William Shakespeare - "The Tragedie of Hamlet"

John Muir - "The Yosemite"

Cuthbert Bede - "The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green"

Unknown - "The World English Bible (WEB): Leviticus"

Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare

W >> Walter Savage Landor >> Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare



Transcribed from the 1891 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




CITATION AND EXAMINATION OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
EUSEBY TREEN JOSEPH CARNABY AND SILAS GOUGH CLERK
BEFORE THE WORSHIPFUL
SIR THOMAS LUCY KNIGHT
TOUCHING DEER-STEELING
On the Nineteenth Day of September in the Year of Grace 1582
NOW FIRST PUBLISHED FROM ORIGINAL PAPERS




EDITOR'S PREFACE.



"It was an ancestor of my husband who BROUGHT OUT the famous
Shakspeare."

These words were really spoken, and were repeated in conversation as
most ridiculous. Certainly such was very far from the lady's
intention; and who knows to what extent they are true?


The frolic of Shakspeare in deer-stealing was the cause of his
Hegira; and his connection with players in London was the cause of
his writing plays. Had he remained in his native town, his ambition
had never been excited by the applause of the intellectual, the
popular, and the powerful, which, after all, was hardly sufficient
to excite it. He wrote from the same motive as he acted,--to earn
his daily bread. He felt his own powers; but he cared little for
making them felt by others more than served his wants.

The malignant may doubt, or pretend to doubt, the authenticity of
the Examination here published. Let us, who are not malignant, be
cautious of adding anything to the noisome mass of incredulity that
surrounds us; let us avoid the crying sin of our age, in which the
"Memoirs of a Parish Clerk," edited as they were by a pious and
learned dignitary of the Established Church, are questioned in
regard to their genuineness; and even the privileges of Parliament
are inadequate to cover from the foulest imputation--the imputation
of having exercised his inventive faculties--the elegant and
accomplished editor of Eugene Aram's apprehension, trial, and
defence.

Indeed, there is little of real history, excepting in romances.
Some of these are strictly true to nature; while histories in
general give a distorted view of her, and rarely a faithful record
either of momentous or of common events.

Examinations taken from the mouth are surely the most trustworthy.
Whoever doubts it may be convinced by Ephraim Barnett.

The Editor is confident he can give no offence to any person who may
happen to bear the name of Lucy. The family of Sir Thomas became
extinct nearly half a century ago, and the estates descended to the
Rev. Mr. John Hammond, of Jesus College, in Oxford, a respectable
Welsh curate, between whom and him there existed at his birth
eighteen prior claimants. He took the name of Lucy.

The reader will form to himself, from this "Examination of
Shakspeare," more favourable opinion of Sir Thomas than is left upon
his mind by the dramatist in the character of Justice Shallow. The
knight, indeed, is here exhibited in all his pride of birth and
station, in all his pride of theologian and poet; he is led by the
nose, while he believes that nobody can move him, and shows some
other weaknesses, which the least attentive observer will discover;
but he is not without a little kindness at the bottom of the heart,-
-a heart too contracted to hold much, or to let what it holds
ebulliate very freely. But, upon the whole, we neither can utterly
hate nor utterly despise him. Ungainly as he is. -


Circum praecordia ludit.


The author of the "Imaginary Conversations" seems, in his "Boccacio
and Petrarca," to have taken his idea of Sir Magnus from this
manuscript. He, however, has adapted that character to the times;
and in Sir Magnus the coward rises to the courageous, the unskilful
in arms becomes the skilful, and war is to him a teacher of
humanity. With much superstition, theology never molests him;
scholarship and poetry are no affairs of his. He doubts of himself
and others, and is as suspicious in his ignorance as Sir Thomas is
confident.

With these wide diversities, there are family features, such as are
likely to display themselves in different times and circumstances,
and some so generically prevalent as never to lie quite dormant in
the breed. In both of them there is parsimony, there is arrogance,
there is contempt of inferiors, there is abject awe of power, there
is irresolution, there is imbecility. But Sir Magnus has no
knowledge, and no respect for it. Sir Thomas would almost go thirty
miles, even to Oxford, to see a fine specimen of it, although, like
most of those who call themselves the godly, he entertains the most
undoubting belief that he is competent to correct the errors of the
wisest and most practised theologian.



EDITOR'S APOLOGY.



A part only of the many deficiencies which the reader will discover
in this book is attributable to the Editor. These, however, it is
his duty to account for, and he will do it as briefly as he can.

