Note 411 — APPENDIX

See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of As You Like It. The countess is said to have added, ‘We have the man Shakespeare with us.’ No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke’s mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as ‘the man Shakespeare.’ Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words ‘Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603’ The ink and handwriting are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice.