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Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE GREAT UNKNOWN
INTRODUCTION
The theory that Francis Bacon was, in the main, the author of “Shakespeare’s
plays,” has now been for fifty years before the learned world.
Its advocates have met with less support than they had reason to expect.
Their methods, their logic, and their hypotheses closely resemble those
applied by many British and foreign scholars to Homer; and by critics
of the very Highest School to Holy Writ. Yet the Baconian theory
is universally rejected in England by the professors and historians
of English literature; and generally by students who have no profession
save that of Letters. The Baconians, however, do not lack the
countenance and assistance of highly distinguished persons, whose names
are famous where those of mere men of letters are unknown; and in circles
where the title of “Professor” is not duly respected.
The partisans of Bacon aver (or one of them avers) that “Lord
Penzance, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Palmerston, Judge Webb, Judge Holmes
(of Kentucky, U.S.), Prince Bismarck, John Bright, and innumerable most
thoughtful scholars eminent in many walks of life, and especially
in the legal profession . . . ” have been Baconians, or, at
least, opposed to Will Shakspere’s authorship. To these
names of scholars I must add that of my late friend, Samuel Clemens,
D.Litt. of Oxford; better known to many as Mark Twain. Dr. Clemens
was, indeed, no mean literary critic; witness his epoch-making study
of Prof. Dowden’s Life of Shelley, while his researches
into the biography of Jeanne d’Arc were most conscientious.
With the deepest respect for the political wisdom and literary taste
of Lord Palmerston, Prince Bismarck, Lord Beaconsfield, and the late
Mr. John Bright; and with every desire to humble myself before the judicial
verdicts of Judges Holmes, Webb, and Lord Penzance; with sincere admiration
of my late friend, Dr. Clemens, I cannot regard them as, in the first
place and professionally, trained students of literary history.
They were no more specially trained students of Elizabethan literature
than myself; they were amateurs in this province, as I am an amateur,
who differ from all of them in opinion. Difference of opinion
concerning points of literary history ought not to make “our angry
passions rise.” Yet this controversy has been extremely
bitter.
I abstain from quoting the “sweetmeats,” in Captain MacTurk’s
phrase, which have been exchanged by the combatants. Charges of
ignorance and monomania have been answered by charges of forgery, lying,
“scandalous literary dishonesty,” and even inaccuracy.
Now no mortal is infallibly accurate, but we are all sane and “indifferent
honest.” There have been forgeries in matters Shakespearean,
alas, but not in connection with the Baconian controversy.
It is an argument of the Baconians, and generally of the impugners of
good Will’s authorship of the plays vulgarly attributed to him,
that the advocates of William Shakspere, Gent, as author of the plays,
differ like the Kilkenny cats among themselves on many points.
All do not believe, with Mr. J. C. Collins, that Will knew Sophocles,
Euripides, and Æschylus (but not Aristophanes) as well as Mr.
Swinburne did, or knew them at all - for that matter. Mr. Pollard
differs very widely from Sir Sidney Lee on points concerning the First
Folio and the Quartos: my sympathies are with Mr. Pollard. Few,
if any, partisans of Will agree with Mrs. Stopes (herself no Baconian)
about the history of the Stratford monument of the poet. About
Will’s authorship of Titus Andronicus, and Henry
VI, Part I, the friends of Will, like the friends of Bacon,
are at odds among themselves. These and other divergencies of
opinion cause the Baconians to laugh, as if they were a harmonious
circle . . . ! For the Baconian camp is not less divided against
itself than the camp of the “Stratfordians.” Not all
Baconians hold that Bacon was the legitimate son of “that Imperial
votaress” Queen Elizabeth. Not all believe in the Cryptogram
of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, or in any other cryptograms. Not all
maintain that Bacon, in the Sonnets, was inspired by a passion for the
Earl of Essex, for Queen Elizabeth, or for an early miniature of himself.
Not all regard him as the author of the plays of Kit Marlowe.
Not all suppose him to be a Rosicrucian, who possibly died at the age
of a hundred and six, or, perhaps, may be “still running.”
Not all aver that he wrote thirteen plays before 1593. But one
party holds that, in the main, Will was the author of the plays, while
the other party votes for Bacon - or for Bungay, a Great Unknown.
I use Bungay as an endearing term for the mysterious being who was the
Author if Francis Bacon was not. Friar Bungay was the rival of
Friar Bacon, as the Unknown (if he was not Francis Bacon) is the rival
of “the inventor of Inductive reasoning.”
I could never have expected that I should take a part in this controversy;
but acquaintance with The Shakespeare Problem Restated (503 pp.),
(1908), and later works of Mr. G. G. Greenwood, M.P., has tempted me
to enter the lists.
Mr. Greenwood is worth fighting; he is cunning of fence, is learned
(and I cannot conceal my opinion that Mr. Donnelly and Judge Holmes
were rather ignorant). He is not over “the threshold of
Eld” (as were Judge Webb and Lord Penzance when they took up Shakespearean
criticism). His knowledge of Elizabethan literature is vastly
superior to mine, for I speak merely, in Matthew Arnold’s words,
as “a belletristic trifler.”
Moreover, Mr. Greenwood, as a practising barrister, is a judge of legal
evidence; and, being a man of sense, does not “hold a brief for
Bacon” as the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems, and
does not value Baconian cryptograms. In the following chapters
I make endeavours, conscientious if fallible, to state the theory of
Mr. Greenwood. It is a negative theory. He denies that Will
Shakspere (or Shaxbere, or Shagspur, and so on) was the author of the
plays and poems. Some other party was, in the main,
with other hands, the author. Mr. Greenwood cannot, or does
not, offer a guess as to who this ingenious Somebody was. He does
not affirm, and he does not deny, that Bacon had a share, greater or
less, in the undertaking.
In my brief tractate I have not room to consider every argument; to
traverse every field. In philology I am all unlearned, and cannot
pretend to discuss the language of Shakespeare, any more than I can
analyse the language of Homer into proto-Arcadian and Cyprian, and so
on. Again, I cannot pretend to have an opinion, based on internal
evidence, about the genuine Shakespearean character of such plays as
Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, Part I, and Troilus
and Cressida. About them different views are held within
both camps.
I am no lawyer or naturalist (as Partridge said, Non omnia possumus
omnes), and cannot imagine why our Author is so accurate
in his frequent use of terms of law - if he be Will; and so totally
at sea in natural history - if he be Francis, who “took all knowledge
for his province.”
How can a layman pretend to deal with Shakespeare’s legal attainments,
after he has read the work of the learned Recorder of Bristol, Mr. Castle,
K.C.? To his legal mind it seems that in some of Will’s
plays he had the aid of an expert in law, and then his technicalities
were correct. In other plays he had no such tutor, and then he
was sadly to seek in his legal jargon. I understand Mr. Greenwood
to disagree on this point. Mr. Castle says, “I think Shakespeare
would have had no difficulty in getting aid from several sources.
There is therefore no prima facie reason why we should suppose
the information was supplied by Bacon.”
Of course there is not!
“In fact, there are some reasons why one should attribute the
legal assistance, say, to Coke, rather than to Bacon.”
The truth is, that Bacon seems not to have been lawyer enough for Will’s
purposes. “We have no reason to believe that Bacon was particularly
well read in the technicalities of our law; he never seems to have seriously
followed his profession.” {0a}
Now we have Mr. Greenwood’s testimonial in favour of Mr. Castle,
“Who really does know something about law.” {0b}
Mr. Castle thinks that Bacon really did not know enough about law, and
suggests Sir Edward Coke, of all human beings, as conceivably Will’s
“coach” on legal technicalities. Perhaps Will consulted
the Archbishop of Canterbury on theological niceties?
Que sçais je? In some plays, says Mr. Castle,
Will’s law is all right, in other plays it is all wrong.
As to Will’s law, when Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Castle differ, a
layman dare not intervene.
Concerning legend and tradition about our Will, it seems that, in each
case, we should do our best to trace the Quellen, to discover
the original sources, and the steps by which the tale arrived at its
late recorders in print; and then each man’s view as to the veracity
of the story will rest on his sense of probability; and on his bias,
his wish to believe or to disbelieve.
There exists, I believe, only one personal anecdote of Will, the actor,
and on it the Baconians base an argument against the contemporary recognition
of him as a dramatic author. I take the criticism of Mr. Greenwood
(who is not a Baconian). One John Manningham, Barrister-at-Law,
“a well-educated and cultured man,” notes in his Diary (February
2, 1601) that “at our feast we had a play called Twelve Night
or What you Will, much like the Comedy of Errors, or Menæchmi
in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni.”
He confides to his Diary the tricks played on Malvolio as “a
good practice.” {0c}
That is all.
About the authorship he says nothing: perhaps he neither knew nor cared
who the author was. In our day the majority of people who tell
me about a play which they have seen, cannot tell me the name of the
author. Yet it is usually printed on the playbill, though in modest
type. The public does not care a straw about the author’s
name, unless he be deservedly famous for writing letters to the newspapers
on things in general; for his genius as an orator; his enthusiasm as
a moralist, or in any other extraneous way. Dr. Forman in his
queer account of the plot of “Mack Beth” does not allude
to the name of the author (April 20, 1610). Twelfth Night was
not published till 1623, in the Folio: there was no quarto to enlighten
Manningham about the author’s name. We do not hear of printed
playbills, with author’s names inserted, at that period.
It seems probable that occasional playgoers knew and cared no more about
authors than they do at present. The world of the wits, the critics
(such as Francis Meres), poets, playwrights, and players, did know and
care about the authors; apparently Manningham did not. But he
heard a piquant anecdote of two players and (March 13, 1601) inserted
it in his Diary.
Shakespeare once anticipated Richard Burbage at an amorous tryst with
a citizen’s wife. Burbage had, by the way, been playing
the part of Richard III. While Will was engaged in illicit dalliance,
the message was brought (what a moment for bringing messages!) that
Richard III was at the door, and Will “caused return to be made
that William the Conqueror was before Richard III. Shakespeare’s
name William.” (My italics.) Mr. Greenwood argues
that if “Shakspere the player was known to the world as the author
of the plays of Shakespeare, it does seem extremely remarkable”
that Manningham should have thought it needful to add “Shakespeare’s
name William.” {0d}
But was “Shakspere,” or any man, “known to
the world as the author of the plays of Shakespeare”? No!
for Mr. Greenwood writes, “nobody, outside a very small circle,
troubled his head as to who the dramatist or dramatists might be.”
{0e} To that
“very small circle” we have no reason to suppose that Manningham
belonged, despite his remarkable opinion that Twelfth Night resembles
the Menæchmi. Consequently, it is not “extremely
remarkable” that Manningham wrote “Shakespeare’s name
William,” to explain to posterity the joke about “William
the Conqueror,” instead of saying, “the brilliant author
of the Twelfth Night play which so much amused me at our feast a few
weeks ago.” {0f}
“Remarkable” out of all hooping it would have been had Manningham
written in the style of Mr. Greenwood. But Manningham apparently
did not “trouble his head as to who the dramatist or dramatists
might be.” “Nobody, outside a very small circle,”
did trouble his poor head about that point. Yet Mr. Greenwood
thinks “it does seem extremely remarkable” that Manningham
did not mention the author.
Later, on the publication of the Folio (1623), the world seems to have
taken more interest in literary matters. Mr. Greenwood says that
then while “the multitude” would take Ben Jonson’s
noble panegyric on Shakespeare as a poet “au pied de la lettre,”
“the enlightened few would recognise that it had an esoteric
meaning.” {0g}
Then, it seems, “the world” - the “multitude”
- regarded the actor as the author. Only “the enlightened
few” were aware that when Ben said “Shakespeare,”
and “Swan of Avon,” he meant - somebody else.
Quite different inferences are drawn from the same facts by persons
of different mental conditions. For example, in 1635 or 1636,
Cuthbert Burbage, brother of Richard, the famous actor, Will’s
comrade, petitioned Lord Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, for consideration
in a quarrel about certain theatres. Telling the history of the
houses, he mentions that the Burbages “to ourselves joined those
deserving men, Shakspere, Heminge, Condell, Phillips and others.”
Cuthbert is arguing his case solely from the point of the original owners
or lease-holders of the houses, and of the well-known actors to whom
they joined themselves. Judge Webb and Mr. Greenwood think that
“it does indeed seem strange . . . that the proprietor[s] of the
playhouses which had been made famous by the production of the Shakespearean
plays, should, in 1635 - twelve years after the publication of the great
Folio - describe their reputed author to the survivor of the Incomparable
Pair, as merely a ‘man-player’ and ‘a deserving man.’”
Why did he not remind the Lord Chamberlain that this “deserving
man” was the author of all these famous dramas? Was it because
he was aware that the Earl of Pembroke “knew better than that”?
{0h}
These arguments are regarded by some Baconians as proof positive of
their case.
Cuthbert Burbage, in 1635 or 1636, did not remind the Earl of what the
Earl knew very well, that the Folio had been dedicated, in 1623, to
him and his brother, by Will’s friends, Heminge and Condell, as
they had been patrons of the late William Shakspere and admirers of
his plays. The terms of this dedication are to be cited in the
text, later. We all now would have reminded the
Earl of what he very well knew. Cuthbert did not.
The intelligence of Cuthbert Burbage may be gauged by anyone who will
read pp. 481-484 in William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
by the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton. Cuthbert
was a puzzle-pated old boy. The silence as to Will’s authorship
on the part of this muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635-36, cannot outweigh
the explicit and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed
by his friends and fellow-actors in 1623.
Men believe what they may; but I prefer positive evidence for the affirmative
to negative evidence from silence, the silence of Cuthbert Burbage.
One may read through Mr. Greenwood’s three books and note the
engaging varieties of his views; they vary as suits his argument; but
he is unaware of it, or can justify his varyings. Thus, in 1610,
one John Davies wrote rhymes in which he speaks of “our English
Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare”; “good Will.”
In his period patriotic English critics called a comic dramatist “the
English Terence,” or “the English Plautus,” precisely
as American critics used to call Mr. Bryant “the American Wordsworth,”
or Cooper “the American Scott”; and as Scots called the
Rev. Mr. Thomson “the Scottish Turner.” Somewhere,
I believe, exists “the Belgian Shakespeare.”
Following this practice, Davies had to call Will either “our English
Terence,” or “our English Plautus.” Aristophanes
would not have been generally recognised; and Will was no more like
one of these ancient authors than another. Thus Davies was apt
to choose either Plautus or Terence; it was even betting which he selected.
But he chanced to choose Terence; and this is “curious,”
and suggests suspicions to Mr. Greenwood - and the Baconians.
They are so very full of suspicions!
It does not suit the Baconians, or Mr. Greenwood, to find contemporary
recognition of Will as an author. {0i}
Consequently, Mr. Greenwood finds Davies’s “curious, and
at first sight, inappropriate comparison of ‘Shake-speare’
to Terence worthy of remark, for Terence is the very author whose name
is alleged to have been used as a mask-name, or nom de plume,
for the writings of great men who wished to keep the fact of their
authorship concealed.”
Now Davies felt bound to bring in some Roman parallel to Shakespeare;
and had only the choice of Terence or Plautus. Meres (1598)
used Plautus; Davies used Terence. Mr. Greenwood {0j}
shows us that Plautus would not do. “Could he”
(Shakespeare) “write only of courtesans and cocottes,
and not of ladies highly born, cultured, and refined? . . . ”
“The supposed parallel” (Plautus and Shakespeare) “breaks
down at every point.” Thus, on Mr. Greenwood’s showing,
Plautus could not serve Davies, or should not serve him, in his search
for a Roman parallel to “good Will.” But Mr. Greenwood
also writes, “if he” (Shakespeare) “was to be likened
to a Latin comedian, surely Plautus is the writer with whom he should
have been compared.” {0k}
Yet Plautus was the very man who cannot be used as a parallel to Shakespeare.
Of course no Roman nor any other comic dramatist closely resembles the
author of As You Like It. They who selected either
Plautus or Terence meant no more than that both were celebrated comic
dramatists. Plautus was no parallel to Will. Yet “surely
Plautus is the author to whom he should have been compared” by
Davies, says Mr. Greenwood. If Davies tried Plautus, the comparison
was bad; if Terence, it was “curious,” as Terence was absurdly
accused of being the “nom de plume” of some
great “concealed poets” of Rome. “From all the
known facts about Terence,” says a Baconian critic (who has consulted
Smith’s Biographical Dictionary), “it is an almost
unavoidable inference that John Davies made the comparison to Shakspere
because he knew of the point common to both cases.” The
common point is taken to be, not that both men were famous comic dramatists,
but that Roman literary gossips said, and that Baconians and Mr. Greenwood
say, that “Terence” was said to be a “mask-name,”
and that “Shakespeare” is a mask-name. Of the second
opinion there is not a hint in literature of the time of good Will.
What surprises one most in this controversy is that men eminent in the
legal profession should be “anti-Shakesperean,” if not overtly
Baconian. For the evidence for the contemporary faith in Will’s
authorship is all positive; from his own age comes not a whisper of
doubt, not even a murmur of surprise. It is incredible to me that
his fellow-actors and fellow-playwrights should have been deceived,
especially when they were such men as Ben Jonson and Tom Heywood.
One would expect lawyers, of all people, to have been most impatient
of the surprising attempts made to explain away Ben Jonson’s testimony,
by aid, first, of quite a false analogy (Scott’s denial of his
own authorship of his novels), and, secondly, by the suppression of
such a familiar fact as the constant inconsistency of Ben’s judgments
of his contemporaries in literature. Mr. Greenwood must have forgotten
the many examples of this inconsistency; but I have met a Baconian author
who knew nothing of the fact. Mr. Greenwood, it is proper to say,
does not seem to be satisfied that he has solved what he calls “the
Jonsonian riddle.” Really, there is no riddle. About
Will, as about other authors, his contemporaries and even his friends,
on occasion, Ben “spoke with two voices,” now in terms of
hyperbolical praise, now in carping tones of censure. That is
the obvious solution of “the Jonsonian riddle.”
I must apologise if I have in places spelled the name of the Swan of
Avon “Shakespeare” where Mr. Greenwood would write “Shakspere,”
and vice versa. He uses “Shakespeare” where
he means the Author; “Shakspere” where he means Will; and
is vexed with some people who write the name of Will as “Shakespeare.”
As Will, in the opinion of a considerable portion of the human race,
and of myself, was the Author, one is apt to write his name as
“Shakespeare” in the usual way. But difficult cases
occur, as in quotations, and in conditional sentences. By any
spelling of the name I always mean the undivided personality of “Him
who sleeps by Avon.”
CHAPTER I: THE BACONIAN AND ANTI-WILLIAN POSITIONS
Till the years 1856-7 no voice was raised against the current belief
about Shakespeare (1564-1616). He was the author in the main of
the plays usually printed as his. In some cases other authors,
one or more, may have had fingers in his dramas; in other cases, Shakespeare
may have “written over” and transfigured earlier plays,
of himself and of others; he may have contributed, more or less, to
several plays mainly by other men. Separately printed dramas published
during his time carry his name on their title-pages, but are not included
in the first collected edition of his dramas, “The First Folio,”
put forth by two of his friends and fellow-actors, in 1623, seven years
after his death.
On all these matters did commentators, critics, and antiquarians for
long dispute; but none denied that the actor, Will Shakspere (spelled
as heaven pleased), was in the main the author of most of the plays
of 1623, and the sole author of Venus and Adonis, Lucrece,
and the Sonnets.
Even now, in England at least, it would be perhaps impossible to find
one special and professed student of Elizabethan literature, and of
the classical and European literatures, who does not hold by the ancient
belief, the belief of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and intimates,
the belief that he was, in the sense explained above, the author of
the plays.
But ours is not a generation to be overawed by “Authority”
(as it is called). A small but eager company of scholars have
convinced themselves that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespearean plays.
That is the point of agreement among these enthusiasts: points of difference
are numerous: some very wild little sects exist. Meanwhile multitudes
of earnest and intelligent men and women, having read notices in newspapers
of the Baconian books, or heard of them at lectures and tea-parties,
disbelieve in the authorship of “the Stratford rustic,”
and look down on the faithful of Will Shakespere with extreme contempt.
From the Baconians we receive a plain straightforward theory, “Bacon
wrote Shakespeare,” as one of their own prophets has said. {4a}
Since we have plenty of evidence for Bacon’s life and occupations
during the period of Shakespearean poetic activity, we can compare what
he was doing as a man, a student, a Crown lawyer, a pleader in the Courts,
a political pamphleteer, essayist, courtier, active member of Parliament,
and so on, with what he is said to have been doing - by the Baconians;
namely, writing two dramas yearly.
But there is another “Anti-Willian” theory, which would
dethrone Will Shakspere, and put but a Shadow in his place. Conceive
a “concealed poet,” of high social position, contemporary
with Bacon and Shakespeare. Let him be so fond of the Law that
he cannot keep legal “shop” out of his love Sonnets even.
Make him a courtier; a statesman; a philosopher; a scholar who does
not blench even from the difficult Latin of Ovid and Plautus.
Let this almost omniscient being possess supreme poetic genius, extensive
classical attainments, and a tendency to make false quantities.
Then conceive him to live through the reigns of “Eliza and our
James,” without leaving in history, in science, in society, in
law, in politics or scholarship, a single trace of his existence.
He left nothing but the poems and plays usually attributed to Will.
As to the date of his decease, we only know that it must necessarily
have been later than the composition of the last genuine Shakespearean
play - for this paragon wrote it.
Such is the Being who occupies, in the theory of the non-Baconian, but
not Anti-Baconian, Anti-Willians, the intellectual
throne filled, in the Will Shakespeare theory, by Will; and in the Baconian,
by Bacon - two kings of Brentford on one throne.
We are to be much engaged by the form of this theory which is held by
Mr. G. G. Greenwood in his The Shakespeare Problem Restated.
In attempting to explain what he means I feel that I am skating on very
thin ice. Already, in two volumes (In Re Shakespeare,
1909, and The Vindicators of Shakespeare), Mr. Greenwood
has accused his critics of frequently misconceiving and misrepresenting
his ideas: wherefore I also tremble. I am perfectly confident
in saying that he “holds no brief for the Baconians.”
He is not a Baconian. His position is negative merely:
Will of Stratford is not the author of the Shakespearean plays
and poems. Then who is? Mr. Greenwood believes that work
by an unknown number of hands exists in the plays first published all
together in 1623. Here few will differ from him. But, setting
aside this aspect of the case, Mr. Greenwood appears to me to believe
in an entity named “Shakespeare,” or “the Author,”
who is the predominating partner; though Mr. Greenwood does not credit
him with all the plays in the Folio of 1623 (nor, perhaps, with the
absolute entirety of any given play). “The Author”
or “Shakespeare” is not a syndicate (like the Homer of many
critics), but an individual human being, apparently of the male sex.
As to the name by which he was called on earth, Mr. Greenwood is “agnostic.”
He himself is not Anti-Baconian. He does not oust Bacon and put
the Unknown in his place. He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon
may have contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean work.
To put it briefly: Mr. Greenwood backs the field against the favourite
(our Will), and Bacon may be in the field. If he has any
part in the whole I suspect that it is “the lion’s part,”
but Mr. Greenwood does not commit himself to anything positive.
We shall find (if I am not mistaken) that Mr. Greenwood regards the
hypothesis of the Baconians as “an extremely reasonable one,”
{7a} and that for
his purposes it would be an extremely serviceable one, if not even essential.
For as Bacon was a genius to whose potentialities one can set no limit,
he is something to stand by, whereas we cannot easily believe - I cannot
believe - that the actual “Author,” the “Shakespeare”
lived and died and left no trace of his existence except his share in
the works called Shakespearean.
However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans, this
advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly unknown, we
cannot, as in Bacon’s case, show how he was occupied while the
plays were being composed. He must, however, have
been much at Court, we learn, and deep in the mysteries of legal terminology.
Was he Sir Edward Coke? Was he James VI and I?
It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of the
“Anti-Willians” in a shape which will satisfy them.
The task, especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is
perhaps impossible. I can only summarise their views in my own
words as far as I presume to understand them. I conceive the Baconians
to cry that “the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature,
attributed to a man named William Shakespeare.” Of
a man named William Shakspere (there are many varieties of spelling)
we certainly know that he was born (1564) and bred in Stratford-on-Avon,
a peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant country town. There
is absolutely no evidence that he (or any Stratford boy of his standing)
ever went to Stratford school. His father, his mother, and his
daughter could not write, but, in signing, made their marks; and if
he could write, which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly bad hand.
As far as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his death
inform us, he was a butcher’s apprentice; and also a schoolmaster
“who knew Latin pretty well”; and a poacher. He made,
before he was nineteen, a marriage tainted with what Meg Dods calls
“ante-nup.” He early had three children, whom he deserted,
as he deserted his wife. He came to London, we do not know when
(about 1582, according to the “guess” of an antiquary of
1680); held horses at the door of a theatre (so tradition says), was
promoted to the rank of “servitor” (whatever that may mean),
became an actor (a vagabond under the Act), and by 1594 played before
Queen Elizabeth. He put money in his pocket (heaven knows how),
for by 1597 he was bargaining for the best house in his native bourgade.
He obtained, by nefarious genealogical falsehoods (too common, alas,
in heraldry), the right to bear arms; and went on acting. In 1610-11
(?) he retired to his native place. He never took any interest
in his unprinted manuscript plays; though rapacious, he never troubled
himself about his valuable copyrights; never dreamed of making a collected
edition of his works. He died in 1616, probably of drink taken.
Legal documents prove him to have been a lender of small sums, an avid
creditor, a would-be encloser of commons. In his will he does
not bequeath or mention any books, manuscripts, copyrights, and so forth.
It is utterly incredible, then, that this man wrote the poems and plays,
so rich in poetry, thought, scholarship, and knowledge, which are attributed
to “William Shakespeare.” These must be the works
of “a concealed poet,” a philosopher, a courtier moving
in the highest circles, a supreme legist, and, necessarily, a great
poet, and student of the classics.
No known person of the age but one, Bacon, was a genius, a legist, a
scholar, a great poet, and brilliant courtier, with all the other qualifications
so the author of the plays either was Francis Bacon - or some person
unknown, who was in all respects equally distinguished, but kept his
light under a bushel. Consequently the name “William Shakespeare”
is a pseudonym or “pen-name” wisely adopted by Bacon (or
the other man) as early as 1593, at a time when William Shakspere was
notoriously an actor in the company which produced the plays of the
genius styling himself “William Shakespeare.”
Let me repeat that, to the best of my powers of understanding and of
expression, and in my own words, so as to misquote nobody, I have now
summarised the views of the Baconians sans phrase, and
of the more cautious or more credulous “Anti-Willians,”
as I may style the party who deny to Will the actor any share in the
authorship of the plays, but do not overtly assign it to Francis Bacon.
Beyond all comparison the best work on the Anti-Willian side of the
controversy is The Shakespeare Problem Restated, by Mr.
G. G. Greenwood (see my Introduction). To this volume I turn for
the exposition of the theory that “Will Shakspere” (with
many other spellings) is an actor from the country - a man of very scanty
education, in all probability, and wholly destitute of books; while
“William Shakespeare,” or with the hyphen, “Shake-speare,”
is a “nom de plume” adopted by the Great Unknown
“concealed poet.”
When I use the word “author” here, I understand Mr. Greenwood
to mean that in the plays called “Shakespearean” there exists
work from many pens: owing to the curious literary manners, methods,
and ethics of dramatic writing in, say, 1589-1611. In my own poor
opinion this is certainly true of several plays in the first collected
edition, “The Folio,” produced seven years after Will’s
death, namely in 1623. These curious “collective”
methods of play-writing are to be considered later.
Matters become much more perplexing when we examine the theory that
“William Shake-speare” (with or without the hyphen), on
the title-pages of plays, or when signed to the dedications of poems,
is the chosen pen-name, or “nom de plume,” of
Bacon or of the Unknown.
Here I must endeavour to summarise what Mr. Greenwood has written {11a}
on the name of the actor, and the “nom de plume”
of the unknown author who, by the theory, was not the actor.
Let me first confess my firm belief that there is no cause for all the
copious writing about the spellings “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare”
- as indicating the true but “concealed poet” - and “Shakspere”
(&c.), as indicating the Warwickshire rustic. At Stratford
and in Warwickshire the clan-name was spelled in scores of ways, was
spelled in different ways within a single document. If the actor
himself uniformly wrote “Shakspere” (it seems that we have
but five signatures), he was accustomed to seeing the name spelled variously
in documents concerning him and his affairs. In London the printers
aimed at a kind of uniformity, “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare”:
and even if he wrote his own name otherwise, to him it was indifferent.
Lawyers and printers might choose their own mode of spelling - and there
is no more in the matter.
I must now summarise briefly, in my own words, save where quotations
are indicated in the usual way, the results of Mr. Greenwood’s
researches. “The family of William Shakspere of Stratford”
(perhaps it were safer to say “the members of his name”)
“wrote their name in many different ways - some sixty, I believe,
have been noted . . . but the form ‘Shakespeare’ seems never
to have been employed by them”; and, according to Mr. Spedding,
“Shakspere of Stratford never so wrote his name ‘in any
known case.’” (According to many Baconians he never
wrote his name in his life.) On the other hand, the dedications
of Venus and Adonis (1593) and of Lucrece (1594) are inscribed
“William Shakespeare” (without the hyphen). In 1598,
the title-page of Love’s Labour’s Lost
“bore the name W. Shakespere,” while in the same year
Richard II and Richard III bear “William Shake-speare,”
with the hyphen (not without it, as in the two dedications by the Author).
“The name which appears in the body of the conveyance and of the
mortgage bearing” (the actor’s) “signature is ‘Shakespeare,’
while ‘Shackspeare’ appears in the will, prepared, as we
must presume, by or under the directions of Francis Collyns, the Stratford
solicitor, who was one of the witnesses thereto” (and received
a legacy of £13, 6s. 8d.).
Thus, at Stratford even, the name was spelled, in legal papers, as it
is spelled in the two dedications, and in most of the title-pages -
and also is spelled otherwise, as “Shackspeare.” In
March 1594 the actor’s name is spelled “Shakespeare”
in Treasury accounts. The legal and the literary and Treasury
spellings (and conveyances and mortgages and wills are not literature)
are Shakespeare, Shackspeare, Shake-speare, Shakespere - all four are
used, but we must regard the actor as never signing “Shakespeare”
in any of these varieties of spelling - if sign he ever did; at all
events he is not known to have used the a in the last syllable.
