Your life, good master,

Must shuffle for itself.1

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Shuffle her away.3

And here, as illustrating the scholarly acquirements of the writer of the Plays, and his tendency to enrich the English language by the creation of new words, I would refer to two instances, which, although I have observed no parallels for them in Bacon's writings, are curious enough to be noted here:

Dost thou infamonize me among potentates.*

As he had been incorpsed and demi-natured.5

And here we have a very unusual word used by both — used only once, I think, by either of them.

I could give many more instances of this use in the two bodies of writings of the same quaint and unusual words, did I not fear to offend the patience of the reader and extend this book beyond all reasonable proportions.

I regret that I am not where I could have access to authorities which would show how many of these strange words appeared for the first time, in the history of our language, in the Bacon and Shakespeare writings. But this will constitute a work for scholars. hereafter.

1 Cymbeline, V, 5.

2 Hamlet, iii, 1.

Merry Wives of Windsor, ii, 2.

4 Love's Labor Lost, v, 2.

Hamlet, iv, 7.

Gesta Grayorum- Life and Works, vol. i,

P. 336.

2d Henry VI., v, 3.

8 Letter to the King, 1612.

Othello, i, 3.

CHAPTER VIII.

IDENTITIES OF CHARACTER.

I saw Othello's visage in his mind.

Othello, i, 3.

HARACTER, after all, constitutes the man.

CH

I do not mean thereby reputation,- for that concerns the opinions of others, and they may or may not be deserved; but those infinite shades of disposition which separate one man from all other men. And as there were never in the world two men who possessed heads of precisely the same shape, so there cannot be two men having precisely the same character. The Creator has a thousand elements which go to make man, and he never puts all of them in any one man; nor does he ever mix a part of them, in his alembic, in the same proportions, for any two men. "In the catalogue we all go for men." Anything, with the human osseous system and flesh on it, is, perforce, a man; but the difference between one man and another may be as wide as that between the primordial cell and the regenerated soul.

The writer of the Plays had thought this thought, as he seems to have thought all other thoughts, and he exclaims:

Oh, the difference of man and man!1

When we seek, however, to institute a comparison between Francis Bacon and the writer of the Plays, we are met by this difficulty: We know, accurately enough, what was the character of Francis Bacon-his life reveals it;—but if we turn to the author of certain dramatic compositions, we are at a loss to know when the man himself speaks and when the character he has created speaks. We are more apt to see the inner nature of the writer in the general frame, moral and purpose of the piece, and in those utterances which burst from him unawares, and which have no necessary connection with the plot or the characters of the play, than in the acts performed in the course of the drama, or in the 1 Lear, iv, 2.

sentiments put into the mouths of the men who perform them, and which are parts of the acts and parcel of the plots.

But, notwithstanding these difficulties, we can perceive clearly enough that the writer of the Plays possessed essentially the same traits of character which we know to have belonged to Francis Bacon.

The reader has seen already that both personages, if we may call them such, possessed the philosophical and poetical cast of mind; that they were persons of unequaled genius, command of language, elevation of mind and loftiness of moral purpose. Let us go a step farther.

I. INDUSTRY.

I have shown on page 92, ante, that the writer of the Plays was a man of vast industry, and that he elaborated his work with the utmost skill and pains. Knight says:

The whole of this scene,' in the Folio, exhibits the greatest care in remodeling the text of the quarto.

But let us turn to another play.

A comparison of that part of the text of The Merry Wives of Windsor which embraces the scene at Hernes' oak, in the edition of 1602, with the text of the Folio of 1623, will show how elaborately the writer revised and improved his text. I place the new parts of the Folio in italics, and where it repeats the words of the edition of 1602 they are given in quotation marks. In this way the changes are made more conspicuous.

In the edition of 1602 we have:

Quickly. You fairies that do haunt these shady groves,

Look round about the woods if you espy

A mortal that doth haunt our sacred round:

If such a one you can espy, give him his due,

And leave not till you pinch him black and blue.
Give them their charge, Puck, ere they part away.

In the Folio of 1623 we have this thus amplified:

Quickly. "Fairies," black, gray, green and white,
You moonshine revelers and shades of night,

You orphan heirs of fixèd destiny,

Attend your office and your quality.