The fac-similes (as printers' boys call them, meaning specimens) of
the handwriting of nearly all the persons introduced, might perhaps
have been procured had sufficient time been allowed for another
journey into Warwickshire. That of Shakspeare is known already in
the signature to his will, but deformed by sickness; that of Sir
Thomas Lucy is extant at the bottom of a commitment of a female
vagrant, for having a sucking child in her arms on the public road;
that of Silas Gough is affixed to the register of births and
marriages, during several years, in the parishes of Hampton Lucy and
Charlecote, and certifies one death,--Euseby Treen's; surmised, at
least, to be his by the letters "E. T." cut on a bench seven inches
thick, under an old pollard-oak outside the park paling of
Charlecote, toward the northeast. For this discovery the Editor is
indebted to a most respectable, intelligent farmer in the adjoining
parish of Wasperton, in which parish Treen's elder brother lies
buried. The worthy farmer is unwilling to accept the large portion
of fame justly due to him for the services he has thus rendered to
literature in elucidating the history of Shakspeare and his times.
In possession of another agricultural gentleman there was recently a
very curious piece of iron, believed by many celebrated antiquaries
to have constituted a part of a knight's breast-plate. It was
purchased for two hundred pounds by the trustees of the British
Museum, among whom, the reader will be grieved to hear, it produced
dissension and coldness; several of them being of opinion that it
was merely a gorget, while others were inclined to the belief that
it was the forepart of a horse-shoe. The Committee of Taste and the
Heads of the Archaeological Society were consulted. These learned,
dispassionate, and benevolent men had the satisfaction of
conciliating the parties at variance,--each having yielded somewhat
and every member signing, and affixing his seal to the signature,
that, if indeed it be the forepart of a horse-shoe, it was probably
Ismael's,--there being a curved indentation along it, resembling the
first letter of his name, and there being no certainty or record
that he died in France, or was left in that country by Sir Magnus.

The Editor is unable to render adequate thanks to the Rev. Stephen
Turnover for the gratification he received in his curious library by
a sight of Joseph Carnaby's name at full length, in red ink, coming
from a trumpet in the mouth of an angel. This invaluable document
is upon an engraving in a frontispiece to the New Testament. But
since unhappily he could procure no signature of Hannah Hathaway,
nor of her mother, and only a questionable one of Mr. John
Shakspeare, the poet's father,--there being two, in two very
different hands,--both he and the publisher were of opinion that the
graphical part of the volume would be justly censured as extremely
incomplete, and that what we could give would only raise
inextinguishable regret for that which we could not. On this
reflection all have been omitted.

The Editor is unwilling to affix any mark of disapprobation on the
very clever engraver who undertook the sorrel mare; but as in the
memorable words of that ingenious gentleman from Ireland whose
polished and elaborate epigrams raised him justly to the rank of
prime minister, -


"White was not SO VERY white," -


in like manner it appeared to nearly all the artists he consulted
that the sorrel mare was not SO SORREL in print.

There is another and a graver reason why the Editor was induced to
reject the contribution of his friend the engraver; and this is, a
neglect of the late improvements in his art, he having, unadvisedly
or thoughtlessly, drawn in the old-fashioned manner lines at the two
sides and at the top and bottom of his print, confining it to such
limits as paintings are confined in by their frames. Our spirited
engravers, it is well-known, disdain this thraldom, and not only
give unbounded space to their scenery, but also melt their figures
in the air,--so advantageously, that, for the most part, they
approach the condition of cherubs. This is the true aerial
perspective, so little understood heretofore. Trees, castles,
rivers, volcanoes, oceans, float together in absolute vacancy; the
solid earth is represented, what we know it actually is, buoyant as
a bubble, so that no wonder if every horse is endued with all the
privileges of Pegasus, save and except our sorrel. Malicious
carpers, insensible or invidious of England's glory, deny her in
this beautiful practice the merit of invention, assigning it to the
Chinese in their tea-cups and saucers; but if not absolutely new and
ours, it must be acknowledged that we have greatly improved and
extended the invention.

Such are the reasons why the little volume here laid before the
public is defective in those decorations which the exalted state of
literature demands. Something of compensation is supplied by a
Memorandum of Ephraim Barnett, written upon the inner cover, and
printed below.