I now give the essence of Mr. Greenwood’s words {13a}
concerning the nom de plume of the “concealed poet,”
whoever he was.
“And now a word upon the name ‘Shakespeare.’
That in this form, and more especially with a hyphen, Shake-speare,
the word makes an excellent nom de plume is obvious. As
old Thomas Fuller remarks, the name suggests Martial in its warlike
sound, ‘Hasti-vibrans or Shake-speare.’ It is of course
further suggestive of Pallas Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom, for Pallas
also was a spear-shaker (Pallas απο του
παλλειν το δορυ);
and all will remember Ben Jonson’s verses . . . ” on Shakespeare’s
“true-filed lines” -
“In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.”
There is more about Pallas in book-titles (to which additions can easily
be made), and about “Jonson’s Cri-spinus or Cri-spinas,”
but perhaps we have now the gist of Mr. Greenwood’s remarks on
the “excellent nom de plume” (cf. pp. 31-37.
On the whole of this, cf. The Shakespeare Problem Restated,
pp. 293-295; a nom de plume called a “pseudonym,”
pp. 307, 312; Shakespeare “a mask name,” p. 328; a “pseudonym,”
p. 330; “nom de plume,” p. 335).
Now why was the “nom de plume” or “pseudonym”
“William Shakespeare” “an excellent nom de plume”
for a concealed author, courtier, lawyer, scholar, and so forth?
If “Shakespeare” suggested Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom
and of many other things, and so was appropriate, why add “William”?
In 1593, when the “pseudonym” first appears in Venus
and Adonis, a country actor whose name, in legal documents
- presumably drawn up by or for his friend, Francis Collyns at Stratford
- is written “William Shakespeare,” was before the town
as an actor in the leading company, that of the Lord Chamberlain.
This company produced the plays some of which, by 1598, bear “W.
Shakespere,” or “William Shakespeare” on their title-pages.
Thus, even if the actor habitually spelled his name “Shakspere,”
“William Shakespeare” was, practically (on the Baconian
theory), not only a pseudonym of one man, a poet, but also the real
name of another man, a well-known actor, who was not the “concealed
poet.”
“William Shakespeare” or “Shakespere” was thus,
in my view, the ideally worst pseudonym which a poet who wished to be
“concealed” could possibly have had the fatuity to select.
His plays and poems would be, as they were, universally attributed to
the actor, who is represented as a person conspicuously incapable of
writing them. With Mr. Greenwood’s arguments against the
certainty of this attribution I deal later.
Had the actor been a man of rare wit, and of good education and wide
reading, the choice of name might have been judicious. A “concealed
poet” of high social standing, with a strange fancy for rewriting
the plays of contemporary playwrights, might obtain the manuscript copies
from their owners, the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, through that
knowledgeable, witty, and venal member of the company, Will Shakspere.
He might then rewrite and improve them, more or less, as it was his
whim to do. The actor might make fair copies in his own hand,
give them to his company, and say that the improved works were from
his own pen and genius. The lie might pass, but only if the actor,
in his life and witty talk, seemed very capable of doing what he pretended
to have done. But if the actor, according to some Baconians, could
not write even his own name, he was impossible as a mask for the poet.
He was also impossible, I think, if he were what Mr. Greenwood describes
him to be.
Mr. Greenwood, in his view of the actor as he was when he came to London,
does not deny to him the gift of being able to sign his name.
But, if he were educated at Stratford Free School (of which there is
no documentary record), according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps “he
was removed from school long before the usual age,” “in
all probability” when “he was about thirteen” (an
age at which some boys, later well known, went up to their universities).
If we send him to school at seven or so, “it appears that he could
only have enjoyed such advantages as it may be supposed to have provided
for a period of five or six years at the outside. He was then
withdrawn, and, as it seems, put to calf-slaughtering.” {16a}
What the advantages may have been we try to estimate later.
Mr. Greenwood, with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, thinks that Will “could
have learned but little there. No doubt boys at Elizabethan grammar
schools, if they remained long enough, had a good deal of Latin driven
into them. Latin, indeed, was the one subject that was taught;
and an industrious boy who had gone through the course and attained
to the higher classes would generally be able to write fair Latin prose.
But he would learn very little else” (except to write fair Latin
prose?). “What we now call ‘culture’ certainly
did not enter into the ‘curriculum,’ nor ‘English,’
nor modern languages, nor ‘literature.’” {17a}
Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that “removed prematurely from school,
residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown
into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress - it is
difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all
but destitute of polished accomplishments.” {17b}
Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship to a butcher or draper, but doubts
the poaching, and the frequent whippings and imprisonments, as in the
story told by the Rev. R. Davies in 1708. {17c}
That this promising young man, “when he came to London, spoke
the Warwickshire dialect or patois is, then, as certain as anything
can be that is incapable of mathematical proof.” {17d}
“Here is the young Warwickshire provincial . . . ” {17e}
producing, apparently five or six years after his arrival in town, Venus
and Adonis . . . “Is it conceivable that this was the work
of the Stratford Player of whom we know so little, but of whom we know
so much too much? If so we have here a veritable sixteenth-century
miracle.” {17f}
Moreover, “our great supposed poet and dramatist had at his death
neither book nor manuscript in his possession, or to which he was legally
entitled, or in which he had any interest whatever.” {17g}
If it be not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a patois
could write Venus and Adonis, manifestly it was inconceivable
in 1593, when Venus and Adonis was signed “William Shakespeare.”
No man who knew the actor (as described) could believe that he was the
author, but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that
the faintest doubt was thrown on the actor’s authorship; ignorant
as he was, bookless, and rude of speech. For such a Will as Mr.
Greenwood describes to persuade the literary and dramatic world of his
age that he did write the plays, would have been a miracle.
Consequently Mr. Greenwood has to try to persuade us that there is no
sufficient evidence that Will did persuade, say Ben Jonson, of
his authorship and we shall see whether or not he works this twentieth-century
miracle of persuasion.
Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an enthusiastic
Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could not easily pass
for the Author. {18a}
But his own bookless actor with a patois seems to him, as author
of Venus and Adonis, almost inconceivable. Yet,
despite Will’s bookless rusticity, this poem with Lucrece,
which displays knowledge of a work of Ovid not translated into English
by 1593, was regarded as his own. I must suppose, therefore, that
Will was not manifestly so ignorant of Latin as Mr. Greenwood
thinks. “I think it highly probable,” says this critic,
“that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford” (where
nothing but Latin was taught) “for four or five years, and that,
later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able to ‘bumbast
out a line,’ and perhaps to pose as ‘Poet-Ape that would
be thought our chief.’ Nay, I am not at all sure that he
would not have been capable of collaborating with such a man as George
Wilkins, and perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if not even better.
But it does not follow from this that he was the author either of Venus
and Adonis or of Hamlet.” {19a}
Nothing follows from all this: we merely see that, in Mr. Greenwood’s
private opinion, the actor might write even better than George Wilkins,
but could not write Venus and Adonis. Will, therefore,
though bookless, is not debarred here from the pursuits of literature,
in partnership with Wilkins. We have merely the critic’s
opinion that Will could not write Hamlet, even if, like
Wordsworth, “he had the mind,” even if the gods had made
him more poetical than Wilkins.
Again, “he had had but little schooling; he had ‘small Latin
and less Greek’” (as Ben Jonson truly says), “but
he was a good Johannes Factotum; he could arrange a scene, and,
when necessary, ‘bumbast out a blank verse.’” {19b}
The “Johannes Factotum,” who could “bumbast
out a blank verse,” is taken from Robert Greene’s hackneyed
attack on an actor-poet, “Shake-scene,” published in 1592.
“Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief,” is from an epigram
on an actor-poet by Ben Jonson (1601-16?). If the allusions by
Greene and Jonson are to our Will, he, by 1592, had a literary ambition
so towering that he thought his own work in the new art of dramatic
blank verse was equal to that of Marlowe (not to speak of Wilkins),
and Greene reckoned him a dangerous rival to three of his playwright
friends, of whom Marlowe is one, apparently.
If Jonson’s “Poet-Ape” be meant for Will, by 1601
Will would fain “be thought the chief” of contemporary dramatists.
His vanity soared far above George Wilkins! Greene’s phrases
and Jonson’s are dictated by spite, jealousy, and envy; and from
them a true view of the work of the man whom they envy, the actor-poet,
cannot be obtained. We might as well judge Molière in the
spirit of the author of Elomire Hypocondre, and of de
Visé! The Anti-Willian arguments keep on appearing, going
behind the scenes, and reappearing, like a stage army. To avoid
this phenomenon I reserve what is to be said about “Shake-scene”
and “Poet-Ape” for another place (pp. 138-145 infra).
But I must give the reader a warning. Concerning “William
Shakespeare” as a “nom de plume,” or
pseudonym, Mr. Greenwood says, “Some, indeed, would see through
it, and roundly accuse the player of putting forth the works of others
as his own. To such he would be a ‘Poet-Ape,’ or ‘an
upstart crow’ (Shake-scene) ‘beautified with the feathers
of other writers.’” {21a}
If this be true, if “some would see through” (Mr. Greenwood,
apparently, means did “see through”) the “nom
de plume,” the case of the Anti-Willians is promising.
But, in this matter, Mr. Greenwood se trompe. Neither Greene
nor Jonson accused “Shake-scene” or “Poet-Ape”
of “putting forth the works of others as his own.”
That is quite certain, as far as the scorns of Jonson and Greene have
reached us. (See pp. 141-145 infra.)
If an actor, obviously incapable of wit and poetry, were credited with
the plays, the keenest curiosity would arise in “the profession,”
and among rival playwrights who envied the wealth and “glory”
of the actors. This curiosity, prompting the wits and players
to watch and “shadow” Will, would, to put it mildly, most
seriously imperil the secret of the concealed author who had the folly
to sign himself “William Shakespeare.” Human nature
could not rest under such a provocation as the “concealed poet”
offered.
This is so obvious that had one desired to prove Bacon or the Unknown
to be the concealed author, one must have credited his mask, Will, with
abundance of wit and fancy, and, as for learning - with about as much
as he probably possessed. But the Baconians make him an illiterate
yokel, and we have quoted Mr. Greenwood’s estimate of the young
Warwickshire provincial.
We all have our personal equations in the way of belief. That
the plot of the “nom de plume” should have evaded
discovery for a week, if the actor were the untutored countryman of
the hypotheses, is to me, for one, absolutely incredible. A “concealed
poet” looking about for a “nom de plume”
and a mask behind which he could be hidden, would not have selected
the name, or the nearest possible approach to the name, of an ignorant
unread actor. As he was never suspected of not being the author
of the plays and poems, Will cannot have been a country ignoramus, manifestly
incapable of poetry, wit, and such learning as the plays exhibit.
Every one must judge for himself. Mr. Greenwood fervently believes
in what I disbelieve. {22a}
“Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan times, concerned themselves
at all, or cared one brass farthing, about the authorship of plays .
. . ” says Mr. Greenwood.
Very few care now. They know the actors’ names: in vain,
as a rule, do I ask playgoers for the name of the author of their entertainment.
But in Elizabeth’s time the few who cared were apt to care very
much, and they would inquire intensely when the Stratford actor, a bookless,
untaught man, was announced as the author of plays which were among
the most popular of their day. The seekers never found any other
author. They left no hint that they suspected the existence of
any other author. Hence I venture to infer that Will seemed to
them no unread rustic, but a fellow of infinite fancy, - no scholar
to be sure, but very capable of writing the pieces which he fathered.
They may all have been mistaken. Nobody can prove that Heywood
and Ben Jonson, and the actors of the Company, were not mistaken.
But certain it is that they thought the Will whom they knew capable
of the works which were attributed to him. Therefore he cannot
possibly have been the man who could not write, of the more impulsive
Baconians; or the bookless, and probably all but Latinless, man of Mr.
Greenwood’s theory. The positions already seem to me to
be untenable.
CHAPTER II: THE “SILENCE” ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
Before proceeding further to examine Mr. Greenwood’s book, and
the Baconian theories, with the careful attention which they deserve,
we must clear the ground by explaining two points which appear to puzzle
Baconians, though, to be sure, they have their own solutions of the
problems.
The first question is: Why, considering that Shakespeare, by the consent
of the learned of most of the polite foreign nations, was one of the
world’s very greatest poets, have we received so few and such
brief notices of him from the pens of his contemporaries?
“It is wonderful,” exclaims Mr. Crouch-Batchelor, “that
hundreds of persons should not have left records of him. {27a}
We know nearly as much about the most insignificant writer of the period
as we know of him, but fifty times more about most of his contemporaries.
It is senseless to try to account for this otherwise than by recognising
that the man was not the author.”
Mr. Crouch-Batchelor is too innocent. He sees the sixteenth century
in the colours of the twentieth. We know nothing, except a few
dates of birth, death, entrance at school, College, the Inns of Court,
and so forth, concerning several of Shakespeare’s illustrious
contemporaries and successors in the art of dramatic poetry. The
Baconians do not quite understand, or, at least, keep steadily before
their minds, one immense difference between the Elizabethan age and
later times. In 1590-1630, there was no public excitement about
the characters, personalities, and anecdotage of merely literary men,
poets, and playwrights, who held no position in public affairs, as Spenser
did; or in Court, Society, and War, as Sidney did; who did not write
about their own feuds and friendships, like Greene and Nash; who did
not expand into prefaces and reminiscences, and satires, like Ben Jonson;
who never killed anybody, as Ben did; nor were killed, like Marlowe;
nor were involved, like him, in charges of atheism, and so forth; nor
imprisoned with every chance of having their ears and noses slit, like
Marston. Consequently, silence and night obscure the lives and
personalities of Kyd, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Dekker, Webster,
and several others, as night and silence hide Shakespeare from our view.
He was popular on the stage; some of his plays were circulated separately
in cheap and very perishable quartos. No collected edition of
his plays appeared during his life; without that he could not be studied,
and recognised in his greatness. He withdrew to the country and
died. There was no enthusiastic curiosity about him; nobody Boswellised
any playwright of his time. The Folio of 1623 gave the first opportunity
of studying him as alone he can be studied. The Civil Wars and
the Reign of the Saints distracted men’s minds and depressed or
destroyed the Stage.
Sir William Davenant, a boy when Shakespeare died, used to see the actor
at his father’s inn at Oxford, was interested in him, and cherished
the embers of the drama, which were fading before the theatres were
closed. Davenant collected what he could in the way of information
from old people of the stage; he told Shakespearean anecdotes in conversation;
a few reached the late day when uncritical inquiries began, say 1680-90
at earliest. The memories of ancient people of the theatre and
clerks and sextons at Stratford were ransacked, to very little purpose.
As these things were so, how can we expect biographical materials about
Shakespeare? As to the man, as to how his character impressed
contemporaries, we have but the current epithets: “friendly,”
“gentle,” and “sweet,” the praise of his worth
by two of the actors in his company (published in 1623), and the brief
prose note of Ben Jonson, - this is more than we have for the then so
widely admired Beaumont, Ben Jonson’s friend, or Chapman, or the
adored Fletcher. “Into the dark go one and all,” Shakespeare
and the others. To be puzzled by and found theories on the silence
about Shakespeare is to show an innocence very odd in learned disputants.
The Baconians, as usual, make a puzzle and a mystery out of their own
misappreciation of the literary and social conditions of Shakespeare’s
time. That world could not possibly appreciate his works as we
do; the world, till 1623, possessed only a portion of his plays in cheap
pamphlets, in several of these his text was mangled and in places unintelligible.
And in not a single instance were anecdotes and biographical traits
of playwrights recorded, except when the men published matter about
themselves, or when they became notorious in some way unconnected with
their literary works. Drummond, in Scotland, made brief notes
of Ben Jonson’s talk; Shakespeare he never met.
That age was not widely and enthusiastically appreciative of literary
merit in playwrights who were merely dramatists, and in no other way
notorious or eminent. Mr. Greenwood justly says “the contemporary
eulogies of the poet afford proof that there were some cultured critics
of that day of sufficient taste and acumen to recognise, or partly recognise,
his excellence . . . ” {30a}
(Here I omit some words, presently to be restored to the text.)
From such critics the poet received such applause as has reached us.
We also know that the plays were popular; but the audiences have not
rushed to pen and ink to record their satisfaction. With them,
as with all audiences, the actors and the spectacle, much
more than the “cackle,” were the attractions. When
Dr. Ingleby says that “the bard of our admiration was unknown
to the men of that age,” he uses hyperbole, and means, I presume,
that he was unknown, as all authors are, to the great majority; and
that those who knew him in part made no modern fuss about him. {31a}
The second puzzle is, - Why did Shakespeare, conscious of his great
powers, never secure for his collected plays the permanence of print
and publication? We cannot be sure that he and his company, in
fact, did not provide publishers with the copy for the better Quartos
or pamphlets of separate plays, as Mr. Pollard argues on good grounds
that they sometimes did. {31b}
For the rest, no dramatic author edited a complete edition of his works
before Ben Jonson, a scholarly man, set the example in the year of Shakespeare’s,
and of Beaumont’s death (1616). Neither Beaumont nor Fletcher
collected and published their works for the Stage. The idea was
unheard of before Jonson set the example, and much of his work lay unprinted
till years after his death. We must remember the conditions of play-writing
in Shakespeare’s time.
There were then many poets of no mean merit, all capable of admirable
verse on occasion; and in various degrees possessed of the lofty, vigorous,
and vivid style of that great age. The theatre, and writing for
the theatre, afforded to many men of talent a means of livelihood analogous
to that offered by journalism among ourselves. They were apt to
work collectively, several hands hurrying out a single play; and in
twos or threes, or fours or fives, they often collaborated.
As a general rule a play when finished was sold by the author or authors
to a company of players, or to a speculator like the notorious Philip
Henslowe, and the new owners, “the grand possessors,” were
usually averse to the publication of the work, lest other companies
might act it. The plays were primarily written to be acted.
The company in possession could have the play altered as they pleased
by a literary man in their employment.
To follow Mr. Greenwood’s summary of the situation “it would
seem that an author could restrain any person from publishing his manuscript,
or could bring an action against him for so doing, so long as he had
not disposed of his right to it; and that the publisher could prevent
any other publisher from issuing the work. At the same time it
is clear that the law was frequently violated . . . whether because
of the difficulty of enforcing it, or through the supineness of authors;
and that in consequence authors were frequently defrauded by surreptitious
copies of their works being issued by piratical publishers.” {33a}
It may appear that to “authors” we should, in the case of
plays, add “owners,” such as theatrical companies, for no
case is cited in which such a company brings an action against the publisher
of a play which they own. The two players of Shakespeare’s
company who sign the preface to the first edition of his collected plays
(1623, “The First Folio”) complain that “divers stolen
and surreptitious copies” of single plays have been put forth,
“maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors.”
They speak as if they were unable to prevent, or had not the energy
to prevent, these frauds. In the accounts of the aforesaid Henslowe,
we find him paying forty shillings to a printer to stop or “stay”
the printing of a play, Patient Grizel, by three of his
hacks.
We perhaps come across an effort of the company to prevent or delay
the publication of The Merchant of Venice, on July 17,
1598, in the Stationers’ Register. James Robertes,
and all other printers, are forbidden to print the book without previous
permission from the Lord Chamberlain, the protector of Will Shakespeare’s
company. Two years passed before Robertes issued the book. {34a}
As is well known, Heywood, a most prolific playwright, boasts that he
never made a double sale of his pieces to the players and the press.
Others occasionally did, which Heywood clearly thought less than honest.
As an author who was also an actor, and a shareholder in his company,
Will’s interests were the same as theirs. It is therefore
curious that some of his pieces were early printed, in quartos, from
very good copies; while others appeared in very bad copies, clearly
surreptitious. Probably the company gave a good MS. copy, sometimes,
to a printer who offered satisfactory terms, after the gloss of novelty
was off the acted play. {34b}
In any case, we see that the custom and interests of the owners of manuscript
plays ran contrary to their early publication. In 1619 even Ben
Jonson, who loved publication, told Drummond that half of his comedies
were still unprinted.
These times were not as our own, and must not be judged by ours.
Whoever wrote the plays, the actor, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon;
whoever legally owned the manuscripts, was equally incurious and negligent
about the preservation of a correct text. As we shall see later,
while Baconians urge without any evidence that Bacon himself edited,
or gave to Ben Jonson the duty of editing, the first collected edition
(1623), the work has been done in an indescribably negligent and reckless
manner, and, as Mr. Greenwood repeatedly states, the edition, in his
opinion, contains at least two plays not by his “Shakespeare”
- that “concealed poet” - and masses of “non-Shakespearean”
work.
How this could happen, if Bacon (as on one hypothesis) either revised
the plays himself, or entrusted the task to so strict an Editor as Ben
Jonson, I cannot imagine. This is also one of the difficulties
in Mr. Greenwood’s theory. Thus we cannot argue, “if
the actor were the author, he must have been conscious of his great
powers. Therefore the actor cannot have been the author, for the
actor wholly neglected to collect his printed and to print his manuscript
works.”
This argument is equally potent against the authorship of the plays
by Bacon. He, too, left the manuscripts unpublished till 1623.
“But he could not avow his authorship,” cry Baconians, giving
various exquisite reasons. Indeed, if Bacon were the author, he
might not care to divulge his long association with “a cry of
players,” and a man like Will of Stratford. But he had no
occasion to avow it. He had merely to suggest to the players,
through any safe channel, that they should collect and publish the works
of their old friend Will Shakspere.
Thus indifferent was the main author of the plays, whether he were actor
or statesman; and the actor, at least, is not to blame for the chaos
of the first collected edition, made while he was in his grave, and
while Bacon was busy in revising and superintending Latin translations
of his works on scientific subjects.
We now understand why there are so few contemporary records of Shakspere
the man; and see that the neglect of his texts was extreme, whether
or not he were the author. The neglect was characteristic of the
playwrights of his own and the next generation. In those days
it was no marvel; few cared. Nine years passed before a second
edition of the collected plays appeared: thirty-two years went by before
a third edition was issued - years of war and tumult, yet they saw the
posthumous publication of the collected plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.
There remains one more mystery connected with publication. When
the first collected edition of the plays appeared, it purported to contain
“All His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.” According
to the postulate of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by
Jonson acting for him. It contains several plays which, according
to many critics, are not the author’s. This, if true, is
mysterious, and so is the fact that a few plays were published, as by
Shakespeare, in the lifetime both of the actor and of Bacon; plays which
neither acknowledged for his own, for we hear of no remonstrance from
- whoever “William Shakespeare” was. It is impossible
for me to say why there was no remonstrance.
Suppose that Will merely supplied Bacon’s plays, under his own
name, with a slight difference in spelling, to his company. It
was as much his interest, in that case, to protest when Bacon’s
pen-name was taken in vain, as if he had spelled his own surname with
an a in the second syllable.
There is another instance which Mr. Greenwood discusses twice. {37a}
In 1599 Jaggard published “The Passionate Pilgrim; W. Shakespeare.”
Out of twenty poems, five only were by W. S. In 1612, Jaggard
added two poems by Tom Heywood, retaining W. Shakespeare’s name
as sole author. “Heywood protested” in print, “and
stated that Shakespeare was offended, and,” says Mr. Greenwood,
“very probably he was so; but as he was, so I conceive, ‘a
concealed poet,’ writing under a nom de plume, he
seems to have only made known his annoyance through the medium of Heywood.”
If so, Heywood knew who the concealed poet was. Turning to pp.
348, 349, we find Mr. Greenwood repeating the same story, with this
addition, that the author of the poems published by Jaggard, “to
do himself right, hath since published them in his own name.”
That is, W. Shakespeare has since published under his own name such
pieces of The Passionate Pilgrim as are his own. “The
author, I know,” adds Heywood, “was much offended with Mr.
Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with
his name.”
Why was the author so slack when Jaggard, in 1599, published W. S.’s
poems with others not by W. S.?
How can anyone explain, by any theory? It was as open to him in
1599 as in 1612 to publish his own pieces under his own name, or pen-name.
“Here we observe,” says Mr. Greenwood, {38a}
“that Heywood does nothing to identify ‘the author with
the player.’” This is, we shall see, the eternal argument.
Why should Heywood, speaking of W. Shakespeare, explain what all the
world knew? There was no other W. Shakespeare (with or without
the e and a) but one, the actor, in the world of
letters of Elizabeth and James. Who the author was Heywood himself
has told us, elsewhere: the author was - Will!
But why Shakespeare was so indifferent to the use of his name, or, when
he was moved, acted so mildly, it is not for me or anyone to explain.
We do not know the nature of the circumstances in detail; we do not
know that the poet saw hopes of stopping the sale of the works falsely
attributed to him. I do not even feel certain that he had not
a finger in some of them. Knowing so little, a more soaring wit
than mine might fly to the explanation that “Shakespeare”
was the “nom de plume” of Bacon or his unknown equivalent,
and that he preferred to “let sleeping dogs lie,” or, as
Mr. Greenwood might quote the Latin tag, said ne moveas Camarinam.
CHAPTER III: THAT IMPOSSIBLE HE - THE SCHOOLING OF SHAKESPEARE
The banner-cry of the Baconians is the word “Impossible!”
It is impossible that the actor from Stratford (as they think of him,
a bookless, untutored lad, speaking in patois) should
have possessed the wide, deep, and accurate scholarship displayed by
the author of the plays and poems. It is impossible that at the
little Free School of Stratford (if he attended it), he should have
gained his wide knowledge of the literatures of Greece and Rome.
To these arguments, the orthodox Stratfordian is apt to reply, that
he finds in the plays and poems plenty of inaccurate general information
on classical subjects, information in which the whole literature of
England then abounded. He also finds in the plays some knowledge
of certain Latin authors, which cannot be proved to have been translated
at the date when Shakespeare drew on them. How much Latin Shakespeare
knew, in our opinion, will presently be explained.
But, in reply to the Baconians and the Anti-Willians, we must say that
while the author of the plays had some lore which scholars also possessed,
he did not use his knowledge like a scholar. We do not see how
a scholar could make, as the scansion of his blank verse proves that
the author did make, the second syllable of the name of Posthumus, in
Cymbeline, long. He must have read a famous line
in Horace thus,
“Eheu fugaces Posthoome, Posthoome!”
which could scarce ‘scape whipping, even at Stratford Free School.
In the same way he makes the penultimate syllable of Andronicus short,
equally impossible.
Mr. Greenwood, we shall see, denies to him Titus Andronicus,
but also appears to credit it to him, as one of the older plays
which he “revised, improved, and dressed,” {44a}
and that is taken to have been all his “authorship”
in several cases. A scholar would have corrected, not accepted,
false quantities. In other cases, as when Greeks and Trojans cite
Plato and Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida, while Plato
and Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the latest conceivable
date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly suppose that a scholar
would have permitted to himself the freak, any more than that in The
Winter’s Tale he should have borrowed from an earlier
novel the absurdity of calling Delphi “Delphos” (a non-existent
word), of confusing “Delphos” with Delos, and placing the
Delphian Oracle in an island. In the same play the author, quite
needlessly, makes the artist Giulio Romano (1492-1546) contemporary
with the flourishing age of the oracle of the Pythian Apollo.
This, at least, would not be ignorance.
We have, I think, sufficient testimony to Ben’s inability to refrain
from gibes at Shakspere’s want of scholarship. Rowe, who
had traditions of Davenant’s, tells how, in conversation with
Suckling, Davenant, Endymion Porter, and Hales of Eton, Ben harped on
Will’s want of learning; and how Hales snubbed him. Indeed,
Ben could have made mirth enough out of The Winter’s
Tale. For, granting to Mr. Greenwood {45a}
that “the mention of Delphos suggests the Bohemia of a much earlier
date, and under the reign of Ottocar (1255-78) Bohemia extended from
the Adriatic to the shores of the Baltic,” that only makes matters
far worse. “Delphos” never was a place-name; there
was no oracle on the isle of “Delphos”; there were no Oracles
in 1255-78 (A.D.); and Perdita, who could have sat for her portrait
to Giulio Romano, was contemporary with an Oracle at Delphos,
but not with Ottocar.
There never was so mad a mixture, not even in Ivanhoe; not even
in Kenilworth. Scott erred deliberately, as he says in
his prefaces; but Will took the insular oracle of Delphos from Greene,
inserted Giulio Romano “for his personal diversion,” never
heard of Ottocar (no more than I), and made a delightful congeries of
errors in gaiety of heart. Nobody shall convince me that Francis
Bacon was so charmingly irresponsible; but I cannot speak so confidently
of Mr. Greenwood’s Great Unknown, a severe scholar, but perhaps
a frisky soul. There was no region called Bohemia when the Delphic
oracle was in vigour; - this apology (apparently contrived by Sir Edward
Sullivan) is the most comic of erudite reflections.
Some cruel critic has censured the lovely speech of Perdita, concerning
the flowers which Proserpine let fall, when she was carried off by Dis.
How could she, brought up in the hut of a Bohemian shepherd, know anything
of the Rape of Proserpine? Why not, as she lived in the days of
the Delphic Oracle - and Giulio Romano, and of printed ballads.
It is impossible, Baconians cry, that the rabbit-stealer, brought up
among the Audreys and Jaquenettas of Warwickshire, should have created
the noble and witty ladies of the Court; and known the style of his
Armado; and understood how dukes and kings talk among themselves - usually
in blank verse, it appears.
It is impossible that the home-keeping yokel should have heard of the
“obscure” (sic!) Court of Navarre; and known
that at Venice there was a place called the Rialto, and a “common
ferry” called “the tranect.” It is impossible
that he should have had “an intimate knowledge of the castle of
Elsinore,” though an English troupe of actors visited Denmark
in 1587. To Will all this knowledge was impossible; for
these and many more exquisite reasons the yokel’s authorship of
the plays is a physical impossibility. But scholars neither invent
nor tolerate such strange liberties with time and place, with history,
geography, and common sense. Will Shakspere either did not know
what was right, or, more probably, did not care, and supposed, like
Fielding in the old anecdote, that the audience “would not find
it out.” How could a scholar do any of these things?
He was as incapable of them as Ben Jonson. Such sins no scholar
is inclined to; they have, for him, no temptations.
As to Shakspere’s schooling, the Baconians point at the current
ignorance of Stratford-on-Avon, where many topping burgesses, even aldermen,
“made their marks,” in place of signing their names to documents.
Shakespeare’s father, wife, and daughter “made their marks,”
in place of signing. So did Lady Jane Gordon, daughter of the
Earl of Huntly, when she married the cultivated Earl of Bothwell (1566).
