but did not say whether he was or not; and neither of them thought
to mention it for decades, and decades, and decades, and two more
decades after Shakespeare’s death (until old age and mental decay
had refreshed and vivified their memories). They hadn’t two facts
in stock about the long-dead distinguished citizen, but only just
the one: he slaughtered calves and broke into oratory while he was
at it. Curious. They had only one fact, yet the distinguished
citizen had spent twenty-six years in that little town–just half
his lifetime. However, rightly viewed, it was the most important
fact, indeed almost the only important fact, of Shakespeare’s life
in Stratford. Rightly viewed. For experience is an author’s most
valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and
the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. Rightly
viewed, calf-butchering accounts for Titus Andronicus, the only
play–ain’t it?–that the Stratford Shakespeare ever wrote; and yet
it is the only one everybody tries to chouse him out of, the
Baconians included.
The historians find themselves “justified in believing” that the
young Shakespeare poached upon Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer preserves and
got haled before that magistrate for it. But there is no shred of
respectworthy evidence that anything of the kind happened.
The historians, having argued the thing that MIGHT have happened
into the thing that DID happen, found no trouble in turning Sir
Thomas Lucy into Mr. Justice Shallow. They have long ago convinced
the world–on surmise and without trustworthy evidence–that
Shallow IS Sir Thomas.
The next addition to the young Shakespeare’s Stratford history
comes easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-
stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the
surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play:
result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh SUCH a
wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for
all time! It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the
colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and
sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and
admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on
the planet. We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of
plaster of paris. We ran short of plaster of paris, or we’d have
built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford
Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or
contained the most plaster.
Shakespeare pronounced Venus and Adonis “the first heir of his
invention,” apparently implying that it was his first effort at
literary composition. He should not have said it. It has been an
embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. They have
to make him write that graceful and polished and flawless and
beautiful poem before he escaped from Stratford and his family–
1586 or ’87–age, twenty-two, or along there; because within the
next five years he wrote five great plays, and could not have found
time to write another line.
It is sorely embarrassing. If he began to slaughter calves, and
poach deer, and rollick around, and learn English, at the earliest
likely moment–say at thirteen, when he was supposably wrenched
from that school where he was supposably storing up Latin for
future literary use–he had his youthful hands full, and much more
than full. He must have had to put aside his Warwickshire dialect,
which wouldn’t be understood in London, and study English very
hard. Very hard indeed; incredibly hard, almost, if the result of
that labor was to be the smooth and rounded and flexible and
letter-perfect English of the Venus and Adonis in the space of ten
years; and at the same time learn great and fine and unsurpassable
literary form.
However, it is “conjectured” that he accomplished all this and
more, much more: learned law and its intricacies; and the complex
procedure of the law courts; and all about soldiering, and
sailoring, and the manners and customs and ways of royal courts and
aristocratic society; and likewise accumulated in his one head
every kind of knowledge the learned then possessed, and every kind
of humble knowledge possessed by the lowly and the ignorant; and