It appears that Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith, could write no more than
her grandfather. {176a} Nor, I repeat, could the Lady Jane Gordon,
daughter of the great Earl of Huntly, when she was married to the Earl of
Bothwell in 1566. At all events, Lady Jane “made her mark.” It may be
feared that Judith, brought up in that very illiterate town of Stratford,
under an illiterate mother, was neglected in her education. Sad, but
very common in women of her rank, and scarcely a proof that her father
did not write the plays.
As “nothing is known of the disposition and character” {176b} of
Shakespeare’s grand-daughter, Lady Barnard, who died in 1670, it is not
so paralysingly strange that nothing is known of any relics or anecdotes
of Shakespeare which she may have possessed. Mr. Greenwood “would have
supposed that she would have had much to say about the great poet,”
exhibited his books (if any), and so forth. Perhaps she did,—but how, if
we “know nothing about her disposition and character,” can we tell? No
interviewers rushed to her house (Abington Hall, Northampton-shire) with
pencils and notebooks to record her utterances; no reporter interviewed
her for the press. It is surprising, is it not?
The inference might be drawn, in the Baconian manner, that, during the
Commonwealth and Restoration, “the friends of the Muses” knew that the
actor was _not_ the author, and therefore did not interview his
granddaughter in the country.
“But, at any rate, we have the Stratford monument,” says Mr. Greenwood,
and delves into this problem. Even the Stratford monument of Shakespeare
in the parish church is haunted by Baconian mysteries. If the gentle
reader will throw his eye over the photograph {177a} of the monument as
it now exists, he may not be able to say to the face of the poet—
“Thou wast that all to me, Will,
For which my soul did pine.”
But if he has any knowledge of Jacobean busts on monuments, he will
probably agree with me in saying, “This effigy, though executed by
somebody who was not a Pheidias, and who perhaps worked merely from
descriptions, is, at all events, Jacobean.” The same may assuredly be
said of the monument; it is in good Jacobean style: the pillars with
their capitals are graceful: all the rest is in keeping; and the two
inscriptions are in the square capital letters of inscriptions of the
period; not in italic characters. Distrusting my own _expertise_, I have
consulted Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Holmes of the National Portrait
Gallery. They, with Mr. Spielmann, think the work to be of the early
seventeenth century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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