There is no evidence, from a roll of schoolboys at Stratford Free Grammar
School, about 1564-77, that any given boy attended it; for no roll exists.
Consequently there is no evidence that Will was a pupil.
“In the Appendix to Malone’s Life of Shakespeare will
be found two Latin letters, written by alumni of Stratford School contemporary
with Shakespeare,” says Mr. Collins. {48a}
But though the writers were Stratford boys contemporary with Shakespeare,
in later life his associates, as there is no roll of pupils’ names
how do we know, the Baconians may ask, that these men were educated
at Stratford School? Why not at Winchester, Eton, St. Paul’s,
or anywhere? Need one reply?
Mr. Collins goes on, in his simple confiding way, to state that “one
letter is by Abraham Sturley, afterwards an alderman of Stratford .
. . ” Pursuing the facts, we find that Sturley wrote in
Latin to “Richard Quiney, Shakespeare’s friend,” who,
if he could read Sturley’s letter, could read Latin. Then
young Richard Quiney, apparently aged eleven, wrote in Latin
to his father. If young Richard Quiney be the son of Shakespeare’s
friend, Richard Quiney, then, of course, his Latin at the age of eleven
would only prove that, if he were a schoolboy at Stratford, one Stratford
boy could write Latin in the generation following that of Shakespeare.
Thus may reason the Baconians.
Perhaps, however, we may say that if Stratford boys contemporary with
Shakspere, in his own rank and known to him, learned Latin, which they
retained in manhood, Shakspere, if he went to school with them, may
have done as much.
Concerning the school, a Free Grammar School, we know that during Shakespeare’s
boyhood the Mastership was not disdained by Walter Roche, perhaps a
Fellow of what was then the most progressive College in learning of
those at Oxford, namely, Corpus Christi. That Shakespeare could
have been his pupil is uncertain; the dates are rather difficult.
I think it probable that he was not, and we do not know the qualifications
of the two or three succeeding Masters.
As to the methods of teaching and the books read at Grammar Schools,
abundance of information has been collected. We know what the
use was in one very good school, Ipswich, from 1528; in another in 1611;
but as we do not possess any special information about Stratford School,
Mr. Greenwood opposes the admission of evidence from other academies.
A man might think that, however much the quality of the teaching varied
in various free schools, the nominal curriculum would be fairly uniform.
As to the teacher, a good endowment would be apt to attract a capable
man. What was the endowment of Stratford School? It was
derived from the bequest of Thomas Jolyffe (died 1482), a bequest of
lands in Stratford and Dodwell, and before the Reformation the Brethren
of the Guild were “to find a priest fit and able in knowledge
to teach grammar freely to all scholars coming to him, taking nothing
for their teaching . . . ” “The Founder’s liberal
endowment made it possible to secure an income for the Master by deed.
Under the Reformation, Somerset’s Commission found that the School
Master had £10 yearly by patent; the school was well conducted,
and was not confiscated.” {50a}
Baconians can compare the yearly £20 (the salary in 1570-6, which
then went much further than it does now) with the incomes of other masters
of Grammar Schools, and thereby find out if the Head-Master was very
cheap. Mr. Elton (who knew his subject intimately) calls the provision
“liberal.” The Head-Master of Westminster had £20
and a house.
As to the method of teaching, it was colloquial; questions were asked
and answered in Latin. This method, according to Dr. Rouse of
Perse School, brings boys on much more rapidly than does our current
fashion, as may readily be imagined; but experts vary in opinion.
The method, I conceive, should give a pupil a vocabulary. Lilly’s
Latin Grammar was universally used, and was learned by rote, as by George
Borrow, in the last century. See Lavengro for details.
Conversation books, Sententiæ Pueriles, were in
use; with easy books, such as Corderius’s Colloquia,
and so on, for boys were taught to speak Latin, the common
language of the educated in Europe. Waifs of the Armada, Spaniards
wrecked on the Irish coast, met “a savage who knew Latin,”
and thus could converse with him. The Eclogues of Mantuanus, a
Latin poet of the Renaissance (the “Old Mantuan” of Love’s
Labour’s Lost), were used, with Erasmus’s
Colloquia, and, says Mr. Collins, “such books as
Ovid’s Metamorphoses” (and other works of his), “the
Æneid, selected comedies of Terence and Plautus, and portions
of Cæsar, Sallust, Cicero, and Livy.”
“Pro-di-gi-ous!” exclaims Mr. Greenwood, {51a}
referring to what Mr. Collins says Will had read at school. But
precocious Latinity was not thought “prodigious” in an age
when nothing but Latin was taught to boys - not even cricket.
Nor is it to be supposed that every boy read in all of these authors,
still less read all of their works, but these were the works of which
portions were read. It is not prodigious. I myself, according
to my class-master, was “a bad and careless little boy”
at thirteen, incurably idle, but I well remember reading in Ovid and
Cæsar, and Sallust, while the rest of my time was devoted to the
total neglect of the mathematics, English “as she was taught,”
History, and whatsoever else was expected from me. Shakespeare’s
time was not thus frittered away; Latin was all he learned (if he went
to school), and, as he was (on my theory) a very clever, imaginative
kind of boy, I can conceive that he was intensely interested in the
stories told by Ovid, and in Catiline’s Conspiracy (thrilling,
if you know your Sallust); and if his interest were once aroused, he
would make rapid progress. My own early hatred of Greek was hissing
and malignant, but as soon as I opened Homer, all was changed.
One was intensely interested!
Mr. Greenwood will not, in the matter of books, go beyond Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,
{52a} “Lilly’s
Grammar, and a few classical works chained to the desks of the free
schools.” Mr. Collins himself gives but “a few classical
books,” of which portions were read. The chains were
in all the free schools, if Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is right.
The chains, if authentic, do not count as objections.
Here it must be noted that Mr. Greenwood’s opinion of Will’s
knowledge and attainments is not easily to be ascertained with precision.
He sees, of course, that the pretension of the extreme Baconians - Will
could not even write his name - is absurd. If he could not write,
he could not pass as the author. Mr. Greenwood “fears that
the arguments” (of a most extreme Baconian) “would drive
many wandering sheep back to the Stratfordian fold.” {52b}
He has therefore to find a via media, to present, as the
pseudo-author, a Will who possessed neither books nor manuscripts when
he made his Testament; a rustic, bookless Will, speaking a patois, who
could none the less pass himself off as the author. So “I
think it highly probable,” says Mr. Greenwood, “that he
attended the Grammar School at Stratford for four or five years, and
that, later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able
to ‘bumbast out a line,’ and perhaps to pose as ‘Poet-Ape
who would be thought our chief.’” {53a}
Again, “He had had but little schooling; he had ‘small Latin
and less Greek’; but he was a good Johannes Factotum,
he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, ‘bumbast out
a blank verse.’” {53b}
But this is almost to abandon Mr. Greenwood’s case. Will
appears to me to be now perilously near acceptance as Greene’s
“Shake-scene,” who was a formidable rival to Greene’s
three professional playwrights: and quite as near to Ben’s Poet-Ape
“that would be thought our chief,” who began by re-making
old plays; then won “some little wealth and credit on the scene,”
who had his “works” printed (for Ben expects them to reach
posterity), and whom Ben accused of plagiarism from himself and his
contemporaries. But this Shake-scene, this Poet-Ape, is merely
our Will Shakespeare as described by bitterly jealous and envious rivals.
Where are now the “works” of “Poet-Ape” if they
are not the works of Shakespeare which Ben so nobly applauded later,
if they are not in the blank verse of Greene’s Shake-scene?
“Shakespeare’s plays” we call them.
When was it “necessary” for the “Stratford
rustic” to “bumbast out a blank verse”? Where
are the blank verses which he bumbasted out? For what purposes
were they bumbasted? By 1592 “Shake-scene” was ambitious,
and thought his blank verse as good as the best that Greene’s
friends, including Marlowe, could write. He had plenty of time
to practise before the date when, as Ben wrote, “he would be thought
our chief.” He would not cease to do that in which he conceived
himself to excel; to write for the stage.
When once Mr. Greenwood deems it “highly probable” that
Will had four or five years of education at a Latin school, Will has
as much of “grounding” in Latin, I think, as would account
for all the knowledge of the Roman tongue which he displays. His
amount of teaching at school would carry and tempt even a boy who was
merely clever, and loved to read romantic tales and comic plays, into
Ovid and Plautus - English books being to him not very accessible.
Here I may speak from my own memories, for though utterly idle where
set school tasks were concerned, I tried very early to worry the sense
out of Aristophanes - because he was said to contain good reading.
To this amount of taste and curiosity, nowise unexampled in an ordinary
clever boy, add Genius, and I feel no difficulty as to
Will’s “learning,” such as, at best, it was.
“The Stratfordian,” says Mr. Greenwood, “will ingeminate
‘Genius! Genius!’” {55a}
I do say “Genius,” and stand by it. The ordinary
clever boy, in the supposed circumstances, could read and admire his
Ovid (though Shakespeare used cribs also), the man of genius could write
Venus and Adonis.
Had I to maintain the Baconian hypothesis, I would not weigh heavily
on bookless Will’s rusticity and patois. Accepting Ben Jonson’s
account of his “excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle
expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility . . . ,”
accepting the tradition of his lively wit; admitting that he had
some Latin and literature, I would find in him a sufficiently plausible
mask for that immense Unknown with a strange taste for furbishing up
older plays. I would merely deny to Will his genius,
and hand that over to Bacon - or Bungay. Believe me,
Mr. Greenwood, this is your easiest way! - perhaps this is your
way? - the plot of the unscrupulous Will, and of your astute Bungay,
might thus more conceivably escape detection from the pack of envious
playwrights.
According to “all tradition,” says Mr. Greenwood, Shakespeare
was taken from school at the age of thirteen. Those late long-descended
traditions of Shakespeare’s youth are of little value as evidence;
but, if it pleases Mr. Greenwood, I will, for the sake of argument,
accept the whole of them. Assuredly I shall not arbitrarily choose
among the traditions: all depends on the genealogical steps by which
they reach us, as far as these can be discovered. {56a}
According to the tattle of Aubrey the antiquary, publishing in 1680,
an opinion concerning Shakspere’s education reached him.
It came thus; there had been an actor in Shakspere’s company,
one Phillips, who, dying in 1605, left to Shakspere the usual thirty-shilling
piece of gold; and the same “to my servant, Christopher Beeston.”
Christopher’s son, William, in 1640, became deputy to Davenant
in the management of “the King’s and Queen’s Young
Company”, and through Beeston, according to Aubrey, Davenant learned;
through Beeston Aubrey learned, that Shakespeare “understood Latin
pretty well, for he had been in his younger days a school-master in
the country.” Aubrey writes that “old Mr. Beeston,
whom Mr. Dryden calls ‘the chronicle of the stage,’”
died in 1682. {56b}
This is a fair example of the genealogy of the traditions. Phillips,
a friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605, leaving a servant, Christopher
Beeston (he, too, was a versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682;
he is “the chronicle of the stage.” Through him Davenant
gets the story, through him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere “knew
Latin pretty well,” and had been a rural dominie. Mr. Greenwood
{57a} devotes much
space to disparaging Aubrey (and I do not think him a scientific authority,
moult s’en faut), but Mr. Greenwood here
says not a word as to the steps in the descent of the tradition.
He frequently repeats himself, thereby forcing me to more iteration
than I like. He had already disparaged Aubrey in note I to p.
105, but there he approached so closely to historical method as to say
that “Aubrey quotes Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, as his
authority.” On p. 209 he dismisses the anecdote (which does
not suit his book) as “a mere myth.” “He
knows, he knows” which traditions are mythical, and
which possess a certain historical value.
My own opinion is that Shakspere did “know Latin pretty well,”
and was no scholar, as his contemporaries reckoned scholarship.
He left school, if tradition speak true, by a year later than the age,
twelve, when Bacon went to Cambridge. Will, a clever kind of lad
(on my theory), left school at an age when some other clever lads became
freshmen. Why not? Gilbert Burnet (of whom you may have
heard as Bishop of Salisbury under William III) took his degree at the
age of fourteen.
Taking Shakspere as an extremely quick, imaginative boy, with nothing
to learn but Latin, and by the readiest road, the colloquial, I conceive
him to have discovered that, in Ovid especially, were to be found the
most wonderful and delightful stories, and poetry which could not but
please his “green unknowing youth.” In the years before
he left Stratford, and after he left school (1577-87?), I can easily
suppose that he was not always butchering calves, poaching, and
making love; and that, if he could get books in no other way, this graceless
fellow might be detected on a summer evening, knitting his brows over
the stories and jests of the chained Ovid and Plautus on his old schoolroom
desk. Moi qui parle, I am no genius; but stories,
romance, and humour would certainly have dragged me back to the old
desks - if better might not be, and why not Shakspere? Put yourself
in his place, if you have ever been a lad, and if, as a lad, you liked
to steal away into the world of romance, into fairyland.
If Will wrote the plays, he (and indeed whoever wrote the plays) was
a marvel of genius. But I am not here claiming for him genius,
but merely stating my opinion that if he were fond of stories and romance,
had no English books of poetry and romance, and had acquired as much
power of reading Latin as a lively, curious boy could easily gain in
four years of exclusively Latin education, he might continue his studies
as he pleased, yet be, so far, no prodigy.
I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians insist;
if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was at a Latin
school. I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity, the prompt
acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the author of
the plays must have possessed in youth. “Tradition says
nothing of all that,” the Baconian answers, and he may now, if
he likes, turn to my reply in The Traditional Shakespeare. {59a}
Meanwhile, how can you expect old clerks and sextons, a century after
date, in a place where literature was not of supreme interest,
to retain a tradition that Will used to read sometimes (if he did),
in circumstances of privacy? As far as I am able to judge, had
I been a boy at Stratford school for four years, had been taught nothing
but Latin, and had little or no access to English books of poetry and
romance, I should have acquired about the same amount of Latin as I
suppose Shakspere to have possessed. Yet I could scarcely, like
him, have made the second syllable in “Posthumus” long!
Sir Walter Scott, however, was guilty of similar false quantities: he
and Shakspere were about equally scholarly.
I suppose, then, that Shakspere’s “small Latin” (as
Jonson called it) enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks;
to read sufficient for his uses. As a fact, he made use of English
translations, and also of Latin texts. Scholars like Bacon do
not use bad translations of easy Latin authors. If Bacon wanted
Plutarch, he went to Plutarch in Greek, not to an English translation
of a French translation of a Latin translation.
Some works of Shakespeare, the Lucrece, for example, and
The Comedy of Errors (if he were not working over an earlier
canvas from a more learned hand), and other passages, show knowledge
of Latin texts which in his day had not appeared in published translations,
or had not been translated at all as far as we know. In my opinion
Will had Latin enough to puzzle out the sense of the Latin, never difficult,
for himself. He could also “get a construe,” when
in London, or help in reading, from a more academic acquaintance: or
buy a construe at no high ransom from some poor scholar. No contemporary
calls him scholarly; the generation of men who were small boys when
he died held him for no scholar. The current English literature
of his day was saturated with every kind of classical information; its
readers, even if Latinless, knew, or might know a world of lore with
which the modern man is seldom acquainted. The ignorant Baconian
marvels: the classically educated Baconian who is not familiar with
Elizabethan literature is amazed. Really there is nothing worthy
of their wonder.
Does any contemporary literary allusion to Shakespeare call him “learned”?
He is “sweet,” “honey-tongued,” “mellifluous,”
and so forth, but I ask for any contemporary who flattered him with
the compliment of “learned.” What Ben Jonson thought
of his learning (but Ben’s standard was very high), what Milton
and Fuller, boys of eight when he died, thought of his learning, we
know. They thought him “Fancy’s child” (Milton)
and with no claims to scholarship (Fuller), with “small Latin
and less Greek” (Jonson). They speak of Shakespeare the
author and actor; not yet had any man divided the persons.
Elizabethan and Jacobean scholarly poets were widely read in the classics.
They were not usually, however, scholars in the same sense as our modern
scholarly poets and men of letters; such as Mr. Swinburne among the
dead, and Mr. Mackail and Sir Gilbert Murray - if I may be pardoned
for mentioning contemporary names. But Elizabethan scholarly poets,
and Milton, never regarded Shakespeare as learned. Perhaps few
modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them. The opinion
of Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even he thought Shakespeare’s
scholarship “inexact,” as we shall see.
I conceive that Shakspere “knew Latin pretty well,” and,
on Ben Jonson’s evidence, he knew “less Greek.”
That he knew any Greek is surprising. Apparently he did,
to judge from Ben’s words. My attitude must, to the Baconians,
seem frivolous, vexatious, and evasive. I cannot pretend to know
what was Shakspere’s precise amount of proficiency in Latin when
he was writing the plays. That between his own knowledge, and
construes given to him, he might easily get at the meaning of all the
Latin, not yet translated, which he certainly knew, I believe.
Mr. Greenwood says “the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere
must have done, and assimilated, during his brief sojourn at the Free
School is positively amazing.” {62a}
But I have shown how an imaginative boy, with little or no access to
English poetry and romances, might continue to read Latin “for
human pleasure” after he left school. As a professional
writer, in a London where Latinists were as common as now they are rare
in literary society, he might read more, and be helped in his reading.
Any clever man might do as much, not to speak of a man of genius.
“And yet, alas, there is no record or tradition of all this prodigious
industry. . . . ” I am not speaking of “prodigious
industry,” and of that - at school. In a region so non-literary
as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr. Greenwood ought not to expect
traditions of Will’s early reading (even if he studied much more
deeply than I have supposed) to exist, from fifty to seventy years after
Will was dead, in the memories of the sons and grandsons of country
people who cared for none of these things. The thing is not reasonable.
{62b}
Let me take one example {62c}
of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is quoted as saying (somewhere) about
Shakespeare’s debt to Seneca’s then untranslated paper De
Clementia (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I). It inspires Portia’s
speech about Mercy. Here I give a version of the Latin.
“Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King or chief
magistrate (principem) . . . No one can think of anything
more becoming to a ruler than clemency . . . which will be confessed
the fairer and more goodly in proportion as it is exhibited in the higher
office . . . But if the placable and just gods punish not instantly
with their thunderbolts the sins of the powerful, how much more just
it is that a man set over men should gently exercise his power.
What? Holds not he the place nearest to the gods, who, bearing
himself like the gods, is kind, and generous, and uses his power for
the better? . . . Think . . . what a lone desert and waste Rome
would be, were nothing left, and none, save such as a severe judge would
absolve.”
The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia’s speech:
“Consider this
That in the course of Justice none of us
Should see salvation.”
Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia’s
eloquence.
Now take Portia:
“The quality of Mercy is not strain’d;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;”
(Not much Seneca, so far!)
“’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But Mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice . . . ”
There follows the passage about none of us seeing salvation, already
cited, and theological in origin.
Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these reflections,
without having read Seneca’s De Clementia, whether,
if he could not conceive the ideas “out of his own head,”
he might not hear Seneca’s words translated in a sermon, or in
conversation, or read them cited in an English book, each reader must
decide for himself. Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick
out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay
of the tutor of Nero.
My view of Shakespeare’s Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter
Raleigh. {64a}
As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held by people who approach
the subject, and who have had a classical education. An exception
was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are discussed in the following
chapter.
In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns
did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing).
Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature. “His
plays,” says Sir Walter Raleigh, “are extraordinarily rich
in the floating debris of popular literature, - scraps and tags and
broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs. In
this respect he is notable even among his contemporaries. . . .
Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool
in Lear and the Grave-digger in Hamlet, even Ophelia
and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs. . . . ” {65a}
He is rich in rural proverbs not recorded in Bacon’s Promus.
Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, “was
making himself all the time.”
The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now obsolete
rural words. Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all the
tags of song, ballad, story, and dicton. But so may Shakespeare.
CHAPTER IV: MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE’S LEARNING
That Shakspere, whether “scholar” or not, had a very wide
and deep knowledge both of Roman literature and, still more, of the
whole field of the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr.
Greenwood seems to admire in that “violent Stratfordian,”
Mr. Churton Collins. {69a}
I think that Mr. Collins did not persuade classical scholars who have
never given a thought to the Baconian belief, but who consider on their
merits the questions: Does Shakespeare show wide classical knowledge?
Does he use his knowledge as a scholar would use it?
My friend, Mr. Collins, as I may have to say again, was a very wide
reader of poetry, with a memory like Macaulay’s. It was
his native tendency to find coincidences in poetic passages (which,
to some, to me for example, did not often seem coincidental); and to
explain coincidences by conscious or subconscious borrowing. One
remarked in him these tendencies long before he wrote on the classical
acquirements of Shakespeare.
While Mr. Collins tended to account for similarities in the work of
authors by borrowing, my tendency was to explain them as undesigned
coincidences. The question is of the widest range. Some
inquirers explain the often minute coincidences in myths, popular tales,
proverbs, and riddles, found all over the world, by diffusion from a
single centre (usually India). Others, like myself, do not deny
cases of transmission, but in other cases see spontaneous and independent,
though coincident invention. I do not believe that the Arunta
of Central Australia borrowed from Plutarch the central feature of the
myth of Isis and Osiris.
It is not on Shakespeare’s use, now and then, of Greek and Latin
models and sources, but on coincidences detected by Mr. Collins himself,
and not earlier remarked, that he bases his belief in the saturation
of Shakespeare’s mind with Roman and Athenian literature.
Consequently we can only do justice to Mr. Collins’s system, if
we compare example after example of his supposed instances of Shakespeare’s
borrowing. This is a long and irksome task; and the only fair
plan is for the reader to peruse Mr. Collins’s Studies in Shakespeare,
compare the Greek and Roman texts, and weigh each example of supposed
borrowing for himself. Baconians must delight in this labour.
I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for Shakespeare
to obtain a view of the manuscript translation of plays of Plautus made
by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use the Menæchmi
as the model of The Comedy of Errors. He does not borrow
phrases from it, as he does from North’s Plutarch.
Venus and Adonis owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for three purple
patches, scattered in different parts of the Metamorphoses.
Lucrece is based on the then untranslated Fasti of Ovid.
I do not think Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for
himself; or too proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some
poor young University man in London. That is a simple and natural
means by which he could help himself when in search of a subject for
a play or poem; and ought not to be overlooked.
Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare’s wide and
profound knowledge of the classics, opens with the remark: “Nothing
which Shakespeare has left us warrants us in pronouncing with certainty
that he read the Greek classics in the original, or even that he possessed
enough Greek to follow the Latin versions of those classics in the Greek
text.” {71a}
In that case, how did Shakespeare’s English become contaminated,
as Mr. Collins says it did, with Greek idioms, while he
only knew the Greek plays through Latin translations?
However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove Shakespeare’s
close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic literature by a
method of which he knows the perils - “it is always perilous to
infer direct imitation from parallel passages which may be mere coincidences.”
{72a} Yet
this method is what he practises throughout; with what amount of success
every reader must judge for himself.
He thinks it “surely not unlikely” that Polonius’s
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,”
may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (Trinummus,
iv. 3). Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if
ever there were a well-known reflection from experience it is this of
the borrowers and lenders.
Next, take this of Plautus (Pseudolus, I, iv. 7-10), “But
just as the poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists
nowhere among men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which
is mere fiction.” We are to take this as the possible germ
of Theseus’s theory of the origin of the belief in fairies:
“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth forms, and
the poet’s pen turns them to shapes. But to suppose
that Shakespeare here borrowed from Plautus appears highly superfluous.
These are samples of Mr. Collins’s methods throughout.
Of Terence there were translations - first in part; later, in 1598,
of the whole. Of Seneca there was an English version (1581).
Mr. Collins labours to show that one passage “almost certainly”
implies Shakespeare’s use of the Latin; but it was used “by
an inexact scholar,” - a terribly inexact scholar, if he thought
that “alienus” (“what belongs to another”)
meant “slippery”!
Most of the passages are from plays (Titus Andronicus and Henry
VI, i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies (usually)
to his author, the Great Unknown. Throughout these early
plays Mr. Collins takes Shakespeare’s to resemble Seneca’s
Latin style: Shakespeare, then, took up Greek tragedy in later
life; after the early period when he dealt with Seneca. Here is
a sample of borrowing from Horace, “Persicos odi puer apparatus”
(Odes. I, xxxviii. I). Mr. Collins quotes Lear (III,
vi. 85) thus, “You will say they are Persian attire.”
Really, Lear in his wild way says to Edgar, “I do not like the
fashion of your garments: you will say they are Persian; but let them
be changed.” Mr. Collins changes this into “you will
say they are Persian attire,” a phrase “which
could only have occurred to a classical scholar.” The phrase
is not in Shakespeare, and Lear’s wandering mind might as easily
select “Persian” as any other absurdity.
So it is throughout. Two great poets write on the fear of death,
on the cries of new-born children, on dissolution and recombination
in nature, on old age; they have ideas in common, obvious ideas, glorified
by poetry, - and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from Lucretius
or Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out and study
the Latin passages which he does not quote. So arbitrary is taste
in these matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but independently,
finds Shakespeare putting a thought from the Alcibiades I of
Plato into the mouth of Achilles in Troilus and Cressida,
while Mr. J. M. Robertson suggests that the borrowing is from Seneca
- where Mr. Collins does not find “the smallest parallel.”
Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author of Troilus makes Ulysses
quote Plato as “the author” of a remark, and makes Achilles
take up the quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.
Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are
taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by
the Achæans!
There were Latin translations of Plato; the Alcibiades I was
published apart, from Ficinus’ version, in 1560, with the sub-title,
Concerning the Nature of Man. Who had read it? - Shakespeare,
or one of the two authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another Troilus
and Cressida (now lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown?
Which of these Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived
long before Homer? Which of them followed the Ionic and mediæval
anti-Achæan view of Homer’s heroes, as given in the Troy
Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired
Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors? Troilus and Cressida
is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus’
version of the Alcibiades; {75a}
and yet made the monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato
before the Trojan war. “That was his fun,” as Charles
Lamb said in another connection.
Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the “small Latin”
with which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare. He could
read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads
French - that is, as easily as he reads English. Still further,
Shakespeare, through Latin translations, was so saturated with the Greek
drama “that the characteristics which differentiate his work from
the work of his contemporaries and recall in essentials the work of
the Greek dramatists are actually attributable to these dramatists.”
Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as
far as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much
acquaintance with Euripides, Æschylus, Sophocles, and do not often
remind us of these masters. Shakespeare does remind us of them
- the only question is, do the resemblances arise from his possession
of a genius akin to that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with
all the treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling
up through the wells of Avon?
But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, cannot be demonstrated)
that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic tragedians? He begins
by saying that he will not bottom his case “on the ground of parallels
in sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are
likely to be” (fortuitous) “coincidences.” Three
pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore follow.
“Curiously close similarities of expression” are also barred.
Four pages of examples therefore follow, from Sophocles and Æschylus,
plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!). Again,
“identities of sentiment under similar circumstances” are
not to be cited; two pages are cited; and “similarities,
however striking they may be in metaphorical expression,” cannot
safely be used; several pages of them follow.
Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the Aias of Sophocles,
and tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from Titus Andronicus,
which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as non-Shakespearean, or not
by his unknown great author. Troilus and Cressida, whatever
part Shakespeare may have had in it, does suggest to me that the author
or authors knew of Homer no more than the few books of the Iliad, first
translated by Chapman and published in 1598. But he or they did
know the Aias of Sophocles, according to Mr. Collins: so did
the author of Romeo and Juliet.
Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the Greeks
are, Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that Shakespeare knew
the Greek tragedians. “We have obviously to be on our guard”
{77a} against three
kinds of such parallels, which “may be mere coincidences,”
{77b} fortuitous
coincidences. But these coincidences against which “we must
be on our guard” fill sixteen pages (pp. 46-63). These pages
must necessarily produce a considerable effect in the way of persuading
the reader that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians as intimately
as Mr. Collins did. Mr. Greenwood is obliged to leave these parallels
to readers of Mr. Collins’s essay. Indeed, what more can
we do? Who would read through a criticism of each instance?
Two or three may be given. The Queen in Hamlet reminds
that prince, grieving for his father’s death, that “all
that live must die”:
“That loss is common to the race,
And common is the common-place.”
The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra, - and here is a
parallel! Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious
expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof. Greece
agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that
it is not lucky to be “a corby messenger” of bad news; or
that all goes ill when a man acts against his better nature; or that
we suffer most from the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there
is strength in a righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an
idea common to Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or
that, having lost a very good man, you will not soon see his like again,
- and so on as long as you please. Of such wisdom are proverbs
made, and savages and Europeans have many parallel proverbs. Vestigia
nulla retrorsum is as well known to Bushmen as to Latinists.
Manifestly nothing in this kind proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare
was saturated in Greek tragedy. But page on page of such facts
as that both Shakespeare and Sophocles talk, one of “the belly-pinched
wolf,” the other of “the empty-bellied wolf,” are
apt to impress the reader - and verily both Shakespeare and Æschylus
talk of “the heart dancing for joy.” Mr. Collins repeats
that such things are no proof, but he keeps on piling them up.
It was a theory of Shakespeare’s time that the apparent ghost
of a dead man might be an impersonation of him by the devil. Hamlet
knows this -
“The spirit that I have seen may be the devil.”
Orestes (Electra, Euripides) asks whether it may not be
an avenging dæmon (alastor) in the shape of a god,
that bids him avenge his father. Is Shakespeare borrowing from
Euripides, or from a sermon, or any contemporary work on ghosts, such
as that of Lavater?
A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in
Romeo and Juliet, and in Euripides, both say that Death
is her bridegroom. Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the
Greek Anthology -
“For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.”
One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels.
But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove
that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.
To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such commonplaces:
as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their latest day in
life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own names.
The situations, in Hamlet and the Choephoræ and
Electra, are so close that resemblances in some passages
must and do occur, and Mr. Collins does not comment specially upon the
closest resemblance of all: the English case is here the murder of Duncan,
the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon.
Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between
Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and
Beowulf and the Njal’s saga, yet Norsemen and the early
Irish were not students of Homer! The parallel passages in Homer,
on one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the
Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing
from Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar.
But no student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found,
I think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels
knew Greek. The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick’s
The Heroic Age (1912), especially Chapter XV, “The Common
Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,” and to what
Mr. Chadwick says much might be added.
But, to be short, Mr. Collins’s case can only be judged by readers
of his most interesting Studies in Shakespeare. To me,
Hamlet’s soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the Phœnix
of Euripides no more closely than two sets of reflections by great
poets on the text that “of death we know nothing” are bound
to do, - though Shakespeare’s are infinitely the richer.
