THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. CIII.

APRIL, 1916.

No. 613.

SHAKESPEARE-HIS THIRD CENTENNIAL.

BY APPLETON MORGAN,

President of the New York Shakespeare Society.

HAVE in mind," says von Herder, "an immense figure of a man, sitting high on a rocky summit, at his feet, storm, tempest and the raging of the sea; but his head is in the beams of heaven. This is Shakespeare. Only with this addition: that, far below, at the foot of his rocky throne, are murmuring crowds that expound, preserve, condemn, defend, worship, slander, over-rate and abuse him. And of all this he hears nothing."

I am eager to confess at the threshold of this semester of praise which is to round out his three centuries, that, after filling perhaps my allotted space in these murmuring crowds, my highest satisfaction is that Shakespeare is still that immense figure of a man; and that he hears nothing of all this worshipping, slandering, expounding and foot-noting, and catches no glimpse of the farthingcandles that we stand tip-toe to hold up to the sun of his mighty page-that, with all our criticastering and our pettifogging, we have not succeeded in reducing Shakespeare to the dimensions of a mere human being.

Candidly, to begin with, we have no data to guide us in the thankless labor; to begin with, we do not even know what manner of man Shakespeare appeared to be in the flesh. Not by photographing him, at least, can we reduce him to the dimensions of a mere human being.

Copyright. 1916. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE

IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

VOL. CIII.-I

I.

HOW DID SHAKESPEARE LOOK IN THE FLESH?

Candidly, we do not know. Of the hundreds, nay, thousands, of portraits of Shakespeare-so-called-there are only three that challenge technical, or even perhaps serious, consideration as presumptive likenesses. And of these three, two cannot claim the possibility of having been made in Shakespeare's lifetime. Nor does any one of these three bear even the most fainéant resemblance to any other of them. These three are as follows:

First. A monumental, or mortuary, bust above Shakespeare's loam-dug grave in the chancel of Trinity Church at Stratford-onAvon. As Shakespeare was buried in that grave in the early months of the year 1616, we assume that this bust was executed within that year, and Sir William Dugdale, writing in 1653, says that the sculptor was "one Gerard Johnson," who made at the same time a monument to John à Coombe, a Stratford character. Whether this Johnson worked with the aid of the memory of the neighbors, or from a death mask, of course there is no means of discovering. But whatever fealty as a likeness we might have been tempted to expect of it vanishes rapidly upon inspection.

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In cutting the stone, the sculptor evidently broke off a fragment of the portion out of which he was to carve the nose, and so was driven to chisel a smaller nose then he intended. The result is that the nose is small and weak, while the upper lip is abnormally long. This abnormal length of upper lip, too, had to be disguised, and the sculptor attempted to disguise it by carving thereon, instead of a moustache, a rather dandyish (so to speak) pair of moustachios," such as no Englishman of the days of Elizabethan or Jacobean days or since can be supposed to have ever worn: the result being to give the whole bust a sort of simpering un-English face, certainly not the face of a scholar or of a poet, certainly not the face of "an immense figure," of the superman we expect and idealize a Shakespeare to have been. A death mask known as the "Kesselstadt" (or "Becker") death mask was later, indeed, discovered in a rubbish shop in Mayence, which not only approximated to the measurements of the face of the bust, but contained a trace of red hairs sticking to the plaster thereof, and (suspiciously) the letters "W. S." and the date 1616. This death mask had a certain vogue of worship, and finally achieved lodgment in the British

Museum. But after a generation or two of reflection the proofs seemed to be a bit too conclusive, and a bit too readily at hand. And when the face of the death mask, a serious face, something like the face of Bismarck with its heavy moustache, came to be placed alongside of the smirking face of the bust, with its dandified "moustachios," it was finally concluded that-whoever the subject of that death mask may have been-it could not well have been used as a model for the Stratford bust.

And, moreover, this bust is not even in the condition in which it was left by its sculptor in 1616. Controversy has raged over the fact (discovered somewhat recently) that a view of this bust, as drawn for Sir William Dugdale in his Antiquities of Warwickshire, a scrupulously careful and conscientious work (for Sir William himself was a native of Warwickshire and proud of its possessions, moreover he was a man of substance and of leisure, and would not have thought of tolerating slovenly or scrapped work), bears mighty little resemblance to any one of scores of later representations thereof in wood or steel engraving or facsimiles of drawings or paintings.

Some rift of explanation of this anomaly was afforded by the discovery, that, at the date of Garrick's “jubilee," a then-prominent actor, John Ward, journeyed through the midland counties giving Shakespeare representations in order to raise funds to "repair and restore" this monument and bust; and we all know what crimes can be committed in the name of "repairs," and what limits, or no limits, of vandalism can be committed under the pretext of "restorations." Save, therefore, as a testimony to the pious regard of the vicinage to the departed Shakespeare, the Stratford bust is of no iconographic value whatever.

Second. When on the death of Shakespeare's widow in 1623, either by lapse of a deed of trust in that lady or otherwise, Messrs. Jaggard and Blount, members of the Stationers company, were able to obtain control of twenty of the Shakespeare plays not already printed in quarto (which they also had previously obtained control of), they put into print one of the most important volumes in the world, the great first folio collection of the complete plays of Shakespeare. To this volume they proposed prefixing a portrait of the dramatist, and they secured Ben Jonson (by all signs the actual editor of the first folio, for Hemings and Condell, its pseudoeditors, were not men of letters, and doubtless lived and died in ignorance of their names having been used to present to the world

its most priceless literature, these gentlemen apparently ending their days as a green grocer and a publican respectively, whose talk no doubt was of oxen over the till and the tap, even while their fame as editors the first editors of Shakespeare's purple page was waxing) as editor thereof.

This portrait was engraved for this great first folio by one Martin Droeshout, and, to extol it as a semblance worth regarding by those who would know great Shakespeare by sight, Ben Jonson wrote a dozen lines of verse. But the Droeshout face proved dismally disappointing. It is hardly the face of a man at all. Except that it undoubtedly possesses eyes, nose (more than Stratford bust can boast of, anyhow) and mouth, the face is a wooden, idiotic affair, such as an ancient tobacconist would not have suffered for a signpost; a silly vacuity resembling nothing more human than simian, certainly not within planetary space of one's ideal of a Shakespeare. The question was, therefore, where could Droeshout have found his model? What model could he have caricatured in 1623 (for it must have been an inadvertent caricature, for the art of steel-engraving was by no means in inchoate state in 1623. We have admirable engravings of Queen Elizabeth and of her courtiers).

Cherchez et vous le trouvera! A Droeshout original was forthcoming. In an obscure London print shop in the year 1840, a Mr. H. C. Clements discovered a portrait painted upon two pieces of elm, bolted together, which the London Shakespeareans (for once agreed upon everything concerning their subject) immediately declared to be Shakespeare, and the original painting which poor Droeshout used as a model for his unhappy engraving. So careful an investigator as the late R. B. Flower, sometimes Mayor of Stratford-on-Avon, purchased it, and his widow subsequently presented it to the Stratford Memorial Library, where it now rests, the property of the British nation.

I confess that for a long time I myself accepted this portraitmalgré the suspicion which attaches to any portrait of anybody found in a rubbish shop (especially if, on removing apparent accumulation of years of dust, the desired verification is found in inscription or dates). But finally my attention was attracted to the fact that, whereas the Droeshout-engraving Shakespeare wore a wonderful coat or tunic, elaborately and grotesquely, not to say arabesquely, flowered or embroidered (a sartorial criticism upon that coat was I believe, that it had no right-arm sleeve, only two left-arm sleeves), this "original" wore a coat without any of the