Kitabı oku: «Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art», sayfa 12

WILLIAM SMITH AND WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE

In the year 1856 Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakspeare Society, received one day a little pamphlet bearing the at that time astounding title, “Was Lord Bacon the author of Shakspeare’s Plays?” The writer’s name was Smith. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 76 Harley Street, writer on Shakspeare, is the style he goes by in the Catalogue of the British Museum, to distinguish him from others of the name, whose works fill no less than eight volumes of that Catalogue, and have a special index all to themselves, thereby nobly confirming the truth of our Mr. Smith’s answer to some irreverent critics who had jested on his patronym, that it was “a name which some wise and many worthy men have borne – which though not unique, is perfectly genteel.” What Lord Ellesmere, either in his presidential or merely human capacity, thought of the pamphlet, we do not know; but Lord Palmerston (who had passed the threescore years then) is said to have declared himself convinced by it, though he is also said to have added that he cared not a jot who the author of the plays might have been provided he was an Englishman. By some of the critics poor Mr. Smith was very roughly handled, and what seems to have galled him most was an insinuation by Nathaniel Hawthorne (then at Liverpool as American Consul) that he had merely taken for his own the ideas of Miss Delia Bacon, whose book was not published till the year after Mr. Smith’s pamphlet, but of whose speculation some rumors had before that come “across the Atlantic wave.” This Mr. Smith (in his next publication, Bacon and Shakspeare; an Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers in the Days of Elizabeth, 1857) most emphatically denied. He had never heard the name of Miss Bacon till he saw it in a review of his pamphlet: he could not for a long while find what or where she had written, and when he did so the alleged insinuation seemed to him too preposterous to be worth notice. Out of courtesy to Mr. Hawthorne, however, he made his denial public; Mr. Hawthorne returned the courtesy of acceptance, and so this part of the great Baconian controversy slept in peace. In 1866 appeared in New York, a book called The Authorship of Shakspeare, the work of a Mr. Nathaniel Holmes, which so enchanted Mr. Smith that he vowed “Providence had provided exactly the champion the cause required,” and that for him it remained only “to retire to the rear of this unexpected American contingent,” and to “make himself useful in the commissariat department.” This American book had, among its other striking merits, this unique one – of being such that no man could possibly quarrel with it. “If argument,” says Mr, Smith, “is ever to outweigh preconception and prejudice, the preponderance can only be in one direction” – perhaps the only judgment ever formulated by mortal man which it would be literally impossible to traverse. In this rearward position Mr. Smith modestly abode for eighteen years; but now – “now that the triumph seems so near at hand, we cannot resist coming to the front to congratulate those that have fought the battle upon their success, and, we candidly own, to show ourselves as a veteran who has survived the campaign, and is ready to give an honest account of the stores which still remain on his hands.” This congratulation and these stores may be read and seen in another little pamphlet just published by Mr. Smith, and to be bought at Mr. Skeffington’s shop in Piccadilly.

It is in no spirit of cavil or disparagement that we overhaul those stores, but solely out of curiosity. We have read Mr. Smith’s last pamphlet, and read again his two earlier ones, with the most lively interest and amusement. Indeed, we have never for our part, been able to see the necessity for that “lyric fury” into which some of Mr. Smith’s opponents have lashed themselves. His theory has amused thousands of readers – readers of Bacon (both Francis and Delia), of Shakspeare, and of Mr. Smith; it has harmed nobody; it has added fresh lustre to the memories of two great men. Surely, then, we should do ill to be angry, and to be angry with one so courteous and good-humored as Mr. Smith would be a twofold impossibility. Moreover, we have always felt that there was a great deal to be said for the theory that Francis Bacon wrote the plays printed under the name of William Shakspeare, just as there is a great deal to be said for the converse of the theory, or for any other speculation with which the restless mind of man chooses for the moment to concern itself. After a certain lapse of years there can be no proof positive, no mathematical proof, that any man did or did not write anything. The mere fact of a work having gone for any length of time under such or such a name proves nothing; that the manuscript is confessedly in a particular man’s handwriting, or the undisputed receipt of a manuscript from a particular man, really, when one comes to consider it, proves nothing, so far as authorship is concerned. Take the excellent ballad of “Kafoozleum,” for instance. That, like Shakspeare’s plays, was known and popular before it was printed; like those, it was printed anonymously; no manuscript of it is known to exist; the authorship is unknown. A hundred years hence who will be able to prove it was not written by Lord Tennyson, let us say? One line in it runs “A sound there falls from ruined walls.” Why should not some speculative Smith a hundred years hence point to this line as proof conclusive that it must be the work of him who wrote, “The splendor falls on castle walls”? The parallel would be at least incomparably closer than any of those as yet found in the undisputed writings of Bacon and the alleged writings of Shakspeare. Let this be, however; we are not now concerned with any attempt to destroy Mr. Smith’s theory, for which, we repeat, we still feel, as we have always felt, there is very much to be said – very much to be said, of course, on both sides; the puzzle is how very little Mr. Smith, and those about him, have found to say on their side.