For Shakespeare’s reflections on death, save where Christians
die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-Æschylean
Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets. In many respects, as Mr. Collins
proves, Shakespeare’s highest and deepest musings are Greek in
tone. But of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in
his art was Keats, who of Greek knew nothing. In the same way,
a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death,
is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native
Fijian poet’s lines on old age, sine amore jocisque,
borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity
of genius. Mr. Collins states the hypothesis - not his own - “that
by a certain natural affinity Shakespeare caught also the accent
and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of Greek
tragedy.”
Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins’s long array of
Greek parallels, I do hold that by “natural affinity,” by
congruity of genius, Shakespeare approached and resembled the great
Athenians.
One thing seems certain to me. If Shakspere read and borrowed
from Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins
knew it; and remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins’s extraordinary
tenacity of memory.
Now if “Shakespeare” did all that, he was not the actor.
The author, on Mr. Collins’s showing, must have been a very sedulous
and diligent student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to
its fragments. The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove,
from Bacon’s works, that he was such a student.
Mr. Collins, “a violent Stratfordian,” overproved his case.
If his proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians
as well as did Mr. Swinburne. If the author of the plays were
so learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion - he was,
in the opinion of Mr. Collins.
If Shakespeare’s spirit and those of Sophocles and Æschylus
meet, it is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey
with “the poet’s sad lucidity” the same “pageant
of men’s miseries.” But how dissimilar in expression
Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the austerity of Greece,
we observe in one of Mr. Collins’s parallels.
Polynices, in the Phœnissæ of Euripides (504-506),
exclaims:
“To the stars’ risings, and the sun’s I’d go,
And dive ’neath earth, - if I could do this thing, -
Possess Heaven’s highest boon of sovereignty.”
Then compare Hotspur:
“By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drownèd honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.”
What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur’s mind!
Is Shakespeare thinking of the Phœnissæ, or
is he speaking only on the promptings of his genius?
CHAPTER V: SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY
A phrase has been used to explain the Greek element in Shakespeare’s
work, namely, “congruity of genius,” which is apt to be
resented by Baconians. Perhaps they have a right to resent it,
for “genius” is hard to define, and genius is invoked by
some wild wits to explain feats of Shakespeare’s which (to Baconians)
appear “miracles.” A “miracle” also is
notoriously hard to define; but we may take it (“under all reserves”)
to stand for the occurrence of an event, or the performance of an action
which, to the speaker who applies the word “miracle,” seems
“impossible.” The speaker therefore says, “The
event is impossible; miracles do not happen: therefore the reported
event never occurred. The alleged performance, the writing of
the plays by the actor, was impossible, was a miracle, therefore was
done by some person or persons other than the actor.” This
idea of the impossibility of the player’s authorship is
the foundation of the Baconian edifice.
I have, to the best of my ability, tried to describe Mr. Greenwood’s
view of the young provincial from Warwickshire, Will Shakspere.
If Will were what Mr. Greenwood thinks he was, then Will’s authorship
of the plays seems to me, “humanly speaking,” impossible.
But then Mr. Greenwood appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance
that Will may have been, not merely “a sharp boy”
but a boy of great parts; and not without a love of stories and poetry:
a passion which, in a bookless region, could only be gratified through
folk-song, folk-tale, and such easy Latin as he might take the trouble
to read. If we add to these very unusual but not wholly impossible
tastes and abilities, that Will may have been a lad of genius,
there is no more “miracle” in his case than in other supreme
examples of genius. “But genius cannot work miracles, cannot
do what is impossible.” Do what is impossible to whom?
To the critics, the men of common sense.
Alas, all this way of talking about “miracles,” and “the
impossible,” and “genius” is quite vague and popular.
What do we mean by “genius”? The Latin term originally
designates, not a man’s everyday intellect, but a spirit from
without which inspires him, like the “Dæmon,” or,
in Latin, “Genius” of Socrates, or the lutin which
rode the pen of Molière. “Genius” is claimed
for Shakespeare in an inscription on his Stratford monument, erected
at latest some six years after his death. Following this path
of thought we come to “inspiration”: the notion of it, as
familiar to Australian savages as to any modern minds, is that, to the
poet, what he produces is given by some power greater than himself,
by the Boilyas (spirits) or Pundjel, the Father of all.
This palæolithic psychology, of course, is now quite discredited,
yet the term “genius” is still (perhaps superstitiously)
applied to the rare persons whose intellectual faculties lightly outrun
those of ordinary mortals, and who do marvels with means apparently
inadequate.
In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers, put - in
place of the Muses or the Boilyas, or the Genius - what
they call the “Subliminal Self,” something “far more
deeply interfused than the everyday intellect.” This subconscious
self, capable of far more than the conscious intelligence, is genius.
On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only higher
in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday intellect
which, for example, pens this page.
Thus as soon as we begin to speak of “genius,” we are involved
in speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical;
in difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by physiological
science or experimental psychology, or by psychical research, or by
the study of heredity. When I speak of “the genius of Shakespeare,”
of Jeanne d’Arc, of Bacon, even of Wellington, I possibly have
a meaning which is not in all respects the meaning of Mr. Greenwood,
when he uses the term “genius”; so we are apt to misunderstand
each other. Yet we all glibly use the term “genius,”
without definition and without discussion.
At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against “that fool of a
word,” as Napoleon said, “impossible.” At once,
on either side, we assume that we know what is possible and what is
impossible, - and so pretend to omniscience.
Thus some “Stratfordians,” or defenders of the actor’s
authorship, profess to know - from all the signed work of Bacon, and
from all that has reached us about Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations,
from 1590 to 1605 - that the theory of Bacon’s authorship of the
plays is “impossible.” I, however, do not profess
this omniscience.
On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that he knows,
or thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the actor’s education,
conditions of life, and opportunities, argues that the authorship of
the actor is “impossible.”
Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know much more
about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations, and in his life,
than we know about the actor; while about “the potentialities
of genius,” we know - very little.
Thus, with all Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, he had,
the Baconians will allow, genius. By the miracle of genius
he may have found time and developed inclination, to begin by
furbishing up older plays for a company of actors: he did it extremely
well, but what a quaint taste for a courtier and scholar! The
eccentricities of genius may account for his choice of a “nom
de plume,” which, if he desired concealment, was the
last that was likely to serve his turn. He may also have divined
all the Doll Tearsheets and Mrs. Quicklys and Pistols, whom, conceivably,
he did not much frequent.
I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written Hamlet
“if he had the mind,” as Charles Lamb said of Wordsworth.
Not at all; I am the last to limit the potentialities of genius.
But suppose, merely for the sake of argument, that Will Shakspere too
had genius in that amazing degree which, in Henry V, the
Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of Canterbury describe and discuss
in the case of the young king. In this passage we perceive that
the poet had brooded over and been puzzled by the “miracle”
(he uses the word) of genius. Says Canterbury speaking of the
Prince’s wild youth,
“Never was such a sudden scholar made.”
One Baconian objection to Shakespeare’s authorship is that during
his early years in London (say 1587-92) he was “such a sudden
scholar made” in various things.
The young king’s
“addiction was to courses vain,
His companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow,”
precisely like Shakespeare’s courses and companions at Stratford
“Had never noted in him any study.”
Stratford tradition, a century after Shakespeare left the town, did
not remember “any study” in him; none had been “noted,”
nor could have been remembered. To return to Henry, he shines
in divinity, knowledge of “commonwealth affairs,”
“You would say, it hath been all in all his study.”
He is as intimate with the art of war; to him “Gordian knots of
policy” are “familiar as his garter.” He must
have
“The art and practic part of life,”
as “mistress to this theorie,”
“Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,”
as his youth was riotous, and was lived in all men’s gaze,
“And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.”
The Bishop of Ely can only suggest that Henry’s study or “contemplation”
“Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen,”
and Canterbury says
“It must be so, for miracles are ceased.”
And thus the miracle of genius baffles the poet, for Henry’s had
been “noisy nights,” notoriously noisy.
Now, as we shall later show, Bacon’s rapid production of the plays,
considering his other contemporary activities and varied but always
absorbing interests, was as much a miracle as the sudden blossoming
of Henry’s knowledge and accomplishments; for all Bacon’s
known exertions and occupations, and his deepest and most absorbing
interest, were remote from the art of tragedy and comedy. If we
are to admit the marvel of genius in Bacon, of whose life and pursuits
we know much, by parity of reasoning we may grant that the actor, of
whom we know much less, may have had genius: had powers and could use
opportunities in a way for which Baconians make no allowance.
We now turn to Mr. Greenwood’s chapter, “Shakespeare and
‘Genius.’” It opens with the accustomed list
of poor Will’s disqualifications, “a boy born of illiterate
parents,” but we need not rehearse the list. {91a}
He “comes to town” (date unknown) “a needy adventurer”;
in 1593 appeared the poem Venus and Adonis, author’s
name being printed as “W. Shakespeare.” Then comes
Lucrece (1594). In 1598 Love’s Labour’s
Lost, printed as “corrected and augmented” by
“W. Shakespere.” And so on with all the rest.
Criticism of the learning and splendour of the two poems follows.
To Love’s Labour’s Lost, and
the amusing things written about it by Baconians, I return; and to Shakespeare’s
“impossible” knowledge of courtly society, his “polish
and urbanity,” his familiar acquaintance with contemporary French
politics, foreign proverbs, and “the gossip of the Court”
of Elizabeth: these points are made by His Honour Judge Webb.
All this lore to Shakespeare is “impossible” - he could
not read, say some Baconians, or had no Latin, or had next to none;
on these points I have said my say. The omniscient Baconians know
that all the early works ascribed to the actor were impossible, to a
man of, say thirty - who was no more, and knew no more,
than they know that the actor was and knew; and as for “Genius,”
it cannot work miracles. Genius “bestows upon no one a knowledge
of facts,” “Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could
impart only what he had learned.”
Precisely, but genius as I understand it (and even cleverness) has a
way of acquiring knowledge of facts where the ordinary “dull intelligent
man” gains none. Keen interest, keen curiosity, swift observation,
even the power of tearing out the things essential from a book, the
gift of rapid reading; the faculty of being alive to the fingertips,
- these, with a tenacious memory, may enable a small boy to know more
facts of many sorts than his elders and betters and all the neighbours.
They are puzzled, if they make the discovery of his knowledge.
Scott was such a small boy; whether we think him a man of genius or
not. Shakspere, even the actor, was, perhaps, a man of genius,
and possessed this power of rapid acquisition and vivid retention of
all manner of experience and information. To what I suppose to
have been his opportunities in London, I shall return. Meanwhile,
let the doubter take up any popular English books of Shakespeare’s
day: he will find them replete with much knowledge wholly new to him
- which he will also find in Shakespeare.
A good example is this: Judge Webb proclaimed that in points of scientific
lore (the lore of that age) Shakespeare and Bacon were much on a level.
Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper, said that the facts staggered him,
as a “Stratfordian.” A friend told me that he too
was equally moved. I replied that these pseudoscientific “facts”
had long been commonplaces. Pliny was a rich source of them.
Professor Dowden took the matter up, with full knowledge, {93a}
and reconverted Mr. Tyrrell, who wrote: “I am not versed in the
literature of the Shakespearian era, and I assumed that the Baconians
who put forward the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the coincidences
were peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and the poet.
Professor Dowden has proved that this is not so.” {93b}
Were I to enter seriously on this point of genius, I should begin by
requesting my adversaries to read Mr. F. W. H. Myers’s papers
on “The Mechanism of Genius” (in his Human Personality),
and to consider the humble problem of “Calculating Boys,”
which is touched on also by Cardinal Newman. How do they, at the
age of innocence, arrive at their amazing results? How did the
child Pascal, ignorant of Euclid, work out the Euclidean propositions
of “bars and rounds,” as he called lines and circles?
Science has no solution!
Transport the problem into the region of poetry and knowledge of human
nature, take Will in place of Pascal and Gauss, and (in manners and
matter of war) Jeanne d’Arc; - and science, I fancy, is much to
seek for a reply.
Mr. Greenwood considers, among others, the case of Robert Burns.
The parallel is very interesting, and does not, I think, turn so much
to Mr. Greenwood’s advantage as he supposes. The genius
of Burns, of course, is far indeed below the level of that of the author
of the Shakespearean plays. But that author and Burns have this
in common with each other (and obviously with Homer), that their work
arises from a basis of older materials, already manipulated by earlier
artists. Burns almost always has a key-note already touched, as
confessedly in the poems of his predecessor, Fergusson; of Hamilton
of Gilbertfield; in songs, popular or artistic, and so forth.
He “alchemised” his materials, as Mr. Greenwood says of
his author of the plays; turned dross into gold, brick into marble.
Notoriously much Shakespearean work is of the same nature.
The education of Burns he owed to his peasant father, to his parish
school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin and Greek;
in fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some English and French;
and he knew a modernised version of Blind Harry’s Wallace;
Locke’s Essay; The Spectator, novels of the
day, and vernacular Scots poets of his century, with a world of old
Scots songs. These things, and such as these, were Burns’s
given literary materials. He used them in the only way open to
him, in poems written for a rural audience, and published for an Edinburgh
public. No classical, no theatrical materials were given; or,
if he read the old drama, he could not, in his rural conditions, and
in a Scotland where the theatre was in a very small way, venture on
producing plays, for which there was no demand, while he had no knowledge
of the Stage. Burns found and filled the only channels open to
him, in a printed book, and in music books for which he transmuted old
songs.
The bookish materials offered to Will, in London, were crammed with
reminiscences from the classics, were mainly romantic and theatrical;
and, from his profession of actor, by far the best channel open to him
was the theatre. Badly as it paid the outside author, there was
nothing that paid better. Venus and Adonis brought “more
praise than pudding,” if one may venture a guess. With the
freedom of the theatre Will could soar to all heights and plumb all
depths. No such opportunity had Burns, even if he could have used
it, and, owing to a variety of causes, his spirit soon ceased to soar
high or wing wide.
I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the current Elizabethan
light literature - Euphues, Lyly’s Court comedies,
novels full of the classics and of social life; Spenser, Sidney - his
Defence of Poesy, and Arcadia (1590) - with scores
of tales translated from the Italian, French, and Spanish, all full
of foreign society, and discourses of knights and ladies. He saw
the plays of the day, perhaps as one of “the groundlings.”
He often beheld Society, from without, when acting before the Queen
and at great houses. He had thus, if I am right, sufficient examples
of style and manner, and knowledge of how the great were supposed (in
books) to comport and conduct themselves. The books were cheap,
and could be borrowed, and turned over at the booksellers’ stalls.
{96a} The
Elizabethan style was omnipresent. Suppose that Shakespeare was
a clever man, a lover of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory,
easily influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that
my conjectures are not too audacious. Not only “the man
in the street,” but “the reading public” (so loved
by Coleridge), have not the beginning of a guess as to the way in which
a quick man reads. Watch them poring for hours over a newspaper!
Let me quote what Sir Walter Raleigh says: {97a}
“Shakespeare was one of those swift and masterly readers who know
what they want of a book; they scorn nothing that is dressed in print,
but turn over the pages with a quick discernment of all that brings
them new information, or jumps with their thought, or tickles their
fancy. Such a reader will have done with a volume in a few minutes,
yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years. He is a live
man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a learned man.”
I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as was Dr.
Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to genius.
The accomplishment is only a marvel to - well, I need not be particular
about the kind of person to whom it is a marvel!
Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent
passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will, quoted
by Mr. Greenwood {97b}
from Mr. Morgan. {97c}
Genius, says Mr. Morgan, “did not guide Burns’s untaught
pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.” No!
that was not Burns’s lay; nor would he have found a public had
he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who
wrote The Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the
delight of David Hume, his friend. The public of 1780-90 did not
want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature
accessible to Burns full of the mediæval legends of Troy and Athens.
But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the mediæval
legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, not of
Homer, Will made his market. Egypt he knew only in the new English
version of Plutarch’s Lives; of Homer, he (or the author
of Troilus and Cressida) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman’s
new translation (1598). For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps),
and, certainly, Caxton’s Destruction of Troy, still
reprinted as a popular book as late as 1713. Will did not,
as Mr. Morgan says, “reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations
and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand
years before he had been begotten. . . ” He bestowed the
manners of mediæval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks.
He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland
cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.
Look at his notion of “the very manners” of early post-Roman
Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear! Concerning
“the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive
Kings” the author of Macbeth knew no more than what he
read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince
was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith’s bothy), and
of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated
legends. The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan
inexplicably declares that he had) of “matters of curious and
occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances
or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools
to teach!”
Mon Dieu! do historians not treat of “matters
of curious research” and of statutes and of treaties? As
for “old romances,” they were current and popular.
The “occult” sources of King Lear are a popular tale
attached to legendary “history” and a story in Sidney’s
Arcadia. Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as “a letterless
peasant lad,” or the Author, whoever he was, is not “invested
with all the love” (sic, v.1. “lore”),
“which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and
buried and forgotten.”
“Our friend’s style has flowery components,” Mr. Greenwood
adds to this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author,
“and yet Shakespeare who did all this,” et cætera.
But Shakespeare did not do “all this”! We know
the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which “Delphos”
is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated
legends; North’s Plutarch, done out of the French;
older plays, and the rest of it. Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach
and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which
is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-plays to the State
Papers. Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up
“clasped books, buried and forgotten.” There is no
original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and
popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day.
Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what
he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence. And the common
Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.
But Mr. Greenwood asks “what was the poetic output?” in
Burns’s case. {100a}
It was what we know, and that was what suited his age and his
circumstances. It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not
drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one winter
in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.
Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have suggested,
to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre. I have
tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all-pervading
classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy,
general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet
of the classics, - with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed
and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide;
with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays;
and in the current popular Morte d’Arthur and Destruction
of Troy.
I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that “Genius
is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and
what it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it
is associated, and the opportunities that are open to it - in a word,
on the circumstances of its environment.” {101a}
Of course by “moral qualities,” a character without spot
or stain is not intended: we may take that for granted. Otherwise,
I agree; and think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that
what it produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it,
and with “the circumstances of its environment.” Without
the “environment,” no Jeanne d’Arc, - without the
environment, no Shakespeare.
To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of “the
light people,” the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by
literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the
productions of their pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and,
above all, the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers’
tales, the seamen’s company, the vision of the Court, the gallants,
the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak in
the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly was. Not
as an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple literary man, William
does not like, though he thoroughly understands, the mob. Like
Alceste (in Le Misanthrope of Poquelin), he might say,
“L’Ami du genre humain n’est point
du tout mon fait.”
In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his mob. This
reminds one to ask, how did the Court-haunting, or the study-haunting,
or law-court, and chamber of criminal examination-rooms haunting Bacon
make acquaintance with Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, and drawers,
and carters, and Bardolph, and Pistol, and copper captains, and all
Shakespeare’s crowd of people hanging loose on the town?
It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone and manners
of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely poetic and conventional),
than to find out where Bacon got his immense knowledge of what is called
“low life.”
If you reply, as regards Bacon, “his genius divined the Costards
and Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and drawers, and Bardolphs,
and carters, from a hint or two, a glance,” I answer that Will
had much better sources for them in his own experience of life,
and had conventional poetic sources for his courtiers - of whom, in
the quick, he saw quite as much as Molière did of his Marquis.
But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of accounting
for Bacon’s pictures of rude rustic life, and he is backed by
Lord Penzance, that aged Judge. The way is short. These
pictures of rural life and character were interpolated into the plays
of Bacon by his collaborator, William Shakspere, actor, “who prepared
the plays for the stage.” This brilliant suggestion is borrowed
from Mr. Appleton Morgan. {103a}
Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it is difficult
to see how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects
of character which he could scarcely draw “from the life.”
I am willing to ascribe miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians
cited give the honour to the actor, “who prepared the plays for
the stage.”
Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe as I believe
in “Genius.” Shakespeare and Molière did not
live in “Society,” though both rubbed shoulders with it,
or looked at it over the invisible barrier between the actor and the
great people in whose houses or palaces he takes the part of Entertainer.
The rest they divined, by genius.
Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs.
Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not
at Court, not in the study, did he meet them. How then did he
create his multitude of very low-lived persons? Rustics and rural
constables he may have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for
his collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company.
So you have to admit “Genius,” - the miracle of “Genius”
in your Bacon, - to an even greater extent than I need it in the case
of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will collaborated
with Bacon.
Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very
different genius, education, and environment. Burns could easily
get at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare
at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics. Suppose him to be
a poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist. Tradition at Stratford
says something about the humorist, and tradition, in similar circumstances,
would have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy
years.
Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged
to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen,
to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles,
with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney. Some sorts
of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so
lightly as Burns did, - some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot
at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he assailed other deer, and was
in troubles many. Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main
chance. Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering,
if he tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory.
His opinion of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that
frequently expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.
Something must be done! Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not
deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may
have seen and talked with them, and been attracted. He was a practical
man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading
straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising
a small brigade of boys as his deputies. According to Ben Jonson
he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent,
that terrible bar! The actors find that out; he is admitted within
the house as a “servitor” - a call-boy, if you like; an
apprentice, if you please.
By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, “Shakescene”
thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor,
he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member
of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene’s three author
friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights;
the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.
Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say,
five years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with
the stage. Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a
good deal of very mixed society - writing men, bookish young blades,
young blades who haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the
custom of the gallants.
What follows? Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps,
after the play, if an actor seems to be good company. This is
quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty
as to stand aloof from any amusing company. They found it among
prize-fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the
fact that he was a lord. Moreover there were no women on the stage
to distract the attention of the gallants. The players, says Asinius
Lupus, in Jonson’s Poetaster, “corrupt young
gentry very much, I know it.” I take the quotation from
Mr. Greenwood. {106a}
They could not corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate
with them. From Ben’s Poetaster, which bristles
with envy of the players, Mr. Greenwood also quotes a railing address
by a copper captain to Histrio, a poor actor, “There are some
of you players honest, gentlemanlike scoundrels, and suspected to ha’
some wit, as well as your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests;
and are companions for gallants. A man may skelder ye,
now and then, of half a dozen shillings or so.” {107a}
We think of Nigel Olifaunt in The Fortunes of Nigel; but better
gallants might choose to have some acquaintance with Shakespeare.
To suppose that young men of position would not form a playhouse acquaintanceship
with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to show misunderstanding
of human nature. The players were, when unprotected by men of
rank, “vagabonds.” The citizens of London, mainly
Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not Puritans.
The Court patronised the actors who performed Masques in palaces and
great houses. The wealth and splendid attire of the actors, their
acquisition of land and of coats of arms infuriated the sweated playwrights.
Envy of the actors appears in the Cambridge “Parnassus”
plays of c. 1600-2. In the mouth of Will Kempe, who acted
Dogberry in Shakespeare’s company, and was in favour, says Heywood,
with Queen Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put this brag: “For
Londoners, who of more report than Dick Burbage and Will Kempe?
He is not counted a gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.”
It is not my opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson came to be,
as much “in Society” as is possible for a mere literary
man. I do not, in fancy, see him wooing a Maid of Honour.
He was a man’s man, a peer might be interested in him as easily
as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician, que sçais-je?
Southampton, discovering his qualities, may have been more interested,
interested in a better way.
In such circumstances which are certainly in accordance with human nature,
I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the young, handsome, popular
Earl of Southampton; who found him interesting, and interested himself
in the poet. There followed the dedication to the Earl of Venus
and Adonis; a poem likely to please any young amorist (1693).
Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating to an
Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to dedicate.
The mere fact that the dedication was accepted, and followed by that
of Lucrece, proves that the Earl did not share the surprise
of Mr. Greenwood. He, conceivably, will argue that the Earl knew
the real concealed author, and the secret of the pseudonym. But
of the hypothesis of such a choice of a pseudonym, enough has been said.
Whatever happened, whatever the Earl knew, if it were discreditable
to be dedicated to by an actor, Southampton was discredited; for we
are to prove that all in the world of letters and theatre who have left
any notice of Shakespeare identified the actor with the poet.
This appears to me to be the natural way of looking at the affair.
But, says Mr. Greenwood, of this intimacy or “patronage”
of Southampton “not a scrap of evidence exists.” {109a}
Where would Mr. Greenwood expect to find a scrap of evidence?
In literary anecdote? Of contemporary literary anecdote about
Shakespeare, as about Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman, Heywood, and Fletcher,
there is none, or next to none. There is the tradition that Southampton
gave the poet £1000 towards a purchase to which he had a mind.
(Rowe seems to have got this from Davenant, - through Betterton.)
In what documents would the critic expect to find a scrap of evidence?
Perhaps in Southampton’s book of his expenditure, and that does
not exist. It is in the accounts of Prince Charlie that I find
him, poor as he was, giving money to Jean Jacques Rousseau.
As to the chances of an actor’s knowing “smart people,”
Heywood, who knew all that world, tells us {109b}
that “Tarleton, in his time, was gracious with the Queen, his
sovereign,” Queen Elizabeth. “Will Kempe was in the
favour of his sovereign.”
They had advantages, they were not literary men, but low comedians.
I am not pretending that, though his
“flights upon the banks of Thames
So did take Eliza and our James,”
Will Shakspere “was gracious with the Queen.”
We may compare the dedication of the Folio of 1623; here two players
address the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. They have the audacity
to say nothing about having asked and received permission to dedicate.
They say that the Earls “have prosecuted both the plays and their
authour living” (while in life) “with much favour.”
They “have collected and published the works of ‘the dead’
. . . only to keep alive the memory of so worthy a Friend, and Fellow”
(associate) “as was our Shakespeare, ‘your servant Shakespeare.’”
Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the actor’s
authorship of the plays, and as to the favour in which the two Earls
held him. Mr. Greenwood {110a}
supposes that Jonson wrote the Preface, which contains an allusion to
a well-known ode of Horace, and to a phrase of Pliny. Be that
as it may, the Preface signed by the two players speaks to Pembroke
and Montgomery. To them it cannot lie; they know
whether they patronised the actor or not; whether they believed, or
not, that the plays were their “servant’s.”
How is Mr. Greenwood to overcome this certain testimony of the Actors,
to the identity of their late “Fellow” the player, with
the author; and to the patronage which the Earls bestowed on him and
his compositions? Mr. Greenwood says nothing except that we may
reasonably suppose Ben to have written the dedication which the players
signed. {111a}
Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of Shakespeare,
the dedication does not say in so many words. They had seen his
plays and had “favoured” both him and them, with so much
favour, had “used indulgence” to the author. That
is not nearly explicit enough for the precise Baconians. But the
Earls knew whether what was said were true or false. I am not
sure whether the Baconians regard them as having been duped as to the
authorship, or as fellow-conspirators with Ben in the great Baconian
joke and mystery - that “William Shakespeare” the author
is not the actor whose Stratford friend, Collyns, has his name written
in legal documents as “William Shakespeare.”
Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William Shakspere
was acting in a company (1592-3), Bacon, or who you please, wrote Venus
and Adonis, and, signing “W. Shakspeare,” dedicated
it to his young friend, the Earl, promising to add “some graver
labour,” a promise fulfilled in Lucrece. In 1593,
Bacon was chiefly occupied, we shall see, with the affairs of a young
and beautiful Earl - the Earl of Essex, not of Southampton: to Essex
he did not dedicate his two poems (if Venus and Lucrece were
his). He “did nothing but ruminate” (he tells the
world) on Essex. How Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown was occupied
in 1593-4, of course we cannot possibly be aware.
I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much schooling
as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in London, about
the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by 1592, be the rising
player-author alluded to as “Shakescene.” There remains
a difficulty. By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of thirteen
plays, or even of six. But I have not credited him with the
authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely, Hamlet,
Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, Love’s
Labour’s Lost, King John, the three plays
of Henry VI, and The Taming of the Shrew.
Mr. Greenwood {112a}
cites Judge Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end
of 1592 “some half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written,”
and for Dr. Furnivall’s opinion that eleven had been composed.
If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean plays, as we
have them, had been written or composed, between 1587 and 1592, I should
be obliged to say that, in my opinion, they were not composed, in these
five years, by Will. Mr. Greenwood writes, “Some of the
dates are disputable”; and, for himself, would omit “Titus
Andronicus, the three plays of Henry VI, and
possibly also The Taming of the Shrew, while the reference
to Hamlet also is, as I have elsewhere shown, of very doubtful
force.” {113a}
This leaves us with six of Dr. Furnivall’s list of earliest plays
put out of action. The miracle is decomposing, but plays numerous
enough to stagger my credulity remain.
I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before 1592-3
was the ex-butcher’s boy. Meanwhile these five plays, written
by somebody before 1593, meet the reader on the threshold of Mr. Greenwood’s
book {113b} with
Dr. Furnivall’s eleven; and they fairly frighten him, if he be
a “Stratfordian.” “Will, even Will,” says
the Stratfordian, “could not have composed the five, much less
the eleven, much less Mr. Edwin Reed’s thirteen ‘before
1592.’” {113c}
But, at the close of his work {113d}
Mr. Greenwood reviews and disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen Shakespearean
plays “before 1592” as mustered by Mr. Reed, a Baconian
of whom Mr. Collins wrote in terms worthy of feu Mr. Bludyer
of The Tomahawk.
From the five plays left to Shakespeare’s account in p. 51,
King John (as we know it) is now eliminated. “I find
it impossible to believe that the same man was the author of the drama”
(The Troublesome Reign of King John) “published
in 1591, and that which, so far as we know, first saw the light in the
Folio of 1623 . . . Hardly a single line of the original version
reappears in the King John of Shakespeare.” {114a}
“I think it is a mistake to endeavour to fortify the argument
against him” (my Will, toi que j’aime),
“by ascribing to Shakespeare such old plays as the King
John of 1591 or the primitive Hamlet.” {114b}
I thought so too, when I read p. 51, and saw King John apparently
still “coloured on the card” among “Shakespeare’s
lot.” We are now left with Love’s Labour’s
Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy of
Errors, and Romeo and Juliet, out of Dr. Furnivall’s
list of plays up to 1593. The phantom force of miraculously early
plays is “following darkness like a dream.” We do
not know the date of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
we do not know the date of Romeo and Juliet. Mr. Gollancz
dates the former “about 1592,” and the latter “at
1591.” {114c}
This is a mere personal speculation. Of Love’s
Labour’s Lost, we only know that our version
is one “corrected and augmented” by William Shakespeare
in 1598. I dare say it is as early as 1591-2, in its older form.