The Editor, it will be perceived, is but little practised in the
ways of literature; much less is he gifted with that prophetic
spirit which can anticipate the judgment of the public. It may be
that he is too idle or too apathetic to think anxiously or much
about the matter; and yet he has been amused, in his earlier days,
at watching the first appearance of such few books as he believed to
be the production of some powerful intellect. He has seen people
slowly rise up to them, like carp in a pond when food is thrown into
it; some of which carp snatch suddenly at a morsel, and swallow it;
others touch it gently with their barb, pass deliberately by, and
leave it; others wriggle and rub against it more disdainfully;
others, in sober truth, know not what to make of it, swim round and
round it, eye it on the sunny side, eye it on the shady, approach
it, question it, shoulder it, flap it with the tail, turn it over,
look askance at it, take a pea-shell or a worm instead of it, and
plunge again their heads into the comfortable mud. After some
seasons the same food will suit their stomachs better.



EXAMINATION, ETC., ETC.



About one hour before noontide the youth WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, accused
of deer-stealing, and apprehended for that offence, was brought into
the great hall at Charlecote, where, having made his obeisance, it
was most graciously permitted him to stand.

The worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, seeing him right opposite,
on the farther side of the long table, and fearing no disadvantage,
did frown upon him with great dignity; then, deigning ne'er a word
to the culprit, turned he his face toward his chaplain, Sir Silas
Gough, who stood beside him, and said unto him most courteously, and
unlike unto one who in his own right commandeth, -

"Stand out of the way! What are those two varlets bringing into the
room?"

"The table, sir," replied Master Silas, "upon the which the
consumption of the venison was perpetrated."

The youth, William Shakspeare, did thereupon pray and beseech his
lordship most fervently, in this guise:-

"Oh, sir! do not let him turn the tables against me, who am only a
simple stripling, and he an old codger."

But Master Silas did bite his nether lip, and did cry aloud, -

"Look upon those deadly spots!"

And his worship did look thereupon most staidly, and did say in the
ear of Master Silas, but in such wise that it reached even unto
mine,

"Good honest chandlery, methinks!"

"God grant it may turn out so!" ejaculated Master Silas.

The youth, hearing these words, said unto him, -

"I fear, Master Silas, gentry like you often pray God to grant what
HE would rather not; and now and then what YOU would rather not."

Sir Silas was wroth at this rudeness of speech about God in the face
of a preacher, and said, reprovingly, -

"Out upon thy foul mouth, knave! upon which lie slaughter and
venison."

Whereupon did William Shakspeare sit mute awhile, and discomfited;
then turning toward Sir Thomas, and looking and speaking as one
submiss and contrite, he thus appealed unto him:-

"Worshipful sir! were there any signs of venison on my mouth, Master
Silas could not for his life cry out upon it, nor help kissing it as
'twere a wench's."

Sir Thomas looked upon him with most lordly gravity and wisdom, and
said unto him, in a voice that might have come from the bench:

"Youth, thou speakest irreverently;" and then unto Master Silas:
"Silas! to the business on hand. Taste the fat upon yon boor's
table, which the constable hath brought hither, good Master Silas!
And declare upon oath, being sworn in my presence, first, whether
said fat do proceed of venison; secondly, whether said venison be of
buck or doe."

Whereupon the reverend Sir Silas did go incontinently, and did bend
forward his head, shoulders, and body, and did severally taste four
white solid substances upon an oaken board; said board being about
two yards long, and one yard four inches wide,--found in, and
brought thither from, the tenement or messuage of Andrew Haggit, who
hath absconded. Of these four white solid substances, two were
somewhat larger than a groat, and thicker; one about the size of
King Henry the Eighth's shilling, when our late sovereign lord of
blessed memory was toward the lustiest; and the other, that is to
say the middlemost, did resemble in some sort, a mushroom, not over
fresh, turned upward on its stalk.

"And what sayest thou, Master Silas?" quoth the knight.

In reply whereunto Sir Silas thus averred:-


"Venison! o' my conscience!
Buck! or burn me alive!


The three splashes in the circumference are verily and indeed
venison; buck, moreover,--and Charlecote buck, upon my oath!"

Then carefully tasting the protuberance in the centre, he spat it
out, crying, -

"Pho! pho! villain! villain!" and shaking his fist at the culprit.

Whereat the said culprit smiled and winked, and said off-hand, -

"Save thy spittle, Silas! It would supply a gaudy mess to the
hungriest litter; but it would turn them from whelps into wolvets.
'T is pity to throw the best of thee away. Nothing comes out of thy
mouth that is not savoury and solid, bating thy wit, thy sermons,
and thy promises."