Crier Hobgoblin, make the fairy oyes.

1 Henry V., ii, 1.

Here there is only one word— fairies — repeated from the parallel passage in the edition of 1602.

The 1602 version continues:

Sir Hugh. Come hither, Pead, go to the country houses,

And when you find a slut that lies asleep,

And all her dishes foul and room unswept,

With your long nails pinch her till she cry

And swear to mend her sluttish housewifery.

In the Folio this speech is put in the mouth of Pistol, but greatly changed in language:

Pistol. Elves, list your names; silence, you airy toys.

Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap:

Where fires thou find'st unraked, and hearths “unswept,"

There "pinch" the maids as blue as bilberry:

Our radiant queen hates "sluts" and sluttery.

Here there are but three words that occur in the edition of 1602.

In the 1602 copy there is added after this speech:

Fairy. I warrant you I will perform your will.

This line is lacking in the Folio, and instead of it Falstaff says:

They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die:
I'll wink and couch: no man their works must eye.

The 1602 edition gives the next speech as follows:

Sir Hugh. Where is Pead? Go you and see where brokers sleep,
And fox-eyed serjeants, with their mace,

Go lay the proctors in the street,

And pinch the lousy serjeant's face:

Spare none of these when they are a-bed,

But such whose nose looks plue and red.

In the Folio we have this speech rendered as follows:

Evans. 'Where's Bead? Go you, and" where you find a maid,

That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said,

Rein up the organs of her fantasy,

Sleep she as sound as careless infancy;

But those as "sleep" and think not on their sins,

46

Pinch them, arms, leks, backs, shoulders, sides and shins.

But I have given enough to prove that the play, as it appears in the Folio of 1623, was practically re-written, and I might add that in every case the changes were for the better. For instance, in the 1602 edition we have:

Go straight, and do as I command,

And take a taper in your hand,

And set it to his finger ends,

And if you see it him offends,

And that he starteth at the flame,
Then he is mortal, know his name;
If with an F it doth begin,

Why, then, be sure, he's full of sin.

This doggerel is transformed in the Folio into the following:
With trial-fire touch me his finger end:

If he be chaste, the flame will back descend
And turn him to no pain; but if he start,

It is the flesh of a corrupted heart.

Speaking of King Henry V., Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Hamlet, Swinburne says:

Of these four plays the two tragedies at least were thoroughly re-cast and rewritten from end to end, the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it first came from the poet's hand, a text to be afterwards indefinitely modified and incalculably improved. . . . But King Henry V., we may fairly say, is hardly less than transformed. Not that it has been re-cast after the fashion of Hamlet, or even re-written after the fashion of Romeo and Juliet; but the corruptions and imperfections of the pirated text are here more flagrant than in any other instance, while the general revision of style, by which it is at once purified and fortified, extends to every nook and corner of the restored and renovated building. Even had we, however, a perfect and trustworthy transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this play, there can be little doubt that the rough draft would still prove almost as different from the final masterpiece as is the soiled and ragged canvas now before us, on which we trace the outline of figures so strangely disfigured, made subject to such rude extremities of defacement and defeature.1

Is it reasonable to suppose that the author who took such pains to perfect his work would have made no provision for its preservation, but would die and leave one-half of the great Plays in manuscript?

He knew that the work of his youth was not equal to the work of his manhood, and he labored conscientiously to improve his crude designs. Dowden says:

It is the opinion of Dyce, of Grant White and of others that Shakespeare began to work upon Romeo and Juliet not later than about 1591, that is, almost at the moment when he began to write for the stage, and, that having occupied him for a series of years, the tragedy assumed its present form about 1595-7. If this be the case, and if, as there is reason to believe, Shakespeare was also during many years interested in the subject of Hamlet, we discover that he accepted the knowledge that his powers were undeveloped and acted upon it, and waited until he believed himself competent to do justice to his conceptions.

De Quincey says of the Plays:

The further on we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement, where the careless eye has seen nothing but accident.

A Study of Shak., p. 104.

2 Dowden, Shak. Mind and Art, p. 51.