And, in truth, little as Mr. Smith had found to say in 1856-57 he has found still less to add now in 1884. His “stores” are still very scanty. He has, indeed, satisfied himself (he had “an intuitive idea” of it in 1856) that Shakspeare could neither read nor write, beyond scrawling most illegibly his own name (the reading he passes by), and curiously enough on the evidence, or rather hypothesis, of another Smith one William James! But, of course, as no scrap of Shakspeare’s handwriting is known to exist beyond six signatures, all tolerably like each other, this hypothesis cannot stand for very much. Yet really this is the only fresh “fact” Mr. Smith has added to his stores in all these seven-and-twenty years. He recapitulates his old “facts” and, we must add, some of his old blunders, when he says “there is no record of his having been in any way connected with literature until the year 1600,” forgetful of the mention of Shakspeare’s name as author of The Rape of Lucrece in the prelude to Willobie’s Avisa (1594), the marginal reference to the same work in Clarke’s Polimanteia (1595), and the long catalogue of the works then attributed to Shakspeare, as well as the very high praise given to him and them in Meres’s Palladis Tamia, 1598. The allusions in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit and Chettle’s Kind-Harts Dreame we put by as hypotheses merely; but how curious it is to find the champions of this theory so strangely ignorant, or careless of facts familiar, we will not say to every student of Shakspeare’s writings, because the word student in connexion with those works has come to have a rather distasteful sound in these Alexandrian days, but to every one who has ever had any curiosity about the man to whom these marvellous works are commonly attributed. Nor is this knowledge within the reach only of those who have money, leisure, or learning. Any one who is able to procure a ticket of admission to the Reading-Room of the British Museum may get it at first hand for himself; numberless books exist any one of which at the cost of a few shillings will furnish him with it at second-hand. We remember to have been much struck last year, when turning over the leaves of Mrs. Pott’s edition of the Promus, with many proofs of the same ignorance of what one may call the very alphabet of the subject. Coleridge, as we all know now blundered much in the same way in his lectures on Shakspeare; but our knowledge both of the poet and his times has very greatly increased since Coleridge lectured. Mr. Smith and Mrs. Pott cannot now soothe themselves with the thought that it is better to err with Coleridge than to shine with Mr. Halliwell-Phillips or Mr. Furnivall; they have only themselves to blame if the world declines to take seriously a theory which its champions have been at so little serious pains to examine and support.

The well-known passage in the Sonnets (Bacon’s or Shakspeare’s)