Of The Comedy of Errors, Mr. Collins wrote, “It
is all but certain that it was written between 1589 and 1592, and it
is quite certain that it was written before the end of 1594.”
{114d}
The legion of Shakespearean plays of date before 1593 has vanished.
The miracle is very considerably abated. In place of introducing
the airy hosts of plays before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been, perhaps,
more instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate, Shakespeare’s
earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be placed about 1591-3.
There would then have been no specious appearance of miracles to be
credited by Stratfordians to Will. But even so, we have sufficient
to “give us pause,” says Mr. Greenwood, with justice.
It gives me “pause,” if I am to believe that, between
1587 and 1592, Will wrote Love’s Labour’s
Lost, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. There is a limit
even to my gullibility, and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we now
possess them, before 1593, I do not suppose that Will was the man.
But the dates, in fact, are unknown: the miracle is apocryphal.
CHAPTER VI: THE COURTLY PLAYS: “LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST”
We now come to consider another “miracle” discovered in
the plays, - a miracle if the actor be the author. The new portent
is the courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies
make the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen
and ladies in the plays. To be sure the refinement in the jests
is often conspicuously absent. How could the rude actor learn
his quips and pretty phrases, and farfetched conceits? This question
I have tried to answer already, - the whole of these fashions abound
in the literature of the day.
Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not make the
ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do converse, whether
in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier style, unless he himself
frequented their society. Marlowe did not frequent the best society;
he was no courtier, but there is the high courtly style in the
speeches of the great and noble in Edward II. Courtiers
and kings never did speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in
blank verse. The style is a poetical convention, while the quips
and conceits, the airs and graces, ran riot through the literature of
the age of Lyly and his Euphues and his comedies, the age of
the Arcadia.
A cheap and probable source of Will’s courtliness is to be
found in the courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were separately
printed between 1584 and 1592. Lyly’s “real significance
is that he was the first to bring together on the English stage the
elements of high comedy, thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare’s
Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It” (and
Love’s Labour’s Lost, one may
add). “Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can
hardly miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly’s
plays almost as closely as Lyly had read Pliny’s Natural History.
. . . One could hardly imagine Love’s Labour’s
Lost as existent in the period from 1590 to 1600, had not Lyly’s
work just preceded it.” {120a}
“It is to Lyly’s plays,” writes Dr. Landmann, “that
Shakespeare owes so much in the liveliness of his dialogues, in smartness
of expression, and especially in that predilection for witticisms, quibbles,
and playing upon words which he shows in his comedies as well as in
his tragedies.” There follows a dissertation on the affected
styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the Pléiade in France,
and generally of the artificial manner in Europe, till in England we
reach Lyly, “in whose comedies,” says Dr. Furness, “I
think we should look for motives which appeared later in Shakespeare.”
{121a}
The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and
court plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in literature
than at Court, decide that the poet of Love’s Labour’s
Lost was not Will, but the courtly “concealed poet.”
No doubt Baconians may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald {121b}
that “Bacon wrote Marlowe,” and, by parity of reasoning
many urge, though Mr. Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring
into Lyly’s comedies the grace and wit, the quips and conceits
of his own courtly youth. “What for no?” The
hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses, “Bacon wrote Marlowe,”
“Bacon wrote Shakespeare.”
The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore
the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and
are noted even in short educational histories of English literature.
Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls,
to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly’s plays, and read
the poems of the time. I am taking him not to be a dullard but
a poet. It was not hard for him, if he were a poet of genius,
not only to catch the manner of Lyly’s Court comedies, and “Marlowe’s
mighty line” (Marlowe was not “brought up on the knees of
Marchionesses”!), but to improve on them. People did not
commonly talk in the poetical way, heaven knows; people did not write
in the poetic convention. Certainly Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth
talked and wrote, as a rule (we have abundance of their letters), like
women of this world. There is a curious exception in Letter VIII
of the Casket Letters from Mary to Bothwell. In this (we have
a copy of the original French), Mary plunges into the affected and figured
style already practised by Les Précieuses of her day;
and expands into symbolisms in a fantastic jargon. If courtiers
of both sexes conversed in the style of Euphues (which is improbable),
they learned the trick of it from Euphues; not the author of
Euphues from them. Lyly’s most popular prose was
accessible to Shakespeare. The whole convention as to how the
great should speak and bear themselves was accessible in poetry and
the drama. A man of genius naturally made his ladies and courtiers
more witty, more “conceited,” more eloquent, more gracious
than any human beings ever were anywhere, in daily life.
It seems scarcely credible that one should be obliged to urge facts
so obvious against the Baconian argument that only a Bacon, intimately
familiar with the society of the great, could make the great speak as,
in the plays, they do - and as in real life they probably did not!
We now look at Love’s Labour’s Lost,
published in quarto, in 1598, as “corrected and augmented
by W. Shakespere.” The date of composition is unknown, but
the many varieties of versification, with some allusions, mark it as
among the earliest of the dramas. Supposing that Shakespeare obtained
his knowledge of fine manners and speech, and of the tedious quips and
conceits which he satirises, from the contemporary poems, plays, and
novels which abounded in them, and from précieux and précieuses
who imitated them, as I suggest, even then Love’s
Labour’s Lost is an extremely eccentric piece.
I cannot imagine how a man who knew the foreign politics of his age
as Bacon did, could have dreamed of writing anything so eccentric, that
is, if it has any connection with foreign politics of the time.
The scene is the Court of Ferdinand, King of Navarre.
In 1589-93, the eyes of England were fixed on the Court of her ally,
Henri of Navarre, in his struggle with the League and the Guises;
the War of Religion. But the poet calls the King “Ferdinand,”
taking perhaps from some story this non-existent son of Charles III
of Navarre (died 1425): to whom, according to Monstrelet, the Burgundian
chronicler of that time, the French king owed 200,000 ducats of gold.
This is a transaction of the early fifteenth century, and leads to the
presence of the princess of France as an envoy at the Court of Navarre
in the play; the whole thing is quite unhistorical, and has the air
of being borrowed from some lost story or brief novel. Bacon’s
brother, Anthony, was English minister at the Court of Navarre.
What could tempt Bacon to pick out a non-historical King Ferdinand of
Navarre, plant him in the distant days of Jeanne d’Arc, and make
him, at that period, found an Academe for three years of austere study
and absence of women? But, if Bacon did this, what could induce
him to give to the non-existent Ferdinand, as companions, the Maréchal
de Biron with de Longueville (both of them, in 1589-93, the chief adherents
of Henri of Navarre), and add to them “Dumain,” that is,
the Duc de Mayenne, one of the Guises, the deadly foes of Henri and
of the Huguenots? Even in the unhistorically minded Shakespeare,
the freak is of the most eccentric, - but in Bacon this friskiness is
indeed strange. I cannot, like Mr. Greenwood, {124a}
find any “allusions to the Civil War of France.” France
and Navarre, in the play, are in full peace.
The actual date of the fabulous King Ferdinand would have been about
1430. By introducing Biron, Longueville, and the Duc de Mayenne,
and Bankes’s celebrated educated horse, the author shifts the
date to 1591. But the Navarre of the play is a region “out
of space, out of time,” a fairy world of projected Academes (like
that of the four young men in de la Primaudaye’s L’Académie
Française, Englished in 1586) and of peace, while
the actual King of Navarre of 1591 was engaged in a struggle for life
and faith; and in his ceaseless amours.
Many of Shakespeare’s anachronisms are easily intelligible.
He takes a novel or story about any remote period, or he chooses, as
for the Midsummer Night’s Dream, a period
earlier than that of the Trojan war. He gives to the Athens contemporary
with the “Late Minoan III” period (1600 B.C.?) a Duke, and
his personages live like English nobles and rustics of his own day,
among the fairies of English folk-lore. It is the manner of Chaucer
and of the poets and painters of any age before the end of the eighteenth
century. The resulting anachronisms are natural and intelligible.
We do not expect war-chariots in Troilus and Cressida; it is
when the author makes the bronze-clad Achæans familiar with Plato
and Aristotle that we are surprised. In Love’s
Labour’s Lost we do not expect the author to introduce
the manners of the early fifteenth century, the date of the affair of
the 200,000 ducats. Let the play reflect the men and manners of
1589-93, - but why place Mayenne, a fanatical Catholic foe of Navarre,
among the courtiers of the Huguenot King of Navarre?
As for de Mayenne (under the English spelling of the day Dumain) appearing
as a courtier of his hated adversary Henri, Bacon, of all men, could
not have made that absurd error. It was Shakespeare who took but
an absent-minded interest in foreign politics. If Bacon is building
his play on an affair, the ducats, of 1425-35 (roughly speaking), he
should not bring in a performing horse, trained by Bankes, a Staffordshire
man, which was performing its tricks at Shrewsbury - in 1591. {126a}
Thus early we find that great scholar mixing up chronology in a way
which, in Shakespeare even, surprises; but, in Bacon, seems quite out
of keeping.
Shakespeare, as Sir Sidney Lee says, gives Mayenne as “Dumain,”
- Mayenne, “whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular
accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre’s movements
that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters.”
Bacon would not have been so led! As Mayenne and Henri fought
against each other at Ivry, in 1590, this was carrying nonsense far,
even for Will, but for the earnestly instructive Bacon!
“The habits of the author could not have been more scholastic,”
so Judge Webb is quoted, “if he had, like Bacon, spent three years
in the University of Cambridge . . . ” Bacon, or whoever
corrected the play in 1598, might have corrected “primater”
into “pia mater,” unless Bacon intended the blunder for
a malapropism of “Nathaniel, a Curate.” Either Will
or Bacon, either in fun or ignorance, makes Nathaniel turn a common
Italian proverb on Venice into gibberish. It was familiar in Florio’s
Second Frutes (1591), and First Frutes (1578), with the
English translation. The books were as accessible to Shakspere
as to Bacon. Either author might also draw from James Sandford’s
Garden of Pleasure, done out of the Italian in 1573-6.
Where the scholastic habits of Bacon at Cambridge are to be discovered
in this play, I know not, unless it be in Biron’s witty speech
against study. If the wit implies in the author a Cambridge education,
Costard and Dull and Holofernes imply familiarity with rustics and country
schoolmasters. Where the author proves that he “could not
have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had
spent three years in the train of an Ambassador to France,” I
cannot conjecture. There are no French politics in the piece,
any more than there are “mysteries of fashionable life,”
such as Bacon might have heard of from Essex and Southampton.
There is no “familiarity with all the gossip of the Court”;
there is no greater knowledge of foreign proverbs than could be got
from common English books. There is abundance, indeed overabundance
of ridicule of affected styles, and quips, with which the literature
of the day was crammed: call it Gongorism, Euphuism, or what you please.
One does not understand how or where Judge Webb (in extreme old age)
made all these discoveries, sympathetically quoted by Mr. Greenwood.
{127a}
“Like Bacon, the author of the play must have had a large command
of books; he must have had his “Horace,” his “Ovidius
Naso,” and his “good old ‘Mantuan.’”
What a prodigious “command of books”! Country schoolmasters
confessedly had these books on the school desks. It was not even
necessary for the author to “have access to the Chronicles
of Monstrelet.” It is not known, we have said, whether
or not such plot as the play possesses, with King Ferdinand and the
100,000 ducats, or 200,000 ducats (needed to bring the Princess and
the mythical King Ferdinand of Navarre together), were not adapted by
the poet from an undiscovered conte, partly based on a
passage in Monstrelet.
Perhaps it will be conceded that Love’s Labour’s
Lost is not a play which can easily be attributed to Bacon.
We do not know how much of the play existed before Shakespeare “augmented”
it in 1598. We do not know whether what he then corrected and
augmented was an early work of his own or from another hand, though
probably it was his own. Molière certainly corrected and
augmented and transfigured, in his illustrious career in Paris, several
of the brief early sketches which he had written when he was the chief
of a strolling troupe in Southern France.
Mr. Greenwood does not attribute the wit (such as it is), the quips,
the conceits, the affectations satirised in Love’s Labour’s
Lost, to Will’s knowledge of the artificial style then
prevalent in all the literatures of Western Europe, and in England most
pleasingly used in Lyly’s comedies. No, “the author
must have been not only a man of high intellectual culture, but one
who was intimately acquainted with the ways of the Court, and the fashionable
society of his time, as also with contemporary foreign politics.”
{129a}
I search the play once more for the faintest hint of knowledge of foreign
politics. The embassy of the daughter of the King of France (who,
by the date of the affair of the ducats, should be Charles VII) has
been compared to a diplomatic sally of the mother of the childless actual
King of France (Henri III), in 1586, when Catherine de Medici was no
chicken. I do not see in the embassy of the Princess of the story
any “intimate acquaintance with contemporary foreign politics”
about 1591-3. The introduction of Mayenne as an adherent of the
King of Navarre, shows either a most confused ignorance of foreign politics
on the part of the author, or a freakish contempt for his public.
I am not aware that the author shows any “intimate acquaintance
with the ways” of Elizabeth’s Court, or of any other fashionable
society, except the Courts which Fancy held in plays.
Mr. Greenwood {129b}
appears to be repeating “the case as to this very remarkable play”
as “well summed up by the late Judge Webb in his Mystery of
William Shakespeare” (p. 44). In that paralysing
judicial summary, as we have seen, “the author could not have
been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had spent
three years in the train of an Ambassador to France.” The
French politics, in the play, are to send the daughter of a King of
France (the contemporary King Henri III was childless) to conduct a
negotiation about 200,000 ducats, at the Court, steeped in peace, of
a King of Navarre, a scholar who would fain be a recluse from women,
in an Academe of his own device. Such was not the Navarre of Henri
in his war with the Guises, and Henri did not shun the sex!
Such are the “contemporary foreign politics,” the “French
politics” which the author knows - as intimately as Bacon might
have known them. They are not foreign politics, they are not French
politics, they are politics of fairy-land: with which Will was at least
as familiar as Bacon.
These, then, are the arguments in favour of Bacon, or the Great Unknown,
which are offered with perfect solemnity of assurance: and the Baconians
repeat them in their little books of popularisation and propaganda.
Quantula sapientia!
CHAPTER VII: CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION OF WILL AS AUTHOR
It is absolutely impossible to prove that Will, or Bacon, or the Man
in the Moon, was the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems.
But it is easy to prove that Will was recognised as the author, by Ben
Jonson, Heywood, and Heminge and Condell the actors, to take the best
witnesses. Meanwhile we have received no hint that any man except
Will was ever suspected of being the author till 1856, when the twin
stars of Miss Delia Bacon and Mr. Smith arose. The evidence of
Ben Jonson and the rest can only prove that professed playwrights and
actors, who knew Will both on and off the stage, saw nothing in him
not compatible with his work. Had he been the kind of letterless
country fellow, or bookless fellow whom the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood
describe, the contemporary witnesses cited must have detected Will in
a day; and the story of the “Concealed Poet” who really,
at first, did the additions and changes in the Company’s older
manuscript plays, and of the inconceivably impudent pretences of Will
of Stratford, would have kept the town merry for a month. Five
or six threadbare scholars would have sat down at a long table in a
tavern room, and, after their manner, dashed off a Comedy of Errors
on the real and the false playwright.
Baconians never seem to think of the mechanical difficulties in their
assumed literary hoax. If Will, like the old Hermit of Prague
who never saw pen and ink, could not even write, the hoax was a physical
impossibility. If he could write, but was a rough bookless man,
his condition would be scarcely the more gracious, even if he were able
to copy in his scrawl the fine Roman hand of the concealed poet.
I am surprised that the Baconians have never made that point.
Will’s “copy” was almost without blot or erasion,
the other actors were wont to boast. Really the absence of erasions
and corrections is too easily explained on the theory that Will was
not the author. Will merely copied the fair copies handed
to him by the concealed poet. The farce was played for some twenty
years, and was either undetected or all concerned kept the dread secret
- and all the other companies and rival authors were concerned in exposing
the imposture.
The whole story is like the dream of a child. We therefore expect
the Anti-Willians to endeavour to disable the evidence of Jonson, Heywood,
Heminge, and Condell. Their attempts take the shape of the most
extravagant and complex conjectures; with certain petty objections to
Ben’s various estimates of the merits of the plays.
He is constant in his witness to the authorship. To these efforts
of despair we return later, when we hope to justify what is here deliberately
advanced.
Meanwhile we study Mr. Greenwood’s attempts to destroy or weaken
the testimony of contemporary literary allusions, in prose or verse,
to the plays as the work of the actor. Mr. Greenwood rests on
an argument which perhaps could only have occurred to legal minds, originally,
perhaps to the mind of Judge Webb, not in the prime vigour of his faculties.
Not very many literary allusions remain, made during Will’s life-time,
to the plays of Shakespeare. The writers, usually, speak of “Shakespeare,”
or “W. Shakespeare,” or “Will Shakespeare,”
and leave it there. In the same way, when they speak of other
contemporaries, they name them, - and leave it there, without telling
us “who” (Frank) Beaumont, or (Kit) Marlowe, or (Robin)
Greene, or (Jack) Fletcher, or any of the others “were.”
All interested readers knew who they were: and also knew who “Shakespeare”
or “Will Shakespeare” was. No other Will Shak(&c.)
was prominently before the literary and dramatic world, in 1592-1616,
except the Warwickshire provincial who played with Burbage.
But though the mere names of the poets, Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe, Frank
Beaumont, Harry Chettle, and so forth, are accepted as indicating the
well-known men whom they designate, this evidence to identity does not
satisfy Mr. Greenwood, and the Baconians, where Will is concerned.
“We should expect to find allusions to dramatic and poetical works
published under the name of ‘Shakespeare’; we should expect
to find Shakespeare spoken of as a poet and a dramatist; we should expect,
further, to find some few allusions to Shakespeare or Shakspere the
player. And these, of course, we do find; but these are not the
objects of our quest. What we require is evidence to establish
the identity of the player with the poet and dramatist; to prove that
the player was the author of the Plays and Poems. That
is the proposition to be established, and that the allusions
fail, as it appears to me, to prove,” says Mr. Greenwood.
He adds, “At any rate they do not disprove the theory that the
true authorship was hidden under a pseudonym” {136a}
- which raises an entirely different question.
Makers of allusions to the plays must identify Shakespeare with the
actor, explicitly; must tell us who this Shakespeare was, though they
need not, and usually do not, tell us who the other authors mentioned
were; and though the world of letters and the Stage knew but one William
Shakspere or Shakespeare, who was far too familiar to them to require
further identification. But even if the makers of allusions did
all this, and said, “by W. Shakespeare the poet, we mean W. Shakespeare
the actor” - that is not enough. For they may all
be deceived, may all believe that a bookless, untutored man is the author.
So we cannot get evidence correct enough for Mr. Greenwood.
Destitute as I am of legal training, I leave this notable way of disposing
of the evidence to the judgement of the Bench and the Bar, a layman
intermeddleth not with it. Still, I am, like other readers, on
the Jury addressed, - I do not accept the arguments. Miror
magis, as Mr. Greenwood might quote Latin. We have
already seen one example of this argument, when Heywood speaks of the
author of poems by Shakespeare, published in The Passionate Pilgrim.
Heywood does nothing to identify the actor Shakspere with the author
Shakespeare, says Mr. Greenwood. I shall prove that, elsewhere,
Heywood does identify them, and no man knew more of the world of playwrights
and actors than Heywood. I add that in his remarks on The Passionate
Pilgrim, Heywood had no need to say “by W. Shakespeare
I mean the well-known actor in the King’s Company.”
There was no other William Shakspere or Shakespeare known to his public.
It is to no purpose that Mr. Greenwood denies, as we have seen above,
that the allusions “disprove the theory that the true authorship
was hidden under a pseudonym.” That is an entirely different
question. He is now starting quite another hare. Men of
letters who alluded to the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant
the actor; that is my position. That they may all have been mistaken:
that “William Shakespeare” was Bacon’s, or any one’s
pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly different question; and we must not
allow the critic to glide away into it through an “at any rate”;
as he does three or four times. So far, then, Mr. Greenwood’s
theory that it was impossible for the actor Shakspere to have been the
author of the plays, encounters the difficulty that no contemporary
attributed them to any other hand: that none is known to have said,
“This Warwickshire man cannot be the author.”
“Let us, however, examine some of these allusions to Shakspere,
real or supposed,” says the critic. {138a}
He begins with the hackneyed words of the dying man of letters, Robert
Greene, in A Groatsworth of Wit (1592). The pamphlet is
addressed to Gentlemen of his acquaintance “that spend their wits
in making plays”; he “wisheth them a better exercise,”
and better fortunes than his own. (Marlowe is supposed to be one
of the three Gentlemen playwrights, but such suppositions do not here
concern us.) Greene’s is the ancient feud between the players
and the authors, between capital and labour. The players are the
capitalists, and buy the plays out and out, - cheap. The author
has no royalties; and no control over the future of his work, which
a Shakspere or a Bacon, a Jonson or a Chettle, or any handyman of the
company owning the play, may alter as he pleases. It is highly
probable that the actors also acquired most of the popular renown, for,
even now, playgoers have much to say about the players in a piece, while
they seldom know the name of the playwright. Women fall in love
with the actors, not with the authors; but with “those puppets,”
as Greene says, “that speake from our mouths, these anticks, garnished
in our colours.” Ben Jonson, we shall see, makes some of
the same complaints, - most natural in the circumstances: though he
managed to retain the control of his dramas; how, I do not know.
Greene adds that in his misfortunes, illness, and poverty, he is ungratefully
“forsaken,” by the players, and warns his friends that such
may be their lot; advising them to seek “some better exercise.”
He then writes - and his meaning cannot easily be misunderstood, I think,
but misunderstood it has been - “Yes, trust them not” (trust
not the players), “FOR there is an upstart crow, beautified with
our feathers, that with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a
Player’s hide” (“Player’s”
in place of “woman’s,” in an old play, The Tragedy
of Richard, Duke of York, &c.), “supposes
he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you;
and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own
conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”
The meaning is pellucid. “Do not trust the players, my fellow
playwrights, for the reasons already given, for they, in addition to
their glory gained by mouthing our words, and their ingratitude,
may now forsake you for one of themselves, a player, who thinks his
blank verse as good as the best of yours” (including Marlowe’s,
probably). “The man is ready at their call (“an absolute
Johannes Factotum”). “In his own conceit”
he is “the only Shake-scene in a country.” “Seek
you better masters,” than these players, who have now an author
among themselves, “the only Shake-scene,” where the pun
on Shakespeare does not look like a fortuitous coincidence. But
it may be, anything may happen.
The sense, I repeat, is pellucid. But Mr. Greenwood writes that
if Shake-scene be an allusion to Shakespeare “it seems clear that
it is as an actor rather than as an author he is attacked.” {140a}
As an actor the person alluded to is merely assailed with the
other actors, his “fellows.” But he is picked out
as presenting another and a new reason why authors should distrust the
players, “for there is” among themselves, “in
a player’s hide,” “an upstart crow” - who thinks
his blank verse as good as the best of theirs. He is, therefore,
necessarily a playwright, and being a factotum, can readily
be employed by the players to the prejudice of Greene’s three
friends, who are professed playwrights.
Mr. Greenwood says that “we do not know why Greene should have
been so particularly bitter against the players, and why he should have
thought it necessary so seriously to warn his fellow playwrights against
them.” {141a}
But we cannot help knowing; for Greene has told us. In addition
to gaining renown solely through mouthing “our”
words, wearing “our feathers,” they have been
bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will,
in the same circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; “yes,
for they now have” an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous
rival, in their own fellowship. Thus we know with absolute certainty
why Greene wrote as he did. He says nothing about the superior
financial gains of the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have
been the “only” cause of his bitterness. Greene gives
its causes in the plainest possible terms, as did Ben Jonson later,
in his verses “Poet-Ape” (Playwright-Actor). Moreover,
Mr. Greenwood gives Greene’s obvious motives on the very page
where he says that we do not know them.
Even Mr. Greenwood, {141b}
anxious as he is to prove Shake-scene to be attacked as an actor, admits
that the words “supposes himself as well able to bumbast out a
blank verse as the best of you,” “do seem to have that implication,”
{141c} namely,
that “Shake-scene” is a dramatic author: what else can the
words mean; why, if not for the Stage, should Shake-scene write blank
verse?
Finally Mr. Greenwood, after saying “it is clear that it is as
an actor rather than as an author that ‘Shake-scene’ is
attacked,” {142a}
concedes {142b}
that it “certainly looks as if he” (Greene) “meant
to suggest that this Shake-scene supposed himself able to compose, as
well as to mouth verses.” Nothing else can possibly be meant.
“The rest of you” were authors, not actors.
If not, why, in a whole company of actors, should “Shake-scene”
alone be selected for a special victim? Shake-scene is chosen
out because, as an author, a factotum always ready at need, he is more
apt than the professed playwrights to be employed as author by his company:
this is a new reason for not trusting the players.
I am not going to take the trouble to argue as to whether, in the circumstances
of the case, “Shake-scene” is meant by Greene for a pun
on “Shake-speare,” or not. If he had some other rising
player-author, the Factotum of a cry of players, in his mind, Baconians
may search for that personage in the records of the stage. That
other player-author may have died young, or faded into obscurity.
The term “the only Shake-scene” may be one of those curious
coincidences which do occur. The presumption lies rather on the
other side. I demur, when Mr. Greenwood courageously struggling
for his case says that, even assuming the validity of the surmise that
there is an allusion to Shakspere, {143a}
“the utmost that we should be entitled to say is that Greene here
accuses Player Shakspere of putting forward, as his own, some work,
or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to
another” (the Great Unknown?). I do more than demur, I defy
any man to exhibit that sense in Greene’s words.
“The utmost that we should be entitled to say,” is, in my
opinion, what we have no shadow of a title to say. Look at the
poor hackneyed, tortured words of Greene again. “Yes, trust
them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,
that with his Tyger’s heart wrapped in a player’s
hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank
verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum,
is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”
How can mortal man squeeze from these words the charge that “Player
Shakspere” is “putting forward, as his own, some work, or
perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another”?
It is as an actor, with other actors, that the player is “beautified
with our feathers,” - not with the feathers of some one
not ourselves, Bacon or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown. Mr.
Greenwood even says that Shake-scene is referred to “as beautified
with the feathers which he has stolen from the dramatic writers”
(“our feathers”).
Greene says absolutely nothing about feathers “which he
has stolen.” The “feathers,” the words of
the plays, were bought, not stolen, by the actors, “anticks garnished
in our colours.”
Tedious it is to write many words about words so few and simple as those
of Greene; meaning “do not trust the players, for one of them
writes blank verse which he thinks as good as the best of yours, and
fancies himself the only Shake-scene in a country.”
But “Greene here accuses Player Shakspere of putting forward,
as his own, some work, or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he
was really indebted to another,” this is “the utmost we
should be entitled to say,” even if the allusion be to Shakspere.
How does Mr. Greenwood get the Anti-Willian hypothesis out of Greene’s
few and plain words?
It is much safer for him to say that “Shake-scene” is not
meant for Shakespeare. Nobody can prove that it is; the
pun may be a strange coincidence, - or any one may say that he
thinks it nothing more; if he pleases.
Greene nowhere “refers to this Shake-scene as being an impostor,
an upstart crow beautified with the feathers which he has stolen
from the dramatic writers (“our feathers”)” {145a}
- that is, Greene makes no such reference to Shake-scene in his capacity
of writer of blank verse. Like all players, who are all “anticks
garnisht in our colours,” Shake-scene, as player, is
“beautified with our feathers.” It is Mr. Greenwood
who adds “beautified with the feathers which he has stolen
from the dramatic writers.” Greene does not even remotely
hint at plagiarism on the part of Shake-scene: and the feathers, the
plays of Greene and his friends, were not stolen but bought. We
must take Greene’s evidence as we find it, - it proves that by
“Shake-scene” he means a “poet-ape,” a playwright-actor;
for Greene, like Jonson, speaks of actors as “apes.”
Both men saw in a certain actor and dramatist a suspected rival.
Only one such successful practising actor-playwright is known to us
at this date (1592-1601), - and he is Shakespeare. Unless another
such existed, Greene, in 1592, alludes to William Shak(&c.) as a
player and playwright. This proves that the actor from Stratford
was accepted in Greene’s world as an author of plays in blank
verse. He cannot, therefore, have seemed incapable of his poetry.
Let us now briefly consider other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare
selected by Mr. Greenwood himself. No allusion can prove that
Shakespeare was the author of the work attributed to him in the allusions.
The plays and poems may have been by James VI and I, “a
parcel-poet.” The allusions can prove no more than that,
by his contemporaries, Shakespeare was believed to be the poet, which
is impossible if he were a mere rustic ignoramus, as the Baconians aver.
Omitting some remarks by Chettle on Greene’s Groatsworth of
Wit, {146a}
as, if grammar goes for all, they do not refer to Shakespeare, we have
the Cambridge farce or comedy on contemporary literature, the Return
from Parnassus (1602?). The University wits laugh at Shakespeare,
- not an university man, as the favourite poet, in his Venus and
Adonis, of a silly braggart pretender to literature, Gullio.
They also introduce Kempe, the low comedy man of Shakespeare’s
company, speaking to Burbage, the chief tragic actor, of Shakespeare
as a member of their company, who, as an author of plays,
“puts down” the University wits “and Ben Jonson
too.” The date is not earlier than that of Ben’s satiric
play on the poets, The Poetaster (1601), to which reference is
made. Since Kempe is to be represented as wholly ignorant, his
opinion of Shakespeare’s pre-eminent merit only proves, as in
the case of Gullio, that the University wits decried the excellences
of Shakespeare. In him they saw no scholar.
The point is that Kempe recognises Shakespeare as both actor and author.
All this “is quite consistent with the theory that Shake-speare
was a pseudonym,” {147a}
says Mr. Greenwood. Of course it is, but it is not consistent
with the theory that Shakespeare was an uneducated, bookless rustic,
for, in that case, his mask would have fallen off in a day, in an hour.
Of course the Cambridge author only proves, if you will, that he
thought that Kempe thought, that his fellow player was the
author. But we have better evidence of what the actors thought
than in the Cambridge play.
In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia credits Shakespeare
with Venus and Adonis, with privately circulated sonnets,
and with a number of the comedies and tragedies. How the allusions
“negative the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a nom de plume
is not apparent,” says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his
method. I repeat that he wanders from the point, which is, here,
that the only William Shak(&c.) known to us at the time, in London,
was credited with the plays and poems on all sides, which proves that
no incompatibility between the man and the works was recognised.
