Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/81

 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 49 it is not, for it represents the loftiest and noblest type of the Anglo-Saxon race. The other portraits are vapid, affected, and conventional, without character or expression ; but this is superb. The broad imperial brow, the firm, aquiline, and sensitive nose, the mouth proud, humorous, and passionate, the full orbits of the eyes, and the resolute, massive jaw, all indicate a temperament and brain of which the greatest deeds in letters, arts, or arms, might be confidently pre- dicted. A few weeks before his death Shakespeare made a will, bequeathing all his landed property in strict entail to his eldest daughter. This document is pre- served at Sotnerset House, a vast government building in London, adjoining Waterloo Bridge, between the Strand and the Victoria Embankment, where the probate records of the kingdom are deposited. It is locked in a buff leather case with an engraved inscription on a brass disk on the lid. It is written on three large square separate sheets of heavy paper, discolored by time. Each sheet is laid flat and sealed between two plates of clear glass, so that both sides can be inspected. The handwriting of the scrivener in the body of the instru- ment is quite distinct and legible, considering its antiquity. The signature of Shakespeare appears at the bottom of each sheet. The chirography of men of genius is proverbially bad, generally from its fluent facility, but the autographs of Shakespeare are clumsy, uncouth, and awkward, their disconnected and sprawling letters seeming to have been formed with difficulty by fingers unfamiliar with the use of the pen. They may perhaps have been written in an unaccustomed posi- tion, or when the testator was enfeebled by disease. It could not have been the infirmity of age, for he was but fifty-two when he died. It is impossible to look at these signatures without receiving the impression that they were written by an illiterate man. It is not merely their illegibility, but they have the scrawly curves and uncertain terminations of the penman who is not certain about the spelling of his own name. The great collections of London contain many manuscripts of celebrated authors, ancient and modern, and some that are hard to decipher, but there is no chirography more hopelessly and irreclaimably unlettered and un- scholarly than that of William Shakespeare. At the shrine by the placid Avon, which the centuries have invested with their pensive and resistless charm, and over which genius has cast its enchanting spell, an impassable gulf seems fixed between ths Shakespeare of Stratford and the Shakespeare of London. They appear like two entirely different and almost irreconcilable personalities. All that is known of either renders all that is claimed for the other improbable. Many dual lives have been lived before and since, but none seem so incompatible as these. It is unlikely that the claim of Shakespeare to the authorship of the dramas that bear his name will ever be overthrown. His title has been too long con- ceded to be successfully contested. That he wrote them can now be neither proved nor refuted, but there are inherent improbabilities that must always make the Shakespearean legend a profoundly fascinating subject of psychological con- sideration. 4