 
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand,
 

receives curious confirmation from Mr. Smith’s writings. He has studied Bacon’s works so closely and long that he has insensibly infected himself with some of that great man’s peculiarities. It is the vice, says Bacon, in the Novum Organum, of high and discursive intellects to attach too much importance to slight resemblances, a vice which leads men to catch at shadows instead of substances. Mr. Smith quotes this saying; yet how must this vice have got possession of his intellect when he drew up that list of “Parallel passages, and peculiar phrases, from Bacon and Shakspeare,” which may be read in his Bacon and Shakspeare! Take one instance only: – In the Life of Henry VII. occurs this passage: “As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed marriage with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee and heart did truly bow before him”; in Richard II. is this line, “Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee”; and in Hamlet this, “And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” Is it possible that Mr. Smith would seriously have us draw any inference from the fact that in these three passages the word “knee” occurs and in two of them the word “heart”? Really, he might as well insist that, because Mr. Swinburne has written “Cry aloud; for the old world is broken” and because Mr. Arnold has declared himself to be “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,” the author of Dolores and the author of the Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse must be one and the same man! Again, Macaulay has noticed how, contrary to general custom, the later writings of Bacon are far superior to the earlier ones in richness of illustration. It is the same with Mr. Smith. His first pamphlet, though direct and lucid enough, was singularly free from all illustration or ornament of any kind. His next contains passages of wonderful richness and imagination. Bacon, he says, is like an orange-tree, “where we may observe the bud, the blossom, and the fruit in every stage of ripeness, all exhibited in one plant at the same time.” And he goes on in a strain of splendid eloquence: – “The stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, restoring his voice with the luscious fruit, continues his harangue to the applauding multitude, little reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by its side, and was gathered at the same time, decorates the fair brow of the fainting bride in the far-off village church.” Never surely before has the familiar fruit of domestic life been so poetized since “Bon Gaultier” wrote of the subjects of the Moorish tyrant how they would fain have sympathized with his Christian prisoner: —

 
But they feared the grizzly despot and his myrmidons in steel,
So their sympathy descended in the fruitage of Seville.
 

We cannot conclude without offering to Mr. Smith, in all humility, a little theory of our own, vague as yet and unsubstantial, but worth, we do venture to think, his consideration or the consideration of anybody who is in want of a theory to sport with. This is, that these plays, or at any rate a considerable number of them, were really and truly written by Walter Raleigh. We have not as yet had time to examine this theory very closely, or (like Mr. Smith with his) to find very much evidence in support of it. But of what we have done in that direction we freely make him a present. The following plays were all produced after the year 1603, the year when Raleigh was sent to the Tower for his alleged share in the Cobham plot: —Othello, Measure for Measure, Lear, Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Henry VIII., Taming of the Shrew. It has been allowed on Mr. Smith’s side that Bacon, amid all his variety of business, both public and private, must have been very hard put to it to find the mere time to write the plays. No man of that age could have had at that time so much leisure on his hands as Raleigh. But that is not all. In the ninth chapter of his Instructions to his Son, on the inconveniences arising from the immoderate use of wine, is a passage which might almost be described as a paraphrase of Cassio’s famous discourse on the same subject. Nor is this all. Raleigh had been in the Tower before, in 1592, on a rather delicate matter, in which Mistress Throckmorton, afterward Lady Raleigh, had a share. The injustice of his second imprisonment would naturally recall the first to his mind, equally or still more unjust as he probably thought. To the second he would hardly dare to allude; but what was more likely than that he should find a sort of melancholy pleasure in recalling the first? Now, if Mr. Smith will turn to the second scene of the first act of Measure for Measure (first acted in December 1604, and written therefore in the first year of Raleigh’s imprisonment), he will find an allusion to the unfortunate cause of his first disgrace obvious to the dullest comprehension. The apparently no less obvious allusion in Twelfth Night to Cole’s brutality at Raleigh’s trial cannot, unfortunately, stand, as we know for certain from John Manningham’s Diary that the comedy was played in the Middle Temple Hall in the previous year. But from such evidence as we have given (and, did time and space serve we could add to it) we think a very good case could be made out for Raleigh, and we commend the making of it to Mr. Smith, who seems to have plenty of time to spare on such matters. At any rate if he will not have Shakspeare for the author of these plays, he must really now begin to think of getting some other Simon Pure than Bacon, if within a quarter of a century and more he has been able to find no better warranty for his theory than that he has given us. But we must entreat him to be a little more careful of poor Raleigh, if he discard our suggestion, than he has been of poor Shakspeare, the only evidence of whose existence he has declared to be the date of his death! But perhaps he is only following Plutarch, whom Bacon praises for saying “Surely I had rather a great deal men should say there was no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say there was one Plutarch that would eat his children as soon as they were born.” —Saturday Review.