Then Weaver (1599) alludes to him as author of Venus,
Lucrece, Romeo, Richard, “more whose
names I know not.” Davies (1610) calls him “our English
Terence” (the famous comedian), and mentions him as having “played
some Kingly parts in sport.” Freeman (1614) credits him
with Venus and Lucrece. “Besides in plays
thy wit winds like Meander.” I repeat Heywood’s evidence.
Thomas Heywood, author of that remarkable domestic play, A Woman
Killed with Kindness, was, from the old days of Henslowe,
in the fifteen-nineties, a playwright and an actor; he survived into
the reign of Charles I. Writing on the familiar names of the poets,
“Jack Fletcher,” “Frank Beaumont,” “Kit
Marlowe,” “Tom Nash,” he says,
“Mellifluous Shakespeare whose enchanting quill
Commanded mirth and passion, was but ‘Will.’”
Does Heywood not identify the actor with the author? No quibbles
serve against the evidence.
We need not pursue the allusions later than Shakespeare’s death,
or invoke, at present, Ben Jonson’s panegyric of 1623. As
to Davies, his dull and obscure epigram is addressed “To our English
Terence, Mr. Will Shake-speare.” He accosts Shakespeare
as “Good Will.” He remarks that, “as some say,”
if Will “had not played some Kingly parts in sport,” he
had been “a companion for a King,” and “been
a King among the meaner sort.” Nobody, now, can see the
allusion and the joke. Shakespeare’s company, in 1604, acted
a play on the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600. King James suppressed
the play after the second night, as, of course, he was brought on the
stage throughout the action: and in very droll and dreadful situations.
Did Will take the King’s part, and annoy gentle King Jamie, “as
some say”? Nobody knows. But Mr. Greenwood, to disable
Davies’s recognition of Mr. Will as a playwright, “Our English
Terence,” quotes, from Florio’s Montaigne, a
silly old piece of Roman literary gossip, Terence’s plays were
written by Scipio and Laelius. In fact, Terence alludes in his
prologue to the Adelphi, to a spiteful report that he
was aided by great persons. The prologue may be the source of
the fable - that does not matter. Davies might get the fable in
Montaigne, and, knowing that some Great One wrote Will’s plays,
might therefore, in irony, address him as “Our English Terence.”
This is a pretty free conjecture! In Roman comedy he had only
two names known to him to choose from; he took Terence, not Plautus.
But if Davies was in the great Secret, a world of others must have shared
le Secret de Polichinelle. Yet none hints at it, and only
a very weak cause could catch at so tiny a straw as the off-chance that
Davies knew, and used “Terence” as a gibe.
{149a}
The allusions, even the few selected, cannot prove that the actor wrote
the plays, but do prove that he was believed to have done so, and therefore
that he was not so ignorant and bookless as to demonstrate that he was
incapable of the poetry and the knowledge displayed in his works.
Mr. Greenwood himself observes that a Baconian critic goes too far when
he makes Will incapable of writing. Such a Will could deceive
no mortal. {150a}
But does Mr. Greenwood, who finds in the Author of the plays “much
learning, and remarkable classical attainments,” or “a wide
familiarity with the classics,” {150b}
suppose that his absolutely bookless Will could have persuaded his intimates
that he was the author of plays exhibiting “a wide familiarity
with the classics,” or “remarkable classical attainments.”
The thing is wholly impossible.
I do not remember that a single contemporary allusion to Shakespeare
speaks of him as “learned,” erudite, scholarly, and so forth.
The epithets for him are “sweet,” “gentle,”
“honeyed,” “sugared,” “honey-tongued”
- this is the convention. The tradition followed by Milton, who
was eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote L’Allegro
just after leaving Cambridge, makes Shakespeare “sweetest
Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,” with “native wood-notes
wild”; and gives to Jonson “the learned sock.”
Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years before the death of Shakespeare,
namely, in 1608. Like Milton he was a Cambridge man. The
First Folio of Shakespeare’s works appeared when each of these
two bookish men was aged fifteen. It would necessarily revive
interest in Shakespeare, now first known as far as about half of his
plays went: he would be discussed among lovers of literature at Cambridge.
Mr. Greenwood quotes Fuller’s remark that Shakespeare’s
“learning was very little,” that, if alive, he would confess
himself “to be never any scholar.” {151a}
I cannot grant that Fuller is dividing the persons of actor and author.
Men of Shakespeare’s generation, such as Jonson, did not think
him learned; nor did men of the next generation. If Mr. Collins’s
view be correct, the men of Shakespeare’s and of Milton’s
generations were too ignorant to perceive that Shakespeare was deeply
learned in the literature of Rome, and in the literature of Greece.
Every one was too ignorant, till Mr. Collins came.
CHAPTER VIII: “THE SILENCE OF PHILIP HENSLOWE”
When Shakespeare is mentioned as an author by contemporary writers,
the Baconian stratagem, we have seen, is to cry, “Ah, but you
cannot prove the author mentioned to be the actor.” We have
seen that Meres (1598) speaks of Shakespeare as the leading tragic and
comic poet (“Poor poet-ape that would be thought our chief,”
quoth Jonson), as author of Venus and Adonis, and as a
sonneteer. “All this does nothing whatever to support the
idea that the Stratford player was the author of the plays and poems
alluded to,” says Mr. Greenwood, playing that card again. {155a}
The allusions, I repeat, do prove that Shak(&c.), the actor,
was believed to be the author, till any other noted William Shak(&c.)
is found to have been conspicuously before the town. “There
is nothing at all to prove that Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any
personal knowledge of Shakespeare.” There is nothing at
all to prove that Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any personal knowledge
of nine-tenths of the English authors, famous or forgotten, whom he
mentions. “On the question - who was Shakespeare? - he throws
no light.” He “throws no light on the question”
“who was?” any of the poets mentioned by him, except one,
quite forgotten, whose College he names . . . To myself this “sad
repeated air,” - “critics who praise Shakespeare do not
say who Shakespeare was,” - would appear to be, not an
argument, but a subterfuge: though Mr. Greenwood honestly believes it
to be an argument, - otherwise he would not use it: much less would
he repeat it with frequent iteration. The more a man was notorious,
as was Will Shakspere the actor, the less the need for any critic to
tell his public “who Shakespeare was.”
As Mr. Greenwood tries to disable the evidence when Shakespeare is alluded
to as an author, so he tries to better his case when, in the account-book
of Philip Henslowe, an owner of theatres, money-lender, pawn-broker,
purchaser of plays from authors, and so forth, Shakespeare is not
mentioned at all. Here is a mystery which, properly handled,
may advance the great cause. Henslowe has notes of loans of money
to several actors, some of them of Shakespeare’s company, “The
Lord Chamberlain’s.” There is no such note of a loan
to Shakespeare. Does this prove that he was not an actor?
If so, Burbage was not an actor; Henslowe never names him.
There are notes of payments of money to Henslowe after each performance
of any play in one of his theatres. In these notes the name
of Shakespeare is never once mentioned as the author of any play.
How weird! But in these notes the names of the authors
of the plays acted are never mentioned. Does this suggest that
Bacon wrote all these plays?
On the other hand, there are frequent mentions of advances of money
to authors who were working at plays for Henslowe, singly, or in pairs,
threes, fours, or fives. We find Drayton, Dekker, Chapman, and
nine authors now forgotten by all but antiquarians. We have also
Ben Jonson (1597), Marston, Munday, Middleton, Webster, and others,
authors in Henslowe’s pay. But the same of Shakespeare
never appears. Mysterious! The other men’s names,
writes Dr. Furness, occur “because they were all writers for Henslowe’s
theatre, but we must wait at all events for the discovery of some other
similar record, before we can produce corresponding memoranda regarding
Shaksper” (sic) “and his productions.”
{157a}
The natural mind of the ordinary man explains all by saying, “Henslowe
records no loans of money to Shakspere the actor, because he lent him
no money. He records no payments for plays to Shakespeare the
author-actor, because to Henslowe the actor sold no plays.”
That is the whole explanation of the Silence of Philip Henslowe.
If Shakspere did sell a play to Henslowe, why should that financier
omit the fact from his accounts? Suppose that the actor was illiterate
as Baconians fervently believe, and sold Bacon’s plays, what prevented
him from selling a play of Bacon’s (under his own name, as usual)
to Henslowe? To obtain a Baconian reply you must wander into conjecture,
and imagine that Bacon forbade the transaction. Then why did
he forbid it? Because he could get a better price from Shakspere’s
company? The same cause would produce the same effect on Shakspere
himself; whether he were the author, or were Bacon’s, or any man’s
go-between. On any score but that of money, why was Henslowe good
enough for Ben Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and Webster, and
not good enough for Bacon, who did not appear in the matter at all,
but was represented in it by the actor, Will? As a gentleman and
a man of the Court, Bacon would be as much discredited if he were known
to sell (for £6 on an average) his noble works to the Lord Chamberlain’s
Company, as if he sold them to Henslowe.
I know not whether the great lawyer, courtier, scholar, and philosopher
is supposed by Baconians to have given Will Shakspere a commission on
his sales of plays; or to have let him keep the whole sum in each case.
I know not whether the players paid Shakspere a sum down for his (or
Bacon’s) plays, or whether Will received a double share, or other,
or any share of the profits on them, as Henslowe did when he let a house
to the players. Nobody knows any of these things.
“If Shakspere the player had been a dramatist, surely Henslowe
would have employed him also, like the others, in that behalf.”
{159a}
Henslowe would, if he could have got the “copy” cheap enough.
Was any one of “the others,” the playwrights, a player,
holding a share in his company? If not, the fact makes an essential
difference, for Shakspere was a shareholder. Collier, in
his preface to Henslowe’s so-called “Diary,” mentions
a playwright who was bound to scribble for Henslowe only (Henry Porter),
and another, Chettle, who was bound to write only for the company protected
by the Earl of Nottingham. {159b}
Modern publishers and managers sometimes make the same terms with novelists
and playwrights.
It appears to me that Shakspere’s company would be likely, as
his plays were very popular, to make the same sort of agreement with
him, and to give him such terms as he would be glad to accept, - whether
the wares were his own - or Bacon’s. He was a keen man of
business. In such a case, he would not write for Henslowe’s
pittance. He had a better market. The plays, whether written
by himself, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, were at his disposal,
and he did not dispose of them to Henslowe, wherefore Henslowe cannot
mention him in his accounts. That is all.
Quoting an American Judge (Dr. Stotsenburg, apparently), Mr. Greenwood
cites the circumstance that, in two volumes of Alleyn’s papers
“there is not one mention of such a poet as William Shaksper in
his list of actors, poets, and theatrical comrades.” {160a}
If this means that Shakspere is not mentioned by Alleyn among actors,
are we to infer that William was not an actor? Even Baconians
insist that he was an actor. “How strange, how more than
strange,” cries Mr. Greenwood, “that Henslowe should make
no mention in all this long diary, embracing all the time from 1591
to 1609, of the actor-author . . . No matter. Credo quia impossibile!”
{160b}
Credo what? and what is impossible? Henslowe’s
volume is no Diary; he does not tell a single anecdote of any description;
he merely enters loans, gains, payments. Does Henslowe mention,
say, Ben Jonson, when he is not doing business with Ben?
Does he mention any actor or author except in connection with money
matters? Then, if he did no business with Shakspere the actor,
in borrowing or lending, and did no business with Shakespeare the author,
in borrowing, lending, buying or selling, “How strange, how more
than strange” it would be if Henslowe did mention Shakespeare!
He was not keeping a journal of literary and dramatic jottings.
He was keeping an account of his expenses and receipts. He never
names Richard Burbage any more than he mentions Shakespeare.
Mr. Greenwood again expresses his views about this dark suspicious mystery,
the absence of Shakespeare or Shakspere (or Shak, as you like it), from
Henslowe’s accounts, if Shak(&c.) wrote plays. But the
mystery, if mystery there be, is just as obscure if the actor were the
channel through which Bacon’s plays reached the stage, for the
pretended author of these masterpieces. Shak - was not the man
to do all the troking, bargaining, lying, going here and there, and
making himself a motley to the view for £0, 0s, 0d.
If he were a sham, a figure-head, a liar, a fetcher-and-carrier of manuscripts,
he would be paid for it. But he did not deal with Henslowe
in his bargainings, and that is why Henslowe does not mention
him. Mr. Greenwood, in one place, {161a}
agrees, so far, with me. “Why did Henslowe not mention Shakespeare
as the writer of other plays” (than Titus Andronicus and
Henry VI)? “I think the answer is simple enough.”
(So do I.) “Neither Shakspere nor ‘Shakespeare’
ever wrote for Henslowe!” The obvious is perceived at last;
and the reason given is “that he was above Henslowe’s ‘skyline,’”
“he” being the Author. We only differ as to why
the author was above Henslowe’s “sky-line.”
I say, because good Will had a better market, that of his Company.
I understand Mr. Greenwood to think, - because the Great Unknown was
too great a man to deal with Henslowe. If to write for the stage
were discreditable, to deal (unknown) with Henslowe was no more disgraceful
than to deal with “a cry of players”; and as (unknown) Will
did the bargaining, the Great Unknown was as safe with Will in one case
as in the other. If Will did not receive anything for the plays
from his own company (who firmly believed in his authorship), they must
have said, “Will! dost thou serve the Muses and thy obliged fellows
for naught? Dost thou give us two popular plays yearly, - gratis?”
Do you not see that, in the interests of the Great Secret itself, Will
had to take the pay for the plays (pretended his) from somebody.
Will Shakspere making his dear fellows and friends a present of two
masterpieces yearly was too incredible. So I suppose he did have
royalties on the receipts, or otherwise got his money; and, as he certainly
did not get them from Henslowe, Henslowe had no conceivable reason for
entering Will’s name in his accounts.
Such are the reflections of a plain man, but to an imaginative soul
there seems to be a brooding mist, with a heart of fire, which half
conceals and half reveals the darkened chamber wherein abides “The
Silence of Philip Henslowe.” “The Silence of Philip
Henslowe,” Mr. Greenwood writes, “is a very remarkable phenomenon
. . . ” It is a phenomenon precisely as remarkable as the
absence of Mr. Greenwood’s name from the accounts of a boot-maker
with whom he has never had any dealings.
“If, however, there was a man in high position, ‘a concealed
poet,’” who “took the works of others and rewrote
and transformed them, besides bringing out original plays of his own
. . . then it is natural enough that his name should not appear among
those [of the] for the most part impecunious dramatists to whom Henslowe
paid money for playwriting.” {163a}
Nothing can be more natural, and, in fact, the name of Bacon, or Southampton,
or James VI, or Sir John Ramsay, or Sir Walter Raleigh, or Sir Fulke
Greville, or any other “man in high position,” does not
appear in Henslowe’s accounts. Nor does the name of
William Shak(&c.). But why should it not appear if Will sold
either his own plays, or those of the noble friend to whom he lent his
name and personality - to Henslowe? Why not?
Then consider the figure, to my mind impossible, of the great “concealed
poet” “of high position,” who can “bring out
original plays of his own,” and yet “takes the works of
others,” say of “sporting Kyd,” or of Dekker and Chettle,
and such poor devils, - takes them as a Yankee pirate-publisher
takes my rhymes, - and “rewrites and transforms them.”
Bacon (or Bungay) cannot “take” them without permission
of their legal owners, - Shakspere’s or any other company; - of
any one, in short, who, as Ben Jonson says, “buys up reversions
of old plays.” How is he to manage these shabby dealings?
Apparently he employs Will Shakspere, spells his own “nom de
plume” “Shakespeare,” and has his rewritings
and transformations of the destitute author’s work acted by Will’s
company. What a situation for Bacon, or Sir Fulke Greville, or
James VI, or any “man in high position” whom fancy can suggest!
The plays by the original authors, whoever they were, could only be
obtained by the “concealed poet” and “man in high
position” from the legal owners, Shakspere’s company, usually.
The concealed poet had to negotiate with the owners, and Bacon (or whoever
he was) employed that scamp Will Shakspere, first, I think, to extract
the plays from the owners, and then to pretend that he himself, even
Will, had “rewritten and transformed them.”
What an associate was our Will for the concealed poet; how certain it
was that Will would blackmail the “man in high position”!
“Doubtless” he did: we find Bacon arrested for debt, more
than once, while Will buys New Place, in Stratford, with the money extorted
from the concealed poet of high position. {164a}
Bacon did associate with that serpent Phillips, a reptile of Walsingham,
who forged a postscript to Mary Stuart’s letter to Babington.
But now, if not Bacon, then some other concealed poet of high position,
with a mysterious passion for rewriting and transforming plays by sad,
needy authors, is in close contact with Will Shakspere, the Warwickshire
poacher and ignorant butcher’s boy, country schoolmaster, draper’s
apprentice, enfin, tout le tremblement.
“How strange, how more than strange!”
The sum of the matter seems to me to be that from as early as March
3, 1591, we find Henslowe receiving small sums of money for the performances
of many plays. He was paid as owner or lessee of the House used
by this or that company. On March 3, 1591, the play acted by “Lord
Strange’s (Derby’s) men” was Henry VI.
Several other plays with names familiar in Shakespeare’s Works,
such as Titus Andronicus, all the three parts of Henry
VI, King Leare (April 6, 1593), Henry V (May 14, 1592),
The Taming of a Shrew (June 11, 1594), and Hamlet,
paid toll to Henslowe. He “received” so much,
on each occasion, when they were acted in a theatre of his. But
he never records his purchase of these plays; and it is not generally
believed that Shakespeare was the author of all these plays, in the
form which they bore in 1591-4: though there is much difference of opinion.
There is one rather interesting case. On August 25, 1594, Henslowe
enters “ne” (that is, “a new play”)
“Received at the Venesyon Comodey, eighteen pence.”
That was his share of the receipts. The Lord Chamberlain’s
Company, that of Shakespeare, was playing in Henslowe’s theatre
at Newington Butts. If the “Venesyon Comodey” (Venetian
Comedy) were The Merchant of Venice, this is the first
mention of it. But nobody knows what Henslowe meant by “the
Venesyon Comodey.” He does not mention the author’s
name, because, in this part of his accounts he never does mention the
author or authors. He only names them when he buys from, or lends
to, or has other money dealings with the authors. He had none
with Shakespeare, hence the Silence of Philip Henslowe.
CHAPTER IX: THE LATER LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE - HIS MONUMENT AND PORTRAITS
In the chapter on the Preoccupations of Bacon the reader may find help
in making up his mind as to whether Bacon, with his many and onerous
duties and occupations, his scientific studies, and his absorbing scientific
preoccupation, is a probable author of the Shakespearean plays.
Mr. Greenwood finds the young Shakspere impossible - because of his
ignorance - which made him such a really good pseudo-author, and such
a successful mask for Bacon, or Bacon’s unknown equivalent.
The Shakspere of later life, the well-to-do Shakspere, the purchaser
of the right to bear arms; so bad at paying one debt at least; so eager
a creditor; a would-be encloser of a common; a man totally bookless,
is, to Mr. Greenwood’s mind, an impossible author of the later
plays.
Here, first, are moral objections on the ground of character as revealed
in some legal documents concerning business. Now, I am very ready
to confess that William’s dealings with his debtors, and with
one creditor, are wholly unlike what I should expect from the author
of the plays. Moreover, the conduct of Shelley in regard to his
wife was, in my opinion, very mean and cruel, and the last thing that
we could have expected from one who, in verse, was such a tender philanthropist,
and in life was - women apart - the best-hearted of men. The conduct
of Robert Burns, alas, too often disappoints the lover of his Cottar’s
Saturday Night and other moral pieces. He was an inconsistent
walker.
I sincerely wish that Shakespeare had been less hard in money matters,
just as I wish that in financial matters Scott had been more like himself,
that he had not done the last things that we should have expected him
to do. As a member of the Scottish Bar it was inconsistent with
his honour to be the secret proprietor of a publishing and a printing
business. This is the unexplained moral paradox in the career
of a man of chivalrous honour and strict probity: but the fault did
not prevent Scott from writing his novels and poems. Why, then,
should the few bare records of Shakspere’s monetary transactions
make his authorship impossible? The objection seems weakly
sentimental.
Macaulay scolds Scott as fiercely as Mr. Greenwood scolds Shakspere,
- for the more part, ignorantly and unjustly. Still, there is
matter to cause surprise and regret. Both Scott and Shakspere
are accused of writing for gain, and of spending money on lands and
houses with the desire to found families. But in the mysterious
mixture of each human personality, any sober soul who reflects on his
own sins and failings will not think other men’s failings incompatible
with intellectual excellence. Bacon’s own conduct in money
matters was that of a man equally grasping and extravagant. Ben
Jonson thus describes Shakespeare as a social character: “He was
indeed honest, and of an open and free nature . . . I loved the man
and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.”
Perhaps Ben never owed money to Shakspere and refused to pay!
We must not judge a man’s whole intellectual character, and declare
him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers about
matters of business. Apparently Shakspere helped that Elizabethan
Mr. Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which
the ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering, - pursued by the distraint
of one of the friendly family of Quiney - Adrian Quiney. They
were neighbours and made a common dunghill in Henley Street. {171a}
I do not, like Mr. Greenwood, see anything “at all out of the
way” in the circumstance “that a man should be writing Hamlet,
and at the same time bringing actions for petty sums lent on loan
at some unspecified interest.” {171b}
Nor do I see anything at all out of the way in Bacon’s prosecution
of his friend and benefactor, Essex (1601), while Bacon was writing
Hamlet. Indeed, Shakspere’s case is the less “out
of the way” of the two. He wanted his loan to be repaid,
and told his lawyer to bring an action. Bacon wanted to keep his
head (of inestimable value) on his shoulders; or to keep his body out
of the Tower; or he merely, as he declares, wanted to do his duty as
a lawyer of the Crown. In any case, Bacon was in a tragic position
almost unexampled; and was at once overwhelmed by work, and, one must
suppose, by acute distress of mind, in the case of Essex. He must
have felt this the more keenly, if, as some Baconians vow, he wrote
the Sonnets to Essex. Whether he were writing his Hamlet
when engaged in Essex’s case (1601), or any other of his dramatic
masterpieces, even this astonishing man must have been sorely bestead
to combine so many branches of business.
Thus I would reply to Mr. Greenwood’s amazement that Shakspere,
a hard creditor, and so forth, should none the less have been able to
write his plays. But if it is meant that a few business transactions
must have absorbed the whole consciousness of Shakespeare, and left
him neither time nor inclination for poetry, consider the scientific
preoccupation of Bacon, his parliamentary duties, his ceaseless activity
as “one of the legal body-guard of the Queen” at a time
when he had often to be examining persons accused of conspiracy, - and
do not forget his long and poignant anxiety about Essex, his constant
efforts to reconcile him with Elizabeth, and to advocate his cause without
losing her favour; and, finally, the anguish of prosecuting his friend,
and of knowing how hardly the world judged his own conduct. Follow
him into his relations with James I; his eager pursuit of favour, the
multiplicity of his affairs, his pecuniary distresses, and the profound
study and severe labour entailed by the preparation for and the composition
of The Advancement of Learning (1603-5). He must be a stout-hearted
Baconian who can believe that, between 1599 and 1605, Bacon was writing
Hamlet, and other masterpieces of tragedy or comedy.
But all is possible to genius. What Mr. Greenwood’s Great
Unknown was doing at this period, “neither does he know, nor do
I know, but he only.” He, no doubt, had abundance of leisure.
At last Shakspere died (1616), and had not the mead of one melodious
tear, as far as we know, from the London wits, in the shape of obituary
verses. This fills Mr. Greenwood with amazement. “Was
it because ‘the friends of the Muses’ were for the most
part aware that Shakespeare had not died with Shakspere?”
Did Jonson perchance think that his idea might be realised when he wrote,
“What a sight it were,
To see thee in our waters yet appear”?
and so on. Did Jonson expect and hope to see the genuine “Shakespeare”
return to the stage, seven years after the death of Shakspere the actor,
the Swan of Avon? As Jonson was fairly sane, we can no more suspect
him of having hoped for this miracle than believe that most of the poets
knew the actor not to be the author. Moreover Jonson, while desiring
that Shakespeare might “shine forth” again and cheer the
drooping stage, added,
“Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like Night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light,”
that is - the Folio of 1623. Ben did not weave the amazing tissue
of involved and contradictory falsities attributed to him by Baconians.
Beaumont died in the same year as Shakspere, who died in the depths
of the country, weary of London. Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary
poems dropped on the grave of the famous Beaumont? Did Fletcher,
did Jonson, produce one melodious tear for the loss of their friend;
in Fletcher’s case his constant partner? No? Were
the poets, then, aware that Beaumont was a humbug, whose poems and plays
were written by Bacon? {174a}
I am not to discuss Shakespeare’s Will, the “second-best
bed,” and so forth. But as Shakespeare’s Will says
not a word about his books, it is decided by Mr. Greenwood that he had
no books. Mr. Greenwood is a lawyer; so was my late friend Mr.
Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton, who remarks that Shakespeare
bequeathed “all the rest of my goods, chattels, leases, &c.,
to my son-in-law, John Hall, gent.” (He really was a
“gent.” with authentic coat-armour.)
It is with Mr. Elton’s opinion, not with my ignorance, that Mr.
Greenwood must argue in proof of the view that “goods” are
necessarily exclusive of books, for Mr. Elton takes it as a quite natural
fact that Shakespeare’s books passed, with his other goods, to
Mr. Hall, and thence to a Mr. Nash, to whom Mr. Hall left “my
study of books” {175a}
(library). I only give this as a lawyer’s opinion.
There is in the Bodleian an Aldine Ovid, “with Shakespeare’s”
signature (merely Wm. She.), and a note, “This little volume of
Ovid was given to me by W. Hall, who sayd it was once Will Shakespeare’s.”
I do not know that the signature (like that on Florio’s Montaigne,
in the British Museum) has been detected as a forgery; nor do I
know that Shakespeare’s not specially mentioning his books proves
that he had none. Lawyers appear to differ as to this inference:
both Mr. Elton and Mr. Greenwood seem equally confident. {175b}
But if it were perfectly natural that the actor, Shakspere, should have
no books, then he certainly made no effort, by the local colour of owning
a few volumes, to persuade mankind that he was the author.
Yet they believed that he was - really there is no wriggling out of
it. As regards any of his own MSS. which Shakespeare may have
had (one would expect them to be at his theatre), and their monetary
value, if they were not, as usual, the property of his company, and
of him as a member thereof, we can discuss that question in the section
headed “The First Folio.”
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.
Next, glance at the figure opposite. This is a reproduction of
“the earliest representation of the Bust” (and monument)
in Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656).
Compare the two objects, point by point, from the potato on top with
holes in it, of Dugdale, which is meant for a skull, through all the
details, - bust and all. Does Dugdale’s print, whether engraved
by Hollar or not, represent a Jacobean work? Look at the two ludicrous
children, their legs dangling in air; at the lions’ heads above
the capitals of the pillars; at the lettering of the two visible words
of the inscription, and at the gloomy hypochondriac or lunatic, clasping
a cushion to his abdomen. That hideous design was not executed
by an artist who “had his eye on the object,” if the object
were a Jacobean monument: while the actual monument was fashioned in
no period of art but the Jacobean. From Digges’ rhymes in
the Folio of 1623, we know that Shakespeare already had his “Stratford
monument.” The existing object is what he had; the
monument in Dugdale is what, I hope, no architect of 1616-23 could have
imagined or designed.
Dugdale’s engraving is not a correct copy of any genuine Jacobean
work of art. Is Dugdale accurate in his reproductions of other
monuments in Stratford Church? To satisfy himself on this point,
Sir George Trevelyan, as he wrote to me (June 13, 1912), “made
a sketch of the Carew Renaissance monument in Stratford Church, and
found that the discrepancies between the original tomb and the representation
in Dugdale’s Warwickshire are far and away greater than
in the monument to William Shakespeare.”
Mr. Greenwood, {179a}
while justly observing that “the little sitting figures . . .
are placed as no monumental sculptor would place them,” “on
the whole sees no reason at all why we should doubt the substantial
accuracy of Dugdale’s figure . . . It is impossible to suppose
that Hollar would have drawn and that Dugdale would have published a
mere travesty of the Stratford Monument.”
I do not know who drew the design, but a travesty of Jacobean work it
is in every detail of the monument. A travesty is what Dugdale
gives as a representation of the Carew monument. Mr. Greenwood,
elsewhere, repeating his criticism of the impossible figures of children,
says: “This is certainly mere matter of detail, and, in the absence
of other evidence, would give us no warrant for doubting the substantial
accuracy of Dugdale’s presentment of the ‘Shakespeare’
bust.” {180a}
Why are we to believe that Dugdale’s artist was merely fantastic
in his design of the children (and also remote from Jacobean taste in
every detail), and yet to credit him with “substantial accuracy”
in his half-length of a gloomy creature clutching a cushion to his stomach?
With his inaccuracies as to the Carew monument, why are we to accept
him as accurate in his representation of the bust? Moreover, other
evidence is not wanting. It is positively certain that the monument
existing in 1748, was then known as “the original monument,”
and that no other monument was put in its place, at that date or later.
Now Mrs. Stopes {180b}
argues that in 1748 the monument was “entirely reconstructed,”
and so must have become no longer what Dugdale’s man drew, but
what we see to-day. It is positively certain that her opinion
is erroneous.
If ever what we see to-day was substituted for anything like what Dugdale’s
man drew, the date of the substitution is unknown.
Mrs. Stopes herself discovered the documents which disprove her theory.
They were known to Halliwell-Phillipps, who quotes an unnamed “contemporary
account.” {181a}
This account Mrs. Stopes, with her tireless industry, found in the Wheler
manuscripts, among papers of the Rev. Joseph Greene, in 1746 Head Master
of the Grammar School. In one paper of September 1740 “the
original monument” is said to be “much impaired and decayed.”
There was a scheme for making “a new monument” in Westminster
Abbey. That, I venture to think, would have been
in Hanoverian, not in Jacobean taste and style. But there was
no money for a new monument. Mrs. Stopes also found a paper of
November 20, 1748, showing that in September 1746, Mr. Ward (grandfather
of Mrs. Siddons) was at Stratford with “a cry of players.”
He devoted the proceeds of a performance of Othello to the reparation
of the then existing monument. The amount was twelve pounds ten
shillings. The affair dragged on, one of the Church-wardens, a
blacksmith, held the £12, 10s., and was troublesome.
The document of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be signed, but was
not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly concerned in the
matter. It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or painter,
is to “take care, according to his ability, that the monument
shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected.”
