illegibly to most modern eyes, as in
fac-simile No. 3, "_a proverbe_." Thereafter, except upon certain rare
and isolated occasions, he never returns to his Italian hand, but
becomes more and more antique in his style, so that on folio 65, and for
ten folios before and after, we have such writing as that of fac-simile
No. 4, "_strangers where they come change the speech there used_." On
folios 93 to 95 we find characters like those given in fac-simile No. 5,
which it requires more experience than ours in record-reading entirely
to decipher. On the reverse of folio 95 the annotator, apparently weary
of his task, stayed his hand.
Now in these ninety-nine folios (including the Preface, which is not
numbered) are not only all the five varieties of chirography fac-similed
above, but others partaking the character of some two of these, and
all manifestly written by the same hand; which is shown no less by the
phraseology than by the chirographic traits common to all the notes. And
besides, not a few of these notes, which fill the margins, are in
Latin, and these Latin notes are always written in the Italian hand of
fac-simile No. 1; so that we find that hand, in which all the notes,
English and Latin, (with a few exceptions, like "_England_,") are
written for the first twenty-seven folios, afterward in juxtaposition
with each of the other hands. For instance, on folio 87, recto, we find
"_tolerare laborem propter virtutem quis vult si praemia desunt_,"
written in the style of "_Experience_" No. 1 above, though not so
carefully, and immediately beneath it, manifestly with the same pen, and
it would seem with the same pen-full of ink, "the saying of Galen," in
the style of No. 4, "_strangers where they come_," etc.
The ink, too, in which these notes are written illustrates the shifts to
which our ancestors were put when writing-materials were not made and
bought by the quantity, as they are now,--a fact which bears against
a not yet well-established point made by Mr. Maskelyne of the British
Museum against Mr. Collier's marginalia. This writing exhibits every
possible variety of tint and of shade, and also of consistence and
composition, that ink called black could show. As far as the recto of
folio 12 it has the look of black ink slightly faded. On the reverse of
that folio it suddenly assumes a pale gray tint, which it preserves to
the recto of folio 20. There it becomes of a very dark rich brown, so
smooth in surface as almost to have a lustre, but in the course of a few
folios it changes to a pale tawny tint; again back to black, again
to gray, again to a fine clear black that might have been written
yesterday, and again to the pale tawny, with which it ends. It is also
worthy of notice, that, where this ink has the dark rich brown hue, it
also seems, in the words of Professor Maskelyne, in his letter to the
London "Times," dated July 13, 1859, to be "on rather than in the
paper"; and it also proved in this instance, to use the phraseology of
the same letter, to be "removable, with the exception of a slight stain,
by mere water." But who will draw hence the conclusion of the Professor
with regard to the fluid used on the Collier folio, that it is "a
water-color paint rather than ink,"--unless "ink" is used in a mere
technical sense, to mean only a compound of nutgalls and sulphate of
iron?[aa]
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