SOME SICILIAN CUSTOMS

BY E. LYNN LINTON

Naturally the most important events of human life are birth, marriage, death. Hence we find among all peoples who have emerged from primitive barbarism, ceremonies and customs special to these three supreme circumstances. These ceremonies and customs are of most picturesque observance and most quaint significance in the middle term of civilization; – amongst those who are neither savages not yet blocked out into fair form, nor educated gentlefolk smoothed down to the dead level of European civilization; but who are still in that quasi-mythical and fetichistic state, when usages have a superstitious meaning beyond their social importance, and charms, signs, omens, and incantations abound as the ornamental flourishes to the endorsement of the law.

We will take for our book of reference no certain Sicilian customs,⁴¹ one of Dr. Pitrè’s exhaustive cycle. We could not have a better guide. Dr. Pitrè has devoted twenty good years of his life, health, and fortune to collecting and preserving the records of all the popular superstitions, habits, legends and customs of Sicily. Some of these are already things of the past; others are swiftly vanishing; others again are in full vigor. Dr. Pitrè’s work is valuable enough now; in a short time it will be priceless to students and ethnologists who care to trace likenesses and track to sources, and who are not content with the mere surface of things without delving down to causes and meanings.

All women, the world over, who expect to become mothers, are curious as to the sex of the unborn child; and every old wife has a bundle of unfailing signs and omens which determine the question out of hand without leaving room for doubt. In Sicily these signs are as follows – among others of dubious modesty, which it is as well to leave in obscurity. If you suddenly ask an expectant mother: “What is the matter with your hand?” and she holds up or turns out the palm of her right hand, her child will be a boy. If she holds up her left hand or turns out the back of her right, it will be a girl. If she strews salt before the threshold, the sex of the first person who enters in at the door determines that of the unborn – a man for a boy, a woman for a girl. If she goes to draw water from the well, and throws a few drops over her shoulder without looking back, the sex of the first person who passes, after the performance of this “sortilegio,” in like manner determines the sex of the child. After the first child, the line in which the hair grows at the nape of the neck of the preceding is an unfailing sign of that which is coming after. If it grows in a peak it presages a boy, if straight a girl. This is also one of the infallible signs in India. If the woman sees an ugly or a deformed creature, and does not say in an audible voice: “Diu ca lu fici” – God has made it – she will produce a monster. If she repeats the charm, devoutly as she ought, she has saved her child from deformity.

The patron saint of expectant mothers in Sicily is S. Francisco di Paola. To secure his intervention in their behalf they go to church every Friday to pray specially to him. The first time they go they are blessed by putting on the cord or girdle proper to this saint; by receiving, before their own offering, two blessed beans, a few blessed wafers, and a small wax taper, also blessed, round which is twisted a slip of paper whereon is printed – “Ora pro nobis Sancte Pater Francisce di Paola.” The cord is worn during the time of pregnancy; the candle is lighted during the pains of childbirth, when heavenly interposition is necessary; and the beans and wafers are eaten as an act of devotion which results in all manner of good to both mother and child.

In country places pregnant women who believe in the knowledge of the midwife rather than in the science of the doctor, are still bled at stated times, generally on the “even” months. Dr. Pitrè knew personally one woman who had been bled the incredible number of two hundred and thirteen times during her pregnancy. She had moreover heart disease; and she offered herself as a wet-nurse.

The quarter in which the moon chances to be at the time of birth has great influence on the future character and career of the new-born. So have special days and months. All children born in March, which is the “mad” month of Italy (“Marzo è pazzo”), are predisposed to insanity. Woe to the female child who has the ill-luck to be born on a cloudy, stormy, rainy day! She must infallibly become an ugly woman. Woe to the boy who is born with the new moon! He will become a “loup garou,” and he will be recognized by his inordinately long nails. But well is it for the child who first sees the light of day on a Friday – unlike ourselves, with whom “Friday’s child is sour and sad” – or who is born on St. Paul’s night. He will be bright, strong, bold and cheerful. He will be able to handle venomous snakes with impunity for his own part, and to cure by licking those who have been bitten. He will be able to control lunatics and to discover things secret and hidden; and he will be a chatterbox.