This appears to have been the idea of Mr. Greene. Another form
of words was later adopted, directing Mr. Hall, the painter, “to
repair and beautify, or to have the direction of repairing and beautifying,
the original monument of Shakespeare the poet.” Mrs.
Stopes infers, justly in my opinion, that Hall “would fill up
the gaps, restore what was amissing as he thought it ought to be, and
finally repaint it according to the original colours, traces of which
he might still be able to see.” In his History and Antiquities
of Stratford-on-Avon, {182a}
Mr. Wheler tells us that this was what Hall did. “In
the year 1748 the monument was carefully repaired, and the original
colours of the bust, &c., as much as possible preserved by Mr. John
Hall, limner, of Stratford.”
It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the painting
is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 “painted in
white,” to please Malone. It was repainted in 1861.
Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told to do,
and what, according to Wheler, he did. She writes: “It would
only be giving good value for his money” (£12, 10s.)
“to his churchwardens if Hall added (sic) a cloak,
a pen, and manuscript.” He “could not help changing”
the face, and so on.
Now it was physically impossible to add a cloak, a pen, and manuscript
to such a stone bust as Dugdale’s man shows; to take away the
cushion pressed to the stomach, and to alter the head. Mr. Hall,
if he was to give us the present bust, had to make an entirely new bust,
and, to give us the present monument in place of that shown in Dugdale’s
print, had to construct an entirely new monument. Now Hall was
a painter, not (like Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor.
Pour tout potage he had but £12, 10s. He could
not do, and he did not do these things! he did not destroy “the
original monument” and make a new monument in Jacobean style.
He was straitly ordered to “repair and beautify the original monument”;
he did repair it, and repainted the colours. That is all.
I do not quote what Halliwell-Phillipps tells us {183a}
about the repairing of the forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and
the pen; work which, he says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of
Oxford in 1790. He gives no authority, and Baconians may say that
he was hoaxed, or “lied with circumstance.”
Mr. Greenwood {183b}
quotes Halliwell-Phillipps’s Works of Shakespeare (1853),
in which he says that the design in Dugdale’s book “is
evidently too inaccurate to be of any authority; the probability being
that it was not taken from the monument itself.” Indeed
the designer is so inaccurate that he gives the first word of the Latin
inscription as “Judicyo,” just as Oudry blunders in the
Latin inscription of a portrait of Mary Stuart which he copied badly.
Mr. Greenwood proceeds: “In his Outlines Halliwell simply
ignores Dugdale. His engraving was doubtless too inconvenient
to be brought to public notice!” Here Halliwell is accused
of suppressing the truth; if he invented his minute details about the
repeated reparation of the writing hand, - not represented in Dugdale’s
design, - he also lied with circumstance. But he certainly quoted
a genuine “contemporary account” of the orders for repairing
and beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that he
also had records for what he says about reparations of the hand and
pen. He speaks, too, of substitutions for decayed alabaster parts
of the monument, though not in his Outlines; and I observe that,
in Mrs. Stopes’s papers, there is record of a meeting on December
20, 1748, at which mention was made of “the materials” which
Hall was to use for repairs.
To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both monument and
bust speaks so loudly for their accepted date (1616-23) and against
the Georgian date of 1748, that I need no other evidence; nor do I suppose
that any one familiar with the monumental style of 1590-1620 can be
of a different opinion. In the same way I do not expect any artist
or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe’s Shakespeare
(1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies
of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made à plaisir.
In Pope’s edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with some approach
to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of the bust presents a top-heavy
and sculpturally impossible face borrowed from “the Chandos portrait,”
which, in my opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait
of Shakespeare. None of them, I conceive, was painted from the
life.
The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust, copied
in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not waste words
over this speculation. Mr. Greenwood writes that “if I should
be told that Dugdale’s effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring
an exceptionally bad harvest, ‘I should not feel it to be strange!’
Neither should I feel it at all strange if I were told that it was the
presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who had fallen from
high estate and recognised that all things are but vanity.”
“I should not feel it to be strange” if a Baconian
told me that the effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the
monument of the dead Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration
was made, I were asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood’s words, “Was
Dugdale’s bust thought to bear too much resemblance to one who
was not Shakspere of Stratford? Or was it thought that the presence
of a woolsack” (the cushion) “might be taken as indicating
that Shakspere of Stratford was indebted for support to a certain Lord
Chancellor?” {186a}
Such, indeed, are the things that Baconians might readily say: do say,
I believe.
Dugdale’s engraving reproduces the first words of a Latin inscription,
still on the monument:
Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem
Terra tegit, populus mæret, Olympus
habet:
“Earth covers, Olympus” (heaven? or the Muses’
Hill?) “holds him who was a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art,
a Virgil; a Socrates for his Dæmon” (“Genius”).
As for the “Genius,” or dæmon of Socrates, and the
permitted false quantity in making the first syllable of Socrates short;
and the use of Olympus for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient
to consult the learning of Mr. Elton. {186b}
The poet who made such notable false quantities in his plays had no
cause to object to another on his monument. We do not know who
erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph;
but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) “a clayver
man.” The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly
put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare’s
daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall. They exhibit a taste
for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription. Mrs.
Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with
one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. {187a}
It opens like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual
strain of Christian mysticism. Mr. Hall possesses, perhaps arranged
for himself, a few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph.
The famous “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear,”
and so on, on the stone in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust
of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first of “the last lines written,
we are told,” {187b}
“by the author of Hamlet.” Who tells us that
Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel? Is it conceivable
that the authority for Shakespeare’s authorship of the doggerel
is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen’s in 1693, from
a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says, - criticism makes the clerk
twenty years younger. {187c}
For Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William Shakspere
of Stratford.
Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will’s daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her
epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father’s intelligence.
“Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of Him with whom she’s now in bliss.” {187d}
Thirty-three years after Shakespeare’s death he was still thought
“witty” in Stratford. But what could Stratford know?
Milton and Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and
the rest of the generation after Shakespeare. But they did not
know, how should they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine
author of the plays and poems. The secret, perhaps, so widely
spread among “the friends of the Muses” in 1616, was singularly
well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a general rule.
I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which
pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about
his monument and his grave, and asks if he “died with a curse
upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might move his
bones? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!” {188a}
And the authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and
vulgar curse upon his lips?
About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost
after Shakespeare’s death, W. Hall, a Queen’s man, Oxford
(the W. Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare’s
signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford,
and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow
of Queen’s. Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was
the author of the mean and vulgar curse. He adds that there was
a great ossuary or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug
up were piled, “they would load a great number of waggons.”
Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style
intelligible to clerks and sextons, “for the most part a very
ignorant sort of people.”
If Shakespeare did, that accommodation of himself to his
audience was the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. {189a}
Of course there is no evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse:
that he did is only the pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.
Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot enter.
Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio, but Ben,
as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio “a good send-off.”
The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait,
if from any, it was executed. Richard Burbage is known to have
amused himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand on
a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor. If so, he may have
succeeded no better than Mary Stuart’s embroiderer, Oudry, in
his copy of the portrait of her Majesty.
That Ben Jonson was painted by Honthorst and others, while Shakespeare,
as far as we know, was not, has nothing to do with the authorship of
the plays. Ben was a scholar, the darling of both Universities;
constantly employed about the Court in arranging Masques; his learning
and his Scottish blood may have led James I to notice him. Ben,
in his later years, was much in society; fashionable and literary.
He was the father of the literary “tribe of Ben.”
Thus he naturally sat for his portrait. In the same way George
Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of Knox. But as a
scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court as tutor of
his King, and was the “good pen” of the anti-Marian nobles,
Murray, Morton, and the rest. Therefore Buchanan’s portrait
was painted, while of Knox we have only a woodcut, done, apparently,
after his death, from descriptions, for Beza’s Icones.
The Folio engraving may have no better source. Without much minute
research it is hard to find authentic portraits of Mary Stuart, and,
just as in Shakespeare’s case, {190a}
the market, in her own day and in the eighteenth century, was flooded
with “mock-originals,” not even derived (in any case known
to me) from genuine and authentic contemporary works.
One thing is certain about the Stratford bust. Baconians will
believe that Dugdale’s man correctly represented the bust as it
was in his time; and that the actual bust is of 1748, in spite of proofs
of Dugdale’s man’s fantastic inaccuracy; in spite of the
evidence of style; and in spite of documentary evidence that “the
original monument” was not to be destroyed and replaced by the
actual monument, but was merely “repaired and beautified”
(painted afresh) by a local painter.
CHAPTER X: “THE TRADITIONAL SHAKSPERE”
In perusing the copious arguments of the Anti-Shakesperean but Non-Baconian
Mr. Greenwood, I am often tempted, in Socratic phrase, to address him
thus: Best of men, let me implore you, first, to keep in memory these
statements on which you have most eloquently and abundantly insisted,
namely, that society in Stratford was not only not literary, but was
illiterate. Next pardon me for asking you to remember that the
late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century did not resemble our
fortunate age. Some people read Shakespeare’s, Beaumont’s,
and Fletcher’s plays. This exercise is now very rarely practised.
But nobody cared to chronicle literary gossip about the private lives
and personal traits of these and several other Elizabethan and Jacobean
playwrights, in the modern manner. Of Shakespeare (pardon, I mean
Shakspere), the actor, there is one contemporary anecdote, in my poor
opinion a baseless waggery. Of Beaumont there is none. Of
a hand-maid of Fletcher, who drank sack in a tumbler, one anecdote appears
at the end of the seventeenth century, - nothing better. Meanwhile
of Shakspere the “traditions” must be sought either at Stratford
or in connection with the London Stage; and in both cases the traditions
began to be in demand very late.
As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate, any traditions
that survived cannot conceivably have been literary. That is absolutely
certain. Natives at Stratford had, by your own hypothesis, scant
interest in literary anecdote. Fifty years after Shakespeare’s
death, no native was likely to cherish tales of any sprouts of wit (though
it was remembered in 1649, that he was “witty”), or any
“wood-notes wild,” which he may have displayed or chirped
at an early age.
Such things were of no interest to Stratford. If he made a speech
when he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town, the circumstance
might descend from one gaffer to another; he might even be remembered
as “the best of his family,” - the least inefficient.
Given your non-literary and illiterate Stratford, and you can expect
nothing more, and nothing better, than we receive.
Let me illustrate by a modern example. In 1866 I was an undergraduate
of a year’s standing at Balliol College, Oxford, certainly not
an unlettered academy. In that year, the early and the best poems
of a considerable Balliol poet were published: he had “gone down”
some eight years before. Being young and green I eagerly sought
for traditions about Mr. Swinburne. One of his contemporaries,
who took a First in the final Classical Schools, told me that “he
was a smug.” Another, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his friend
(later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers, they proposed that they
should combine to pay but a single subscription to the Cricket Club.
A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a moralist and metaphysician,
merely smiled at my early enthusiasm, - and told me nothing. A
white-haired College servant said that “Mr. Swinburne was a very
quiet gentleman.”
Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty
years after Shakspere’s death, - a Civil War and the Reign of
the Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having intervened, - and
ask us to be surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere’s early
brilliance, a century before, survived at Stratford.
A very humble parallel may follow. Some foolish person went seeking
early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick.
From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and interesting
about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and dogs, hunted,
shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them bowled for Gloucestershire
and Oxford. But about me the inquiring literary snipe only heard
that “Andra was aye the stupid ane o’ the fam’ly.”
Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local club, non sine gloria!
Even that was forgotten.
Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow townsman’s
youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from sixty to a
hundred years after date. It is not in human nature that what
was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by the grandson.
Go to “Thrums” and ask for literary memories of the youth
of Mr. Barrie.
Yet {198a} the
learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of Shakespeare but
the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a fever after drink
taken (where, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton, was remembered,
so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty ignorant places.
Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton and Ben? Remember
that we are dealing with human nature, in a peculiarly malodorous and
densely ignorant bourgade, where, however, the “wit”
of Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649. See
the epithet on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.
You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford (1661-3), who has
heard that the actor was “a natural wit,” and contracted
and died of a fever, after a bout with Drayton and Ben. I can
scarcely believe that these were local traditions. How
could these rustauds have an opinion about “natural wit,”
how could they have known the names of Ben and Drayton?
When you come to Aubrey, publishing in 1680, sixty years after Shakespeare’s
death, you neglect to trace the steps in the descent of his tradition.
As has been stated, Beeston, “the chronicle of the Stage”
(died 1682), gave him the story of the school-mastering; Beeston being
the son of a servitor of Phillips, an actor and friend of Shakespeare,
who died eleven years before that player. The story of the school-mastering
and of Shakespeare “knowing Latin pretty well,” is of no
value to me. I think that he had some knowledge of Latin, as he
must have had, if he were what I fancy him to have been, and if (which
is mere hypothesis) he went for four years to a Latin School.
But the story does not suit you, and you call it “a mere myth,”
which, “of course, will be believed by those who wish to believe
it.” But, most excellent of mortals, will it not, by parity
of reasoning, “of course be disbelieved by those who do not
wish to believe it”?
And do you want to believe it?
To several stage anecdotes of the actor as an excellent instructor of
younger players, you refer slightingly. They do not weigh with
me: still, the Stage would remember Shakspere (or Shakespeare) best
in stage affairs. In reference to a very elliptic statement that,
“in Hamlet Betterton benefited by Shakespeare’s coaching,”
you write, “This is astonishing, seeing that Shakspere had been
in his grave nearly twenty years when Betterton was born. The
explanation is that Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, was, according
to Sir William Davenant, instructed by Shakspere, and Davenant, who
had seen Taylor act, according to Downes, instructed Betterton.
There is a similar story about Betterton playing King Henry VIII.
Betterton was said to have been instructed by Sir William, who was instructed
by Lowen, who was instructed by Shakspere!” {200a}
Why a note of exclamation? Who was Downes, and what were his opportunities
of acquiring information? He “was for many years book-keeper
in the Duke’s Company, first under Davenant in the old house .
. . ” Davenant was notoriously the main link between “the
first and second Temple,” the theatre of Shakespeare whom, as
a boy, he knew, and the Restoration theatre. Devoted to the traditions
of the stage, he collected Shakespearean and other anecdotes; he revived
the theatre, cautiously, during the last years of Puritan rule, and
told his stories to the players of the early Restoration. As his
Book-keeper with the Duke of York’s Company, Downes heard what
Davenant had to tell; he also, for his Roscius Anglicanus,
had notes from Charles Booth, prompter at Drury Lane. On May
28, 1663, Davenant reproduced Hamlet, with young Betterton
as the Prince of Denmark. Davenant, says Charles Booth, “had
seen the part taken by Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, and Taylor
had been instructed by the author, (not Bacon but) “Mr. William
Shakespeare,” and Davenant “taught Mr. Betterton in every
particle of it.” Mr. Elton adds, “We cannot be sure
that Taylor was taught by Shakespeare himself. He is believed
to have been a member of the King’s Company before 1613, and to
have left it for a time before Shakespeare’s death.” {201a}
His name is in the list in the Folio of “the principall Actors
in all these plays,” but I cannot pretend to be certain that he
played in them in Will’s time.
It is Mr. Pepys (December 30, 1668) who chronicles Davenant’s
splendid revival of Henry VIII, in which Betterton, as
the King, was instructed by Sir William Davenant, who had it from old
Mr. Lowen, that had his instruction “from Mr. Shakespear himself.”
Lowin, or Lowen, joined Shakespeare’s Company in 1604, being then
a man of twenty-eight. Burbage was the natural man for Hamlet
and Henry VIII; but it is not unusual for actors to have “understudies.”
The stage is notoriously tenacious of such traditions.
When we come with you to Mr. W. Fulman, about 1688, and the additions
to his notes made about 1690-1708, we are concerned with evidence much
too remote, and, in your own classical style, “all this is just
a little mixed.” {201b}
With what Mr. Dowdall heard in 1693, and Mr. William Hall (1694) heard
from a clerk or sexton, or other illiterate dotard at Stratford, I have
already dealt. I do not habitually believe in what I hear from
“the oldest aunt telling the saddest tale,” - no, not even
if she tells a ghost story, or an anecdote about the presentation by
Queen Mary of her portrait to the ancestor of the Laird, - the portrait
being dated 1768, and representing her Majesty in the bloom of girlhood.
Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on Betterton’s information),
in 1709, about Shakespeare’s schooling; nor for what Dr. Furnivall
said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody said that Sir John Mennes
(Menzies?) said. But I do care for what Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’s
fellow-actors said; and for what his literary contemporaries have left
on record. But this evidence you explain away by ætiological
guesses, absolutely modern, and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with
historical inquiry, not more valuable as history than other explanatory
myths.
What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was men’s
impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their knowledge,
if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often bad reprints,
in quartos, of about half of the plays. Men also had Venus
and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very
poorly, and I do not wonder at it. Of the genius of Shakespeare
England could form no conception, till the publication of the Folio
(1623), not in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in
1664. The engouement about the poet, the search for personal
details, did not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty
years after 1664 - and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate
Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless.
What could have been picked up, by 1680-90, about Bacon at Gorhambury,
or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.
CHAPTER XI: THE FIRST FOLIO
“The First Folio” is the name commonly given to the first
collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume includes
a Preface signed by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical
verses by Ben Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait.
The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for
cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints,
and everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent
of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.
The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the
Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The title-page says that
all the contents are published “according to the true original
copies.” If only MS. copies are meant, this is untrue;
in some cases the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by
MSS. The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote
the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), {207a}
speaking in the name of the two actors who sign it. They say that
Shakespeare’s friends “have collected and published”
the plays, have so published them “that whereas you were abus’d
with divers stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by
the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: even
those” (namely, the pieces previously ill-produced
by pirates) “are now offered to your view cur’d, and perfect
of their limbes; and all the rest” (that is, all
the plays which had not been piratically debased), “absolute in
their numbers, as he conceived them.” So obscure is the
Preface that not all previously published separate plays are
explicitly said to be stolen and deformed, but “divers stolen
copies” are denounced. Mr. Pollard makes the same point
in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, p. 2 (1909).
Now, as a matter of fact, while some of the quarto editions of separate
plays are very bad texts, others are so good that the Folio sometimes
practically reprints them, with some tinkerings, from manuscripts.
Some quartos, like that of Hamlet of 1604, are excellent, and
how they came to be printed from good texts, and whether or not the
texts were given to the press by Shakespeare’s Company, or were
sold, or stolen, is the question. Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds
almost certain, that “we have strong prima facie evidence
that the sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the
Stationers’ Registers was regulated by their lawful owners.”
{208a}
The Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately printed
texts were good, but says that “divers” of them were stolen
and deformed. My view of the meaning of the Preface is not generally
held. Dr. H. H. Furness, in his preface to Much Ado about Nothing
(p. vi), says, “We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare
assert in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the Author’s
manuscripts, and in the same breath denounce the Quartos as stolen and
surreptitious.” I cannot see, I repeat, that the Preface
denounces all the Quartos. It could be truly said that
divers stolen and maimed copies had been foisted on “abused”
purchasers, and really no more is said. Dr. Furness writes,
“When we now find them using as ‘copy’ one of these
very Quartos” (Much Ado about Nothing, 1600), “we
need not impute to them a wilful falsehood if we suppose that in using
what they knew had been printed from the original text, howsoever obtained,
they held it to be the same as the manuscript itself . . . ”
That was their meaning, I think, the Quarto of Much Ado had
not been “maimed” and “deformed,” as
divers other quartos, stolen and surreptitious, had been.
Shakspere, unlike most of the other playwrights, was a member of his
Company. I presume that his play was thus the common good of his
Company and himself. If they sold a copy to the press, the price
would go into their common stock; unless they, in good will, allowed
the author to pocket the money.
It will be observed that I understand the words of the Preface otherwise
than do the distinguished Editors of the Cambridge edition. They
write, “The natural inference to be drawn from this statement”
(in the Preface) “is that all the separate editions of
Shakespeare’s plays were ‘stolen,’ ‘surreptitious’
and imperfect, and that all those published in the Folio were printed
from the author’s own manuscripts” (my
italics). The Editors agree with Dr. Furness, not with Mr. Pollard,
whose learned opinion coincides with my own.
Perhaps it should be said that I reached my own construction of the
sense of this passage in the Preface by the light of nature, before
Mr. Pollard’s valuable book, based on the widest and most minute
research, came into my hands. By the results of that research
he backs his opinion (and mine), that some of the quartos are surreptitious
and bad, while others are good “and were honestly obtained.”
{210a}
The Preface never denies this; never says that all the quartos contain
maimed and disfigured texts. The Preface draws a distinction to
this effect, “even those” (even the stolen and deformed
copies) “are now cured and perfect in their limbs,” - that
is, have been carefully edited, while “all the rest”
are “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.”
This does not allege that all the rest are printed from Shakespeare’s
own holograph copies.
Among the plays spoken of as “all the rest,” namely, those
not hitherto published and not deformed by the fraudulent, are, Tempest,
Two Gentlemen, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors,
As You Like It, All’s Well, Twelfth Night,
Winter’s Tale, Henry VI, iii., Henry
VIII, Coriolanus, Timon, Julius Cæsar,
Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline.
Also Henry VI, i., ii., King John, and Taming
of the Shrew, appeared now in other form than in the hitherto
published Quartos bearing these or closely similar names. We have,
moreover, no previous information as to The Shrew, Timon,
Julius Cæsar, All’s Well, and Henry
VIII. The Preface adds the remarkable statement that, whatever
Shakespeare thought, “he uttered with that easinesse, that wee
have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
It is plain that the many dramas previously unpublished could only be
recovered from manuscripts of one sort or another, because they existed
in no other form. The Preface takes it for granted that the selected
manuscripts contain the plays “absolute in their numbers as he
conceived them.” But the Preface does not commit itself,
I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed
from Shakespeare’s own handwriting. After “as he conceived
them,” it goes on, “Who, as he was a most happy imitator
of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand
went together: and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that
we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
This may be meant to suggest, but does not affirm,
that the actors have “all the rest” of the plays
in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. They may have, or may
have had, some of his manuscripts, and believed that other manuscripts
accessible to them, and used by them, contain his very words.
Whether from cunning or design, or from the Elizabethan inability to
tell a plain tale plainly, the authors or author of the Preface have
everywhere left themselves loopholes and ways of evasion and escape.
It is not possible to pin them down to any plain statement of facts
concerning the sources for the hitherto unpublished plays, “the
rest” of the plays.
These, at least, were from manuscript sources which the actors thought
accurate, and some may have been “fair copies” in Shakespeare’s
own hand. (Scott, as regards his novels, sent his prima cura,
his first writing down, to the press, and his pages are nearly free
from blot or erasion. In one case at least, Shelley’s first
draft of a poem is described as like a marsh of reeds in water, with
wild ducks, but he made very elegant fair copies for the press.)
Let it be supposed that Ben Jonson wrote all this Preface, in accordance
with the wishes and instructions of the two actors who sign it.
He took their word for the almost blotless MSS. which they received
from Shakespeare. He remarks, in his posthumously published Discoveries
(notes, memories, brief essays), “I remember the players have
often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing
(whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line.” And
Ben gives, we shall later see, his habitual reply to this habitual boast.
As to the sources of such plays as had been “maimed and deformed
by injurious impostors,” and are now “offered cur’d
and perfect of their limbs,” “it can be proved to demonstration,”
say the Cambridge Editors, “that several plays in the Folio were
printed from earlier quarto editions” (but the players secured
a retreat on this point), “and that in other cases the quarto
is more correctly printed, or from a better manuscript than the Folio
text, and therefore of higher authority.” Hamlet,
in the Folio of 1623, when it differs from the quarto of 1604, “differs
for the worse in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better
in twenty places.”
Can the wit of man suggest any other explanation than that the editing
of the Folio was carelessly done; out of the best quartos and MSS. in
the theatre for acting purposes, and, - if the players did not lie in
what they “often said,” and if they kept the originals,
- out of some MSS. received from Shakspere? Whether the two players
themselves threw into the press, after some hasty botchings, whatever
materials they had, or whether they employed an Editor, a very wretched
Editor, or Editors, or whether the great Author, Bacon, himself was
his own Editor, the preparation of a text was infamously done.
The two actors, probably, I think, never read through the proof-sheets,
and took the word of the man whom they employed to edit their materials,
for gospel. The editing of the Folio is so exquisitely careless
that twelve printer’s errors in a quarto of 1622, of Richard
III, appear in the Folio of 1623. Again, the Merry
Wives of the Folio, is nearly twice as long as the quarto of 1619,
yet keeps old errors.
How can we explain the reckless retention of errors, and also the large
additions and improvements? Did the true author (Bacon or Bungay)
now edit his work, add much matter, and go wrong forty-seven times where
the quarto was right, and go right twenty times when the quarto was
wrong? Did he, for the Folio of 1623, nearly double The Merry
Wives in extent, and also leave all the errors of the fourth quarto
uncorrected?
In that case how negligent was Bacon of his immortal works! Now
Bacon was a scholar, and this absurd conduct cannot be imputed, I hope,
to him.
Mr. Pollard is much more lenient than his fellow-scholars towards the
Editor or Editors of the Folio. He concludes that “manuscript
copies of the plays were easily procurable.” Sixteen out
of the thirty-six plays existed in quartos. Eight of the sixteen
were not used for the Folio; five were used, “with additions,
corrections, or alterations” (which must have been made from manuscripts).
Three quartos only were reprinted as they stood. The Editors greatly
preferred to use manuscript copies; and showed this, Mr. Pollard thinks,
by placing plays, never before printed, in the most salient parts of
the three sets of dramas in their book. {215a}
They did make an attempt to divide their plays into Acts and Scenes,
whereas the quartos, as a general rule, had been undivided. But
the Editors, I must say, had not the energy to carry out their good
intentions fully - or Bacon or Bungay, if the author, wearied in well-doing.
The work is least ill done in the Comedies, and grows worse and worse
as the Editor, or Bacon, or Bungay becomes intolerably slack.
A great living author, who had a decent regard for his own works, could
never have made or passed this slovenly Folio. Yet Mr. Greenwood
argues that probably Bungay was still alive and active, after Shakspere
was dead and buried. (Mr. Greenwood, of course, does not speak
of Bungay, which I use as short for his Great Unknown.) Thus,
Richard III from 1597 to 1622 appeared in six quartos.
It is immensely improved in the Folio, and so are several other plays.
Who made the improvements, which the Editors could only obtain in manuscripts?
If we say that Shakespeare made them in MS., Mr. Greenwood asks, “What
had he to work upon, since, after selling his plays to his company,
he did not preserve his manuscript?” {216a}
Now I do not know that he did sell his plays to his company. We
are sure that Will got money for them, but we do not know what arrangement
he made with his company. He may have had an author’s rights
in addition to a sum down, as later was customary, and he had his regular
share in the profits. Nor am I possessed of information that “he
did not preserve his manuscript.” How can we know that?
He may have kept his first draft, he may have made a fair copy for himself,
as well as for the players, or may have had one made. He may have
worked on a copy possessed by the players; and the publisher of the
quartos of 1605, 1612, 1622, may not have been allowed to use, or may
not have asked for the latest manuscript revised copy. The Richard
III of the Folio contains, with much new matter, the printer’s
errors of the quarto of 1622. I would account for this by supposing
that the casual Editor had just sense enough to add the new parts in
a revised manuscript to the quarto, and was far too lazy to correct
the printer’s errors in the quarto. But Mr. Greenwood asks
whether “the natural conclusion is not that ‘some person
unknown’ took the Quarto of 1622, revised it, added the new passages,
and thus put it into the form in which it appeared in 1623.”
This natural conclusion means that the author, Bungay, was alive in
1622, and put his additions and improvements of recent date into the
quarto of 1622, but never took the trouble to correct the errors in
the quarto. And so on in other plays similarly treated.
“Is it not a more natural conclusion that ‘Shakespeare’”
(Bungay) “himself revised its publication, and that some part
of this revision, at any rate, was done after 1616 and before 1623.”
{217a}
Mr. Greenwood, after criticising other systems, writes, {217b}
“There is, of course, another hypothesis. It is that Shakespeare”
(meaning the real author) “did not die in 1616,” and here
follows the usual notion that “Shakespeare” was the “nom
de plume” of that transcendent genius, “moving
in Court circles among the highest of his day (as assuredly Shakespeare
must have moved) - who wished to conceal his identity.”
I have not the shadow of assurance that the Author “moved in Court
circles,” though Will would see a good deal when he played at
Court, and in the houses of nobles, before “Eliza and our James.”
I never moved in Court circles: Mr. Greenwood must know them better
than I do, and I have explained (see Love’s Labour’s
Lost, and Shakespeare, Genius, and Society)
how Will picked up his notions of courtly ways.
“Another hypothesis,” the Baconian hypothesis, - “nom
de plume” and all, - Mr. Greenwood thinks “an
extremely reasonable one”: I cannot easily conceive of one more
unreasonable.
“Supposing that there was such an author as I have suggested,
he may well have conceived the idea of publishing a collected edition
of the plays which had been written under the name of Shakespeare, and
being himself busy with other matters, he may have entrusted the business
to some ‘literary man,’ to some ‘good pen,’
who was at the time doing work for him; and why not to the man who wrote
the commendatory verses, the ‘Lines to the Reader’”
(opposite to the engraving), “and, as seems certain, the Preface,
‘to the great variety of Readers’?” {218a}
That man, that “good pen,” was Ben Jonson. On the
“supposing” of Mr. Greenwood, Ben is “doing work for”
the Great Unknown at the time when “the business” following
on the “idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays which
had been written under the name of Shakespeare” occurred to the
illustrious but unknown owner of that “nom de plume.”
In plain words of my own, - the Author may have entrusted “the
business,” and what was that business if not the editing of the
Folio? - to Ben Jonson - “who was at the time doing work for him”
- for the Author.
Here is a clue! We only need to know for what man of “transcendent
genius, universal culture, world-wide philosophy . . . moving in Court
circles,” and so on, Ben “was working” about 1621-3,
the Folio appearing in 1623.
The heart beats with anticipation of a discovery! “On January
22, 1621, Bacon celebrated his sixtieth birthday with great state at
York House. Jonson was present,” and wrote an ode, with
something about the Genius of the House (Lar or Brownie),
“Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst.”
Mr. Greenwood does not know what this can mean; nor do I. {219a}
“Jonson, it appears” (on what authority?), “was
Bacon’s guest at Gorhambury, and was one of those good ‘pens,’”
of whom Bacon speaks as assisting him in the translation of some of
his books into Latin.