It was my duty to write down the very words, irreverent as they are,
being so commanded. More of the like, it is to be feared, would
have ensued, but that Sir Thomas did check him, saying, shrewdly, -

"Young man! I perceive that if I do not stop thee in thy courses,
thy name, being involved in thy company's, may one day or other
reach across the county; and folks may handle it and turn it about,
as it deserveth, from Coleshill to Nuneaton, from Bromwicham to
Brownsover. And who knoweth but that, years after thy death, the
very house wherein thou wert born may be pointed at, and commented
on, by knots of people, gentle and simple! What a shame for an
honest man's son! Thanks to me, who consider of measures to prevent
it! Posterity shall laud and glorify me for plucking thee clean out
of her head, and for picking up timely a ticklish skittle, that
might overthrow with it a power of others just as light. I will rid
the hundred of thee, with God's blessing!--nay, the whole shire. We
will have none such in our county; we justices are agreed upon it,
and we will keep our word now and forevermore. Woe betide any that
resembles thee in any part of him!"

Whereunto Sir Silas added, -

"We will dog him, and worry him, and haunt him, and bedevil him; and
if ever he hear a comfortable word, it shall be in a language very
different from his own."

"As different as thine is from a Christian's," said the youth.

"Boy! thou art slow of apprehension," said Sir Thomas, with much
gravity; and taking up the cue, did rejoin, -

"Master Silas would impress upon thy ductile and tender mind the
danger of evil doing; that we, in other words that justice is
resolved to follow him up, even beyond his country, where he shall
hear nothing better than the Italian or the Spanish, or the black
language, or the language of Turk or Troubadour, or Tartar or
Mongol. And, forsooth, for this gentle and indirect reproof, a
gentleman in priest's orders is told by a stripling that he lacketh
Christianity! Who then shall give it?"

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

"Who, indeed? when the founder of the feast leaveth an invited guest
so empty! Yea, sir, the guest was invited, and the board was
spread. The fruits that lay upon it be there still, and fresh as
ever; and the bread of life in those capacious canisters is
unconsumed and unbroken,"

SIR SILAS (aside).

"The knave maketh me hungry with his mischievous similitudes."

SIR THOMAS.

"Thou hast aggravated thy offence, Wil Shakspeare! Irreverent
caitiff! is this a discourse for my chaplain and clerk? Can he or
the worthy scribe Ephraim (his worship was pleased to call me
worthy) write down such words as those, about litter and wolvets,
for the perusal and meditation of the grand jury? If the whole
corporation of Stratford had not unanimously given it against thee,
still his tongue would catch thee, as the evet catcheth a gnat.
Know, sirrah, the reverend Sir Silas, albeit ill appointed for
riding, and not over-fond of it, goeth to every house wherein is a
venison feast for thirty miles round. Not a buck's hoof on any
stable-door but it awakeneth his recollections like a red letter."

This wholesome reproof did bring the youth back again to his right
senses; and then said he, with contrition, and with a wisdom beyond
his years, and little to be expected from one who had spoken just
before so unadvisedly and rashly, -

"Well do I know it, your worship! And verily do I believe that a
bone of one being shovelled among the soil upon his coffin would
forthwith quicken {8a} him. Sooth to say, there is ne'er a
buckhound in the county but he treateth him as a godchild, patting
him on the head, soothing his velvety ear between thumb and
forefinger, ejecting tick from tenement, calling him 'fine fellow,'
'noble lad,' and giving him his blessing, as one dearer to him than
a king's debt to a debtor, {8b} or a bastard to a dad of eighty.
This is the only kindness I ever heard of Master Silas toward his
fellow-creatures. Never hold me unjust, Sir Knight, to Master
Silas. Could I learn other good of him, I would freely say it; for
we do good by speaking it, and none is easier. Even bad men are not
bad men while they praise the just. Their first step backward is
more troublesome and wrenching to them than the first forward."

"In God's name, where did he gather all this?" whispered his worship
to the chaplain, by whose side I was sitting. "Why, he talks like a
man of forty-seven, or more!"

"I doubt his sincerity, sir!" replied the chaplain. "His words are
fairer now--"

"Devil choke him for them!" interjected he, with an undervoice.

"--and almost book-worthy; but out of place. What the scurvy cur
yelped against me, I forgive him as a Christian. Murrain upon such
varlet vermin! It is but of late years that dignities have come to
be reviled. The other parts of the Gospel were broken long before,-
-this was left us; and now this likewise is to be kicked out of
doors, amid the mutterings of such mooncalves as him yonder."

"Too true, Silas!" said the knight, sighing deeply. "Things are not
as they were in our glorious wars of York and Lancaster. The knaves
were thinned then,--two or three crops a year of that rank squitch-
grass which it has become the fashion of late to call the people.
There was some difference then between buff doublets and iron mail,
and the rogues felt it. Well-a-day! we must bear what God willeth,
and never repine, although it gives a man the heart-ache. We are
bound in duty to keep these things for the closet, and to tell God
of them only when we call upon his holy name, and have him quite by
ourselves."

Sir Silas looked discontented and impatient, and said, snappishly, -

"Cast we off here, or we shall be at fault. Start him, sir!--
prithee, start him."

Again his worship, Sir Thomas, did look gravely and grandly, and
taking a scrap of paper out of the Holy Book then lying before him,
did read distinctly these words:-

"Providence hath sent Master Silas back hither, this morning, to
confound thee in thy guilt."

Again, with all the courage and composure of an innocent man, and
indeed with more than what an innocent man ought to possess in the
presence of a magistrate, the youngster said, pointing toward Master
Silas, -

"The first moment he ventureth to lift up his visage from the table,
hath Providence marked him miraculously. I have heard of black
malice. How many of our words have more in them than we think of!
Give a countryman a plough of silver, and he will plough with it all
the season, and never know its substance. 'T is thus with our daily
speech. What riches lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of the poorest
and most ignorant! What flowers of Paradise lie under our feet,
with their beauties and parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from
having been daily trodden on! O, sir, look you!--but let me cover
my eyes! Look at his lips! Gracious Heaven! they were not thus
when he entered. They are blacker now than Harry Tewe's bull-
bitch's!"

Master Silas did lift up his eyes in astonishment and wrath; and his
worship, Sir Thomas, did open his wider and wider, and cried by fits
and starts:-

"Gramercy! true enough! nay, afore God, too true by half! I never
saw the like! Who would believe it? I wish I were fairly rid of
this examination,--my hands washed clean thereof! Another time,--
anon! We have our quarterly sessions; we are many together. At
present I remand--"

And now, indeed, unless Sir Silas had taken his worship by the
sleeve, he would may-hap have remanded the lad. But Sir Silas,
still holding the sleeve and shaking it, said, hurriedly, -

"Let me entreat your worship to ponder. What black does the fellow
talk of? My blood and bile rose up against the rogue; but surely I
did not turn black in the face, or in the mouth, as the fellow calls
it?"

Whether Master Silas had some suspicion and inkling of the cause or
not, he rubbed his right hand along his face and lips, and, looking
upon it, cried aloud, -

"Ho, ho! is it off? There is some upon my finger's end, I find.
Now I have it,--ay, there it is. That large splash upon the centre
of the table is tallow, by my salvation! The profligates sat up
until the candle burned out, and the last of it ran through the
socket upon the board. We knew it before. I did convey into my
mouth both fat and smut!"

"Many of your cloth and kidney do that, good Master Silas, and make
no wry faces about it," quoth the youngster, with indiscreet
merriment, although short of laughter, as became him who had already
stepped too far and reached the mire.

To save paper and time, I shall now, for the most part, write only
what they all said, not saying that they said it, and just copying
out in my clearest hand what fell respectively from their mouths.

SIR SILAS.

"I did indeed spit it forth, and emunge my lips, as who should not?"

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

"Would it were so!"

SIR SILAS.

"WOULD IT WERE SO! in thy teeth, hypocrite!"

SIR THOMAS.

"And, truly, I likewise do incline to hope and credit it, as thus
paraphrased and expounded."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

"Wait until this blessed day next year, sir, at the same hour. You
shall see it forth again at its due season; it would be no miracle
if it lasted. Spittle may cure sore eyes, but not blasted mouths
and scald consciences."

SIR THOMAS.

"Why! who taught thee all this?"

Then turned he leisurely toward Sir Silas, and placing his hand
outspreaden upon the arm of the chaplain, said unto him in a low,
judicial, hollow voice, -

"Every word true and solemn! I have heard less wise saws from
between black covers."

Sir Silas was indignant at this under-rating, as he appeared to
think it, of the church and its ministry, and answered impatiently,
with Christian freedom, -

"Your worship surely will not listen to this wild wizard in his
brothel-pulpit!"

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

"Do I live to hear Charlecote Hall called a brothel-pulpit? Alas,
then, I have lived too long!"

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.