More things go to make a successful or unsuccessful “time” in Sicily than we recognize in England. A woman in her hour of trial is held and hindered as much as was ever poor Alcmena, when Lucina sat crosslegged before her gate, if a woman “in disgrazia di Dio” – that is, leading an immoral life – either in secret or openly, enters the room. The best counter-agent then is to invoke very loudly Santa Leocarda, the Dea Partula of Catholicism. If she be not sufficiently powerful, and things are still delayed, then all the other saints, the Madonna, and finally God himself, are appealed to with profound faith in a speedy release. In one place the church bells are rung; on which all the women within earshot repeat an Ave. In another, the silver chain of La Madonna della Catena is the surest obstetrician; and science and the doctor have no power over the mind of the suffering woman where this has all. To this day is believed the story of a poor mother who, when her pain had begun, hurried off to the church to pray to the Madonna della Catena for aid. When she returned home, the Holy Virgin herself assisted her, and not only brought her child into the world, but also gave her bread, clothes and jewels.

If the child be born weak or dying, and the need is therefore imminent, the midwife baptizes it. For which reason she must never be one who is deaf and dumb – nor one who stutters or stammers. Before baptism no one must kiss a new-born infant, seeing that it is still a pagan; which thing would therefore be a sin. In Modica the new-born child is no longer under the protection of the Madonna, but under that of certain mysterious beings called “Le Padrone della Casa.” To ensure this protection the oldest of the women present lays on the table, or the clothes chest, nine black beans in the form of a wedge – repeating between her teeth a doggerel charm, which will prevent “Le Padrone della Casa” from harming the babe or its mother. Others, instead of black beans, put their trust in a reel or winder with two little bits of cane fastened to it crosswise, which they lay on the bed, and which also is certain to prevent all evil handling by these viewless forms. At Marsala, the night after that following the birth, the windows of the room where the infant lies are shut close, a pinch of salt is strewn behind the door, and the light is left burning, so that a certain malignant spirit called ’Nserra may not enter to hurt the new-born. In other places they hide in the woman’s bed – generally under the pillow – a key, or a small ball, or a clove of garlic, or the mother’s thimble, or scissors, all or any of which does the same good office of exorcism as the pinch of salt, and the light left burning. For the first drink, a whole partridge, beak and feet, is put into a pint of water, which is then boiled down to a cupful, and given to the woman as the best restorative art and science can devise. When she is allowed to eat solids she has a chicken, of which she is careful to give the neck to her husband. Were she herself to eat it, her child’s neck would be undeniably weak.

When taken to the church to be baptized, the infant, if a boy, is carried on the right arm – if a girl, on the left. In the church the father proper effaces himself as of no account in the proceedings; and the godfather carries off all the honors. The more pompous ceremonial at baptism occurs only at the birth of the first son. The Sicilian proverb has it: “The first son is born a baron.”

Immediately after the baptism Sicilian Albanians dance a special dance; and when they go home they throw out roasted peas to the people. Hence: “When shall we have the peas?” is used as a periphrasis for: “When does she expect her confinement?” The water in which the “chrism,” or christening cup is washed, is accounted holy, because of the sacred oil which it has touched. It is flung out on to a hedge, so that no foot of man may tread the soil which has received it. Also the water in which the child is first washed is treated as a thing apart. It is thrown on to the highway, if the babe be a boy; under the bed, or the oven, or in some other part of the house, if it be a girl; – the one signifying that a man must fare forth, the other that a woman must bide within.

When the child “grows two days in one,” and “smiles to the angels?” it is under the guardianship of certain other viewless, formless and mysterious creatures, who seem to be vagabonds and open-air doubles of the “Padrone della Casa.” These are “Le Donne di fuori.” The mother asks permission of these “Donne,” before she lifts the child from the cradle. “In the name of God,” she says, as she takes it up, “with your permission, my ladies.” These “Donne di fuori,” are not always to be relied on, for now they do, and now they do not, protect the little one. It is all a matter of caprice and humor; but certainly no mother who loved her child would omit this courteous entreaty to the, “Donne” who are supposed to have had the creature in their keeping while she was absent, and it was sleeping.