Bacon, writing to Toby Mathew, June 26, 1623, mentions the help of “some
good pens,” Ben Jonson he does not mention. But Judge Webb
does. “It is an undoubted fact,” says Judge Webb,
“that the Latin of the De Augmentis, which was published
in 1623, was the work of Jonson.” {219b}
To whom Mr. Collins replies, “There is not a particle of evidence
that Jonson gave to Bacon the smallest assistance in translating any
of his works into Latin.” {219c}
Très bien, on Judge Webb’s assurance the
person for whom Ben was working, in 1623, was Bacon. Meanwhile,
Mr. Greenwood’s “supposing” is “that there was
such an author” (of transcendent genius, and so on), who “may
have entrusted the editing of his collected plays” to some “good
pen,” who was at the time “doing work for him,” and
“why not to” - Ben Jonson. {220a}
Now the man for whom Ben, in 1623, was “doing work” - was
BACON, - so Judge Webb says. {220b}
Therefore, by this hypothesis of Mr. Greenwood, {220c}
the Great Unknown was Bacon, - just the hypothesis of the common Baconian.
Is my reasoning erroneous? Is the “supposing” suggested
by Mr. Greenwood {220d}
any other than that of Miss Delia Bacon, and Judge Webb? True,
Mr. Greenwood’s Baconian “supposing” is only a working
hypothesis: not a confirmed belief. But it is useful to his argument
(see “Ben Jonson and Shakespeare”) when he wants
to explain away Ben’s evidence, in his verses in the Folio, to
the Stratford actor as the Author.
Mr. Greenwood writes, in the first page of his Preface: “It is
no part of my plan or intention to defend that theory,” “the
Baconian theory.” Apparently it pops out contrary to the
intention of Mr. Greenwood. But pop out it does: at least I can
find no flaw in the reasoning of my detection of Bacon: I see no way
out of it except this: after recapitulating what is said about Ben as
one of Bacon’s “good pens” with other details, Mr.
Greenwood says, “But no doubt that way madness lies!” {221a}
Ah no! not madness, no, but Baconism “lies that way.”
However, “let it be granted” (as Euclid says in his sportsmanlike
way) that Mr. Greenwood by no means thinks that his “concealed
poet” is Bacon - only some one similar and similarly situated
and still active in 1623, and occupied with other business than supervising
a collected edition of plays written under his “nom de plume”
of Shakespeare. Bacon, too, was busy, with supervising, or
toiling at the Latin translation of his scientific works, and Ben (according
to Judge Webb) was busy in turning the Advancement of Learning into
Latin prose. Mr. Greenwood quotes, without reference, Archbishop
Tenison as saying that Ben helped Bacon in doing his works into Latin.
{221b}
Tenison is a very late witness. The prophetic soul of Bacon did
not quite trust English to last as long as Latin, or he thought Latin,
the lingua franca of Europe in his day, more easily accessible
to foreign students, as, of course, it was. Thus Bacon was very
busy; so was Ben. The sad consequence of Ben’s business,
perhaps, is that the editing of the Folio is notoriously bad; whether
Ben were the Editor or not, it is infamously bad.
Conceivably Mr. Greenwood is of the same opinion. He says, “It
stands admitted that a very large part of that volume” (the Folio)
“consists of work that is not ‘Shakespeare’s’
at all.”
How strange, if Ben edited it for the Great Unknown - who knew, if any
human being knew, what work was “Shakespeare’s”!
On Mr. Greenwood’s hypothesis, {222a}
or “supposing,” the Unknown Author “may well have
conceived the idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays which
had been written” (not “published,” written)
“under the name of Shakespeare, and, being himself busy with
other matters, he may have entrusted the business to” some “good
pen,” “and why not to” - Ben. Nevertheless “a
very large part of that volume consists of work that is not ‘Shakespeare’s’
at all.” {222b}
How did this occur? The book {222c}
is “that very doubtful ‘canon.’” How,
if “Shakespeare’s” man edited it for “Shakespeare”?
Did “Shakespeare” not care what stuff was placed under his
immortal “nom de plume”?
It is not my fault if I think that Mr. Greenwood’s hypotheses
{222d} - the
genuine “Shakespeare” either revised his own works, or put
Ben on the editorial task - are absolutely contradicted by his statements
in another part of his book. {222e}
For the genuine “Shakespeare” knew what plays he had written,
knew what he could honestly put forth as his own, as “Shakespeare’s.”
Or, if he placed the task of editing in Ben’s hands, he must have
told Ben what plays were of his own making. In either case the
Folio would contain these, and no others. But - “the plat
contraire,” - the very reverse, - is stated by Mr.
Greenwood. “It stands admitted that a very large portion
of that volume” (the Folio) “consists of work that is not
‘Shakespeare’s’” (is not Bacon’s, or the
other man’s) “at all.” {223a}
Then away fly the hypotheses {223b}
that the auto-Shakespeare, or that Ben, employed by the auto-Shakespeare
(apparently Bacon) revised, edited, and prepared for publication the
auto-Shakespearean plays. For Mr. Greenwood “has already
dealt with Titus (Andronicus) and Henry VI,”
{223c} and proved
them not to be auto-Shakespearean - and he adds “there are many
other plays in that very doubtful ‘canon’” (the Folio)
“which, by universal admission, contain much non-Shakespearean
composition.” {223d}
Perhaps! but if so the two hypotheses, {223e}
that either the genuine Shakespeare {223f}
revised (“is it not a more natural solution that ‘Shakespeare’
himself revised his works for publication, and that some part, at any
rate, of this revision {223g}
was done after 1616 and before 1623?”), or {223h}
that he gave Ben (who was working, by the conjecture, for Bacon) the
task of editing the Folio, - are annihilated. For neither the
auto-Shakespeare (if honest), nor Ben (if sober), could have stuffed
the Folio full of non-Shakespearean work, - including four “non-Shakespearean”
plays, - nor could the Folio be “that very doubtful canon.”
{224a}
Again, if either the auto-Shakespeare or Ben following his instructions,
were Editor, neither could have, as the Folio Editor had “evidently
no little doubt about” Troilus and Cressida. {224b}
Neither Ben, nor the actual Simon Pure, the author, the auto-Shakespeare,
could fail to know the truth about Trodus and Cressida.
But the Editor {224c}
did not know the truth, the whole canon is “doubtful.”
Therefore the hypothesis, the “supposing,” that the actual
author did the revising, {224d}
and the other hypothesis that he gave Ben the work, {224e}
seem to me wholly impossible. But Mr. Greenwood needs the “supposings”
of pp. 290, 293; and as he rejects Titus Andronicus and Henry
VI (both in the Folio), he also needs the contradictory views of
pp. 351, 358. On which set of supposings and averments does he
stand to win?
Perhaps he thinks to find a way out of what appears to me to be a dilemma
in the following fashion: He will not accept Titus Andronicus and
Henry VI, though both are in the Folio, as the work of
his “Shakespeare,” his Unknown, the Bacon of the
Baconians. Well, we ask, if your Unknown, or Bacon, or Ben, -
instructed by Bacon, or by the Unknown, - edited the Folio, how could
any one of the three insert Titus, and Henry VI,
and be “in no little doubt about” Troilus and Cressida?
Bacon, or the Unknown, or the Editor employed by either, knew perfectly
well which plays either man could honestly claim as his own work, done
under the “nom de plume” of “William
Shakespeare” (with or without the hyphen). Yet the Editor
of the Folio does not know - and Mr. Greenwood does know - Henry
VI and Titus are “wrong ones.”
Mr. Greenwood’s way out, if I follow him, is this: {225a}
“Judge Stotsenburg asks, ‘Who wrote The Taming of a Shrew
printed in 1594, and who wrote Titus Andronicus, Henry
VI, or King Lear referred to in the Diary?’”
(Henslowe’s). The Judge continues: “Neither Collier
nor any of the Shaxper commentators make (sic) any claim
to their authorship in behalf of William Shaxper. Since these
plays have the same names as those included in the Folio of 1623 the
presumption is that they are the same plays until the contrary is shown.
Of course it may be shown, either that those in the Folio are entirely
different except in name, or that these plays were revised, improved,
and dressed by some one whom they” (who?) “called Shakespeare.”
Mr. Greenwood says, “My own conviction is that . . . these plays
were ‘revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
Shakespeare.’” {226a}
(Whom who called Shakespeare?) In that case these plays,
- say Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, Part 1, -
which Mr. Greenwood denies to his “Shakespeare” were
just as much his Shakespeare’s plays as any other plays
(and there are several), which his Shakespeare “revised,
improved, and dressed.” Yet his Shakespeare is not
author of Henry VI, {226b}
not the author of Titus Andronicus. {226c}
“Mr. Anders,” writes Mr. Greenwood, “makes what I
think to be a great error in citing Henry VI and Titus as
genuine plays of Shakespeare.” {226d}
He hammers at this denial in nineteen references in his Index to Titus
Andronicus. Yet Ben, or Bacon, or the Unknown thought that
these plays were “genuine plays” of “Shakespeare,”
the concealed author - Bacon or Mr. Greenwood’s man. It
appears that the immense poet who used the “nom de plume”
of “Shakespeare” did not know the plays of which he
could rightfully call himself the author; that (not foreseeing Mr. Greenwood’s
constantly repeated objections) he boldly annexed four plays, or two
certainly, which Mr. Greenwood denies to him, and another about which
“the Folio Editor was in no little doubt.”
Finally, {227a}
Mr. Greenwood is “convinced,” “it is my conviction”
that some plays which he often denies to his “Shakespeare”
were “revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
Shakespeare.” That some one, if he edited or caused to be
edited the Folio, thought that his revision, improvement, and dressing
up of the plays gave him a right to claim their authorship - and Mr.
Greenwood, a dozen times and more, denies to him their authorship.
One is seriously puzzled to discover the critic’s meaning.
The Taming of a Shrew, Titus, Henry VI, and
King Lear, referred to in Henslowe’s “Diary,”
are not “Shakespearean,” we are repeatedly told. But
“my own conviction is that . . . ” these plays were “revised,
improved, and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare.”
But to be revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
Shakespeare, is to be as truly “Shakespearean” work as is
any play so handled “by Shakespeare.” Thus the plays
mentioned are as truly “Shakespearean” as any others in
which “Shakespeare” worked on an earlier canvas, and also
Titus “is not Shakespearean at all.”
Mr. Greenwood, I repeat, constantly denies the “Shakespearean”
character to Titus and Henry VI. “The conclusion
of the whole matter is that Titus and The Trilogy of Henry
VI are not the work of Shakespeare: that his hand is probably not
to be found at all in Titus, and only once or twice, if
at all, in Henry VI, Part I, but that he it probably was
who altered and remodelled the two parts of the old Contention of
the Houses of York and Lancaster, thereby producing Henry
VI, Parts II and III.” {228a}
Yet {228b} Titus
and Henry VI appear as “revised, improved, and dressed”
by the mysterious “some one whom they called Shakespeare.”
If Mr. Greenwood’s conclusion {228c}
be correct, “Shakespeare” had no right to place Henry
VI, Part I, and Titus in his Folio. If his “conviction”
{228d} be correct,
Shakespeare had as good a right to them as to any of the plays which
he revised, and improved, and dressed. They must be “Shakespearean”
if Mr. Greenwood is right {228e}
in his suggestion that “Shakespeare” either revised his
works for publication between 1616 and 1623, or set his man, Ben Jonson,
upon that business. Yet neither one nor the other knew what to
make of Troilus and Cressida. “The Folio Editor had,
evidently, no little doubt about that play.” {228f}
So neither “Shakespeare” nor Ben, instructed by him, can
have been “the Folio Editor.” Consequently Mr. Greenwood
must abandon his suggestion that either man was the Editor, and may
return to his rejection of Titus and Henry VI, Part I.
But he clings to it. He finds in Henslowe’s Diary “references
to, and records of the writing of, such plays” as, among others,
Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI. {229a}
Mr. Greenwood, after rejecting a theory of some one, says, “Far
more likely does it appear that there was a great man of the time whose
genius was capable of ‘transforming dross into gold,’ who
took these plays, and, in great part, rewrote and revised them, leaving
sometimes more, and sometimes less of the original work; and that so
rewritten, revised, and transformed they appeared as the plays of ‘Shake-speare.’”
{229b}
This statement is made {229c}
about “these plays,” including Titus Andronicus and
Henry VI, while {229d}
“Titus and the Trilogy of Henry VI are not the work
of Shakespeare . . . his hand is probably not to be found at all in
Titus, and only once or twice in Henry VI, Part
I,” though he probably made Parts II and III out of older plays.
I do not know where to have the critic. If Henry VI,
Part I, and Titus are in no sense by “Shakespeare,”
then neither “Shakespeare nor Ben for him edited or had anything
to do with the editing of the Folio. If either or both had to
do with the editing, as the critic suggests, then he is wrong in denying
Shakespearean origin to Titus and Henry VI, Part
I.
Of course one sees a way out of the dilemma for the great auto-Shakespeare
himself, who, by one hypothesis, handed over the editing of his plays
to Ben (he, by Mr. Greenwood’s “supposing,”
was deviling at literary jobs for Bacon). The auto-Shakespeare
merely tells Ben to edit his plays, and never even gives him a list
of them. Then Ben brings him the Folio, and the author looks at
the list of Plays.
“Mr. Jonson,” he says, “I have hitherto held thee
for an honest scholar and a deserving man in the quality thou dost profess.
But thou hast brought me a maimed and deformed printed copy of that
which I did write for my own recreation, not wishful to be known for
so light a thing as a poet. Moreover, thou hast placed among these
my trifles, four plays to which I never put a finger, and others in
which I had no more than a thumb. The Seneschal, Mr. Jonson, will
pay thee what is due to thee; thy fardels shall be sent whithersoever
thou wilt, and, Mary! Mr. Jonson, I bid thee never more be officer
of mine.”
This painful discourse must have been held at Gorhambury, - if Ben edited
the Folio - for Francis.
It is manifest, I hope, that about the Folio Mr. Greenwood speaks with
two voices, and these very discordant. It is also manifest that,
whoever wrote the plays left his materials in deep neglect, and that,
when they were collected, some one gathered them up in extreme disorder.
It is extraordinary that the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood do not see
the fallacy of their own reasoning in this matter of the Folio.
They constantly ridicule the old view that the actor, Will Shakspere
(if, by miracle, he were the author of the plays), could have left them
to take their fortunes. They are asked, what did other playwrights
do in that age? They often parted with their whole copyright to
the actors of this or that company, or to Henslowe. The new owners
could alter the plays at will, and were notoriously anxious to keep
them out of print, lest other companies should act them. As Mr.
Greenwood writes, {231a}
“Such, we are told, was the universal custom with dramatists of
the day; they ‘kept no copies’ of their plays, and thought
no more about them. It will, I suppose, be set down to fanaticism
that I should doubt the truth of this proposition, that I doubt if it
be consonant with the known facts of human nature.” But
whom, except Jonson, does Mr. Greenwood find editing and publishing
his plays? Beaumont, Fletcher, Heywood? No!
If the Great Unknown were dead in 1623, his negligence was as bad as
Will’s. If he were alive and revised his own work for publication,
{231b} he did
it as the office cat might have done it in hours of play. If,
on the other side, he handed the editorial task over to Ben, {232a}
then he did not even give Ben a list of his genuine works. Mr.
Greenwood cites the case of Ben Jonson, a notorious and, I think, solitary
exception. Ben was and often proclaimed himself to be essentially
a scholar. He took as much pains in prefacing, editing, and annotating
his plays, as he would have taken had the texts been those of Greek
tragedians.
Finally, all Baconians cry out against the sottish behaviour of the
actor, Will, if being really the author of the plays, he did not bestir
himself, and bring them out in a collected edition. Yet no English
dramatist ventured on doing such a thing, till Ben thus collected his
“works” (and was laughed at) in 1616. The example
might have encouraged Will to be up and doing, but he died early in
1616. If Will were not the author, what care was Bacon,
or the Unknown, taking of his many manuscript plays, and for the proper
editing of those which had appeared separately in pamphlets? As
indolent and casual as Will, the great Author, Bacon or another, left
the plays to take their chances. Mr. Greenwood says that “if
the author” (Bacon or somebody very like him) “had
been careless about keeping copies of his manuscripts . . . ”
{232b}
What an “if” in the case of the great Author! This
gross neglect, infamous in Will, may thus have been practised by the
Great Unknown himself.
In 1911 Mr. Greenwood writes, “There is overwhelming authority
for the view that Titus Andronicus is not Shakespearean at
all.” {233a}
In that case, neither Bacon, nor the Unknown, nor Ben, acting for either,
can have been the person who put Titus into the Folio.
CHAPTER XII: BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE
The evidence of Ben Jonson to the identity of Shakespeare the author
with Shakspere the actor, is “the strength of the Stratfordian
faith,” says Mr. Greenwood. “But I think it will be
admitted that the various Jonsonian utterances with regard to ‘Shakespeare’
are by no means easy to reconcile one with the other.” {237a}
It is difficult to reply briefly to Mr. Greenwood’s forty-seven
pages about the evidence of Jonson. But, first, whenever in written
words or in reported conversation, Ben speaks of Shakespeare by name,
he speaks of his works: in 1619 to Drummond of Hawthornden; in
1623 in commendatory verses to the Folio; while, about 1630, probably,
in his posthumously published Discourses, he writes on
Shakespeare as the friend and “fellow” of the players, on
Shakespeare as his own friend, and as a dramatist. On each of
these three occasions, Ben’s tone varies. In 1619
he said no more to Drummond of Hawthornden (apparently on two separate
occasions) than that Shakespeare “lacked art,” and made
the mistake about a wreck on the sea-coast of Bohemia.
In 1619, Ben spoke gruffly and briefly of Shakespeare, as to Drummond
he also spoke disparagingly of Beaumont, whom he had panegyrised in
an epigram in his own folio of 1616, and was again to praise in the
commendatory verses in the Folio. He spoke still more harshly
of Drayton, whom in 1616 he had compared to Homer, Virgil, Theocritus,
and Tyræus! He told an unkind anecdote of Marston, with
whom he had first quarrelled and then made friends, collaborating with
him in a play; and very generously and to his great peril, sharing his
imprisonment. To Drummond, Jonson merely said that he “beat
Marston and took away his pistol.” Of Sir John Beaumont,
brother of the dramatist, Ben had written a most hyperbolical eulogy
in verse; luckily for Sir John, to Drummond Ben did not speak of him.
Such was Ben, in panegyric verse hyperbolical; in conversation “a
despiser of others, and praiser of himself.” Compare Ben’s
three remarks about Donne, all made to Drummond. Donne deserved
hanging for breaking metre; Donne would perish for not being understood:
and Donne was in some points the first of living poets.
Mr. Greenwood’s effort to disable Jonson’s evidence rests
on the contradictions in his estimates of Shakespeare’s poetry,
in notices scattered through some thirty years. Jonson, it is
argued, cannot on each occasion mean Will. He must now mean Will,
now the Great Unknown, and now - both at once. Yet I have proved
that Ben was the least consistent of critics, all depended on the occasion,
and on his humour at the moment. This is a commonplace of literary
history. The Baconians do not know it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows
it, ignores it, and bases his argument on facts which may be unknown
to his readers. We have noted Ben’s words of 1619, and touched
on his panegyric of 1623. Thirdly, about 1630 probably, Ben wrote
in his manuscript book Discourses an affectionate but critical
page on Shakespeare as a man and an author. Always, in prose,
and in verse, and in recorded conversation, Ben explicitly identified
Shakspere (William, of Stratford) with the author of the plays usually
ascribed to him. But the Baconian Judge Webb (in extreme old age),
and the anti-Shakespearean Mr. Greenwood and others, choose to interpret
Ben’s words on the theory that, in 1623, he “had his tongue
in his cheek”; that, like Odysseus, he “mingled things false
with true,” that they know what is true from what is false,
and can undo the many knots which Ben tied in his tongue. How
they succeed we shall see.
In addition to his three known mentions of Shakespeare by name (1619,
1623, 1630?), Ben certainly appears to satirise his rival at
a much earlier date; especially as Pantalabus, a playwright in The
Poetaster (1601), and as actor, poet, and plagiarist in an epigram,
Poet-Ape, published in his collected works of 1616; but
probably written as early as 1602. It is well known that in 1598
Shakespeare’s company acted Ben’s Every Man in His Humour.
It appears that he conceived some grudge against the actors, and apparently
against Shakespeare and other playwrights, for, in 1601, his Poetaster
is a satire both on playwrights and on actors, whom he calls “apes.”
The apparent attacks on Shakespeare are just such as Ben, if angry and
envious, would direct against him; while we know of no other poet-player
of the period to whom they could apply. For example, in The
Poetaster, Histrio, the actor, is advised to ingratiate himself
with Pantalabus, “gent’man parcel-poet, his
father was a man of worship, I tell thee.” This is perhaps
unmistakably a blow at Shakespeare, who had recently acquired for his
father and himself arms, and the pleasure of writing himself “gentleman.”
This “parcel-poet gent’man” “pens lofty, in
a new stalking style,” - he is thus an author, he “pens,”
and in a high style. He is called Pantalabus, from
the Greek words for “to take up all,” which
means that, as poet, he is a plagiarist. Jonson repeats this charge
in his verses called Poet-Ape -
“He takes up all,” makes each man’s wit
his own,
And told of this, he slights it.”
In a scene added to The Poetaster in 1616, the author (Ben) is
advised not
“With a sad and serious verse to wound
Pantalabus, railing in his saucy jests,”
and obviously slighting the charges of plagiarism. Perhaps Ben
is glancing at Shakespeare, who, if accused of plagiary by an angry
rival, would merely laugh.
A reply to the Poetaster, namely Satiromastix (by
Dekker and Marston?), introduces Jonson himself as babbling darkly
about “Mr. Justice Shallow,” and “an Innocent Moor”
(Othello?). Here is question of “administering strong
pills” to Jonson; then,
“What lumps of hard and indigested stuff,
Of bitter Satirism, of Arrogance,
Of Self-love, of Detraction, of a black
And stinking Insolence should we fetch up!”
This “pill” is a reply to Ben’s “purge”
for the poets in his Poetaster. Oh, the sad old stuff!
Referring to Jonson’s Poetaster, and to Satiromastix,
the counter-attack, we find a passage in the Cambridge play, The
Return from Parnassus (about 1602). Burbage, the tragic actor,
and Kempe, the low-comedy man of Shakespeare’s company, are introduced,
discussing the possible merits of Cambridge wits as playwrights.
Kempe rejects them as they “smell too much of that writer Ovid,
and that writer Metamorphosis . . . ” The purpose, of course,
is to laugh at the ignorance of the low-comedy man, who thinks “Metamorphosis”
a writer, and does not suspect - how should he? - that Shakespeare “smells
of Ovid.” Kempe innocently goes on, “Why, here’s
our fellow” (comrade) “Shakespeare puts them all down”
(all the University playwrights), “aye, and Ben Jonson too.
O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace”
(in The Poetaster) “giving the poets a pill, but
our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge . . . ”
The Cambridge author, perhaps, is thinking of the pill (not purge) which,
in Satiromastix, might be administered to Jonson.
The Cambridge author may have thought that Shakespeare wrote the passage
on the pill which was to “fetch up” masses of Ben’s
insolence, self-love, arrogance, and detraction. If this be not
the sequence of ideas, it is not easy to understand how or why Kempe
is made to say that Shakespeare has given Jonson a purge. Stupid
old nonsense! There are other more or less obscure indications
of Jonson’s spite, during the stage-quarrel, against Shakespeare,
but the most unmistakable proof lies in his verses in “Poet-Ape.”
I am aware that Ben’s intention here to hit at Shakespeare has
been denied, for example by Mr. Collins with his usual vigour of language.
But though I would fain agree with him, the object of attack can be
no known person save Will. Jonson was already, in The Poetaster,
using the term “Poet-Ape,” for he calls
the actors at large “apes.”
Jonson thought so well of his rhymes that he included them in the Epigrams
of his first Folio (1616). By that date, the year of Shakespeare’s
death, if he really loved Shakespeare, as he says, in verse and prose,
Ben might have suppressed the verses. But (as Drummond noted)
he preferred his jest, such as it was, to his friend; who was not, as
usually understood, a man apt to resent a very blunt shaft of very obsolete
wit. Like Molière, Shakespeare had outlived the charge
of plagiarism, made long ago by the jealous Ben.
Poet-Ape is an actor-playwright “that would be thought our
chief” - words which, by 1601, could only apply to Shakespeare;
there was no rival, save Ben, near his throne. The playwright-actor,
too, has now confessedly
“grown
To a little wealth and credit in the scene,”
of no other actor-playwright could this be said.
He is the author of “works” (Jonson was laughed at for calling
his own plays “works”), but these works are “the frippery
of wit,” that is, a tissue of plagiarisms, as in the case of Pantalabus.
But “told of this he slights it,” as most successful authors,
when accused, as they often are, of plagiarism by jealous rivals, wisely
do; - so did Molière. This Poet-Ape began his career by
“picking and gleaning” and “buying reversions of old
plays.” This means that Shakespeare did work over
earlier plays which his company had acquired; or, if Shakespeare did
not, - then, I presume, - Bacon did!
That, with much bad humour, is the gist of the rhymes
on Poet-Ape. Ben thinks Shakespeare’s “works”
very larcenous, but still, the “works,” as such, are those
of the poet-actor. I hope it is now clear that Poet-Ape, who,
like Pantalabus, “takes up all”; who has “grown
to a little wealth and credit in the scene,” and who “thinks
himself the chief” of contemporary dramatists, can be nobody but
Shakespeare. Hence it follows that the “works” of
Poet-Ape, are the works of Shakespeare. Ben admits, nay, asserts
the existence of the works, says that they may reach “the after-time,”
but he calls them a mass of plagiarisms, - because he is in a jealous
rage.
But this view does not at all suit Mr. Greenwood, for it shows Ben regarding
Shakespeare as the “Ape,” or Actor, and also as the “Poet”
and author of the “works.” Yet Ben’s words mean
nothing if not that an actor is the author of works which Ben accuses
of plagiarism. Mr. Greenwood thinks that the epigram proves merely
that “Jonson looked upon Shakspere (if, indeed, he refers to him)
as one who put forward the writings of others as his own, or, in plain
English, an impostor.” “The work which goes in his
name is, in truth, the work of somebody else.” {244a}
Mr. Greenwood put the same interpretation on Greene’s words about
“Shakescene,” and we showed that the interpretation was
impossible. “The utmost we should be entitled to say”
(if Shake-scene be meant for Shakspere) “is that Greene accuses
Player Shakspere of putting forward, as his own, some work or perhaps
some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another.”
{245a}
We proved, by quoting Greene’s words, that he said nothing which
could be tortured into this sense. {245b}
In the same way Ben’s words cannot be tortured into the sense
that “the work which goes in his” (Poet-Ape’s) “name
is, in truth, the work of somebody else.” {245c}
Mr. Greenwood tries to find the Anti-Willian hypothesis in Greene’s
Groatsworth of Wit and in Ben’s epigram. It is in
neither.
Jonson is not accusing Shakespeare of pretending to be the author of
plays written by somebody else, but of “making each man’s
wit his own,” and the men are the other dramatists
of the day. Thus the future “may judge” Shakespeare’s
work “to be his as well as ours.”
It is “we,” the living and recognised dramatists, whom Shakespeare
is said to plagiarise from; so boldly that
“We, the robbed, leave rage, and pity it.”
Ben does not mean that Shakespeare is publishing, as his own, whole
plays by some other author, but that his works are tissues of scraps
stolen from his contemporaries, from “us, the robbed.”
Where are to be found or heard of any works by a player-poet of 1601,
the would-be chief dramatist of the day, except those signed William
Shak(&c.). There are none, and thus Ben, at this date, is
identifying Will Shakspere, the actor, with the author of the Shakespearean
plays, which he expects to reach posterity; “after times may judge
them to be his,” as after times do to this hour.
Thus Ben expresses, in accordance with his humour on each occasion,
most discrepant opinions of Will’s works, but he never varies
from his identification of Will with the author of the plays.
The “works” of which Ben wrote so splenetically in Poet-Ape,
were the works of a Playwright-Actor, who could be nobody but the
actor Shakespeare, as far as Ben then knew. If later, and in altered
circumstances, he wrote of the very same works in very different terms,
his “utterances” are “not easily reconcilable”
with each other, - whoever the real author of the works may be.
If Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s anonymous equivalent for Bacon, were
the author, and if Ben came to know it, his attitudes towards the works
are still as irreconcilable as ever.
Perhaps Baconians and Mr. Greenwood might say, “as long as Ben
believed that the works were those of an Actor-Playwright, he thought
them execrable. But when he learned that they were the works of
Bacon (or of some Great One), he declared them to be more than excellent”
- but not to Drummond. I am reluctant to think that Jonson
was the falsest and meanest of snobs. I think that when his old
rival, by his own account his dear friend, was dead, and when (1623)
Ben was writing panegyric verses about the first collected edition of
his plays (the Folio), then between generosity and his habitual hyperbolical
manner when he was composing commendatory verses, he said, - not too
much in the way of praise, - but a good deal more than he later said
(1630?), in prose, and in cold blood. I am only taking
Ben as I find him and as I understand him. Every step in my argument
rests on well-known facts. Ben notoriously, in his many panegyric
verses, wrote in a style of inflated praise. In conversation with
Drummond he censured, in brief blunt phrases, the men whom, in verse,
he had extolled. The Baconian who has not read all Ben’s
panegyrics in verse, and the whole of his conversations with Drummond,
argues in ignorance.
We now come to Ben’s panegyrics in the Folio of 1623. Ben
heads the lines,
“TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED
THE AUTHOR
MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
AND
WHAT HE HATH LEFT US.”
Words cannot be more explicit. Bacon was alive (I do not know
when Mr. Greenwood’s hidden genius died), and Ben goes on to speak
of the Author, Shakespeare, as dead, and buried. He calls on him
thus:
“Soul of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespear rise: I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.”
Beaumont, by the way, died in the same year as Shakespeare, 1616, and,
while Ben here names him with Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, his
contemporaries have left no anecdotes, no biographical hints.
In the panegyric follow the lines:
“And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund’ring Æschylus,”
and the other glories of the Roman and Attic stage, to see and hear
how Shakespeare bore comparison with all that the classic dramatists
did, or that “did from their ashes come.”
Jonson means, “despite your lack of Greek and Latin I would not
shrink from challenging the greatest Greek and Roman tragedians to see
how you bear comparison with themselