In an instant the gaskets were off and the bunt dropped."Sheet home the fore-royal!"--"Weather sheet's home!"--"Lee sheet's home!"--"Hoist away,sir!"is bawled from aloft."Overhaul your clewlines!"shouts the mate."Aye-aye,sir,all clear!"--"Taut leech!belay!Well the lee brace;haul taut to windward!"and the royals are set.
What would the captain of any sailing-vessel of our time say to that?He would say,"The man that wrote that didn't learn his trade out of a book,he has BEEN there!"But would this same captain be competent to sit in judgment upon Shakespeare's seamanship--considering the changes in ships and ship-talk that have necessarily taken place,unrecorded,unremembered,and lost to history in the last three hundred years?It is my conviction that Shakespeare's sailor-talk would be Choctaw to him.For instance--from The Tempest:
Master.Boatswain!
Boatswain.Here,master;what cheer?
Master.Good,speak to the mariners:fall to't,yarely,or we run ourselves to ground;bestir,bestir!
(Enter mariners.)
Boatswain.Heigh,my hearts!cheerly,cheerly,my hearts!yare,yare!Take in the topsail.Tend to the master's whistle .
Down with the topmast!yare!lower,lower!Bring her to try wi'the main course .Lay her a-hold,a-hold!Set her two courses.
Off to sea again;lay her off.
That will do,for the present;let us yare a little,now,for a change.
If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters say,"Here,devil,empty the quoins into the standing galley and the imposing stone into the hell-box;assemble the comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick about it,"Ishould recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing,and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically,not practically.
I have been a quartz miner in the silver regions--a pretty hard life;I know all the palaver of that business:I know all about discovery claims and the subordinate claims;I know all about lodes,ledges,outcroppings,dips,spurs,angles,shafts,drifts,inclines,levels,tunnels,air-shafts,"horses,"clay casings,granite casings;quartz mills and their batteries;arastras,and how to charge them with quicksilver and sulphate of copper;and how to clean them up,and how to reduce the resulting amalgam in the retorts,and how to cast the bullion into pigs;and finally I know how to screen tailings,and also how to hunt for something less robust to do,and find it.I know the argot of the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly;and so whenever Bret Harte introduces that industry into a story,the first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening--like Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford one--not by experience.No one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse.
I have been a surface-miner--gold--and I know all its mysteries,and the dialect that belongs with them;and whenever Harte introduces that industry into a story I know by the phrasing of his characters that neither he nor they have ever served that trade.
I have been a "pocket"miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in any but one little spot in the world,so far as I know.I know how,with horn and water,to find the trail of a pocket and trace it step by step and stage by stage up the mountain to its source,and find the compact little nest of yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the ground.I know the language of that trade,that capricious trade,that fascinating buried-treasure trade,and can catch any writer who tries to use it without having learned it by the sweat of his brow and the labor of his hands.
I know several other trades and the argot that goes with them;and whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them without having learned it at its source I can trap him always before he gets far on his road.
And so,as I have already remarked,if I were required to superintend a Bacon-Shakespeare controversy,I would narrow the matter down to a single question--the only one,so far as the previous controversies have informed me,concerning which illustrious experts of unimpeachable competency have testified:
WAS THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS A LAWYER?--a lawyer deeply read and of limitless experience?I would put aside the guesses,and surmises,and perhapses,and might-have-beens,and could-have beens,and must-have-beens,and we-are justified-in-presumings,and the rest of those vague spectres and shadows and indefinitenesses,and stand or fall,win or lose,by the verdict rendered by the jury upon that single question.If the verdict was Yes,I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare,the actor,manager,and trader who died so obscure,so forgotten,so destitute of even village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and friend of his later days remembered to tell anything about him,did not write the Works.
Chapter XIII of The Shakespeare Problem Restated bears the heading "Shakespeare as a Lawyer,"and comprises some fifty pages of expert testimony,with comments thereon,and I will copy the first nine,as being sufficient all by themselves,as it seems to me,to settle the question which I have conceived to be the master-key to the Shakespeare-Bacon puzzle.