Not everyone in Sicily can marry according to his desire and the apparent fitness of things; for there are old feuds between parish and parish, as bitter as were ever those of Guelf and Ghibelline in times past; and the devotees of one saint will have as little to say to the devotees of another as will Jew and Gentile, True Believer and Giaour. In early times this local rivalry was, naturally, more pronounced than it is at present; but even now in Modica it is extremely rare if a San Giorgioaro marries a Sampietrana, or vice versâ – each considering the other as of a different and heretical religion. A marriage made not long ago between two people of these several parishes turned out ill solely on the religious question, the husband and wife not agreeing to differ, but each wanting to convert the other from the false to the true faith, and indignant because of ill-success. Just lately, says Dr. Pitrè, a Syracusan girl, whose patron saint was Saint Philip, and who was betrothed to a young man of the confraternity of the Santo Spirito, sent all adrift because, a few days before the marriage was to take place, she went to see her lover, lying ill in bed, and found hanging to the pillow a picture of the objectionable Santo Spirito. Whereat, furious and enraged she snatched down the picture, tore it into a thousand pieces which she trampled under foot, and then and there made it a sine quâ non that her husband-elect should substitute for this a picture of Saint Philip. This the young man refused to do; and the marriage was broken off.

Here in Sicily, as elsewhere, the seafaring population have little or nothing to say to the landsfolk by way of marriage; holding themselves more moral, more industrious, and in every way superior to those who live by the harvests of the earth or by the quick returns and easy profits of trade. But there is much more than this. The daughter of a small landed proprietor will not be given to the master of men in any kind of business, nor will the son of the former be suffered to marry the daughter of the latter. A peasant farmer, without sixpence, would not let his girl marry a well-to-do shepherd. A workman or rather a day laborer – “bracciante” – would not be received into the family of a muleteer, nor he again into one where the head was the keeper of swine or of cattle. The husbandman who can prune vines disdains the man who cannot dig, let him be what he will; the cow-herd disdains the ox-herd, and he again the man who looks after the calves. The shepherd is above the goat-herd; and so on, down to the most microscopic differences, surpassing even those of caste-ridden India.

When conditions, however, are equal, and there are no overt objections to the desired marriage, the mother of the young man takes the thing in hand. She knows that her son wants to marry, because he is sullen, silent, rude, contradictious and fault-finding; because last Saturday night he hitched up the ass to the hook in the house wall, instead of stabling it as he ought, and himself passed the night out of doors; or because – in one place in Sicily – he sat on the chest, stamped his feet and kicked his heels, so that his parents, hearing the noise, might know that he was disturbed in his mind, and wanted to marry so soon as convenient. Then the mother knows what is before her, and accepts her duties as a good woman should.

She dresses herself a little smartly and goes to the house of the Nina or Rosa with whom her son has fallen in love, to see what the girl is like when at home, and to find out the amount of dower likely to be given with her. She hides under her shawl a weaver’s comb, which, as soon as she is seated, she brings out, asking the girl’s mother if she can lend her one like it? This latter answers that she will look for one, and will do all she can to meet her visitor’s wishes. She then sends the daughter into another room, and the two begin the serious business of means and dowry.

In olden times the girl who did not know how to weave the thread she had already spun had small chance of finding a husband, how great soever her charms or virtues. Power looms and cheap cloth have changed all this and substituted a more generalized kind of industriousness; but, all the same, she must be industrious – or have the wit to appear so – else the maternal envoy will have none of her; but leaving the house hurriedly, crosses herself and repeats thrice the Sicilian word for “Renounced.” In Modica the young man’s mother sets a broom against the girl’s house-door at night which does the same as the weaver’s comb elsewhere; and, if all other things suit, the young people are betrothed the following Saturday. And after they are betrothed the girl’s mother goes to a church at some distance from her own home, where she stands behind the door, and, according to the words said by the first persons who pass through, foretells the happiness or the unhappiness of the marriage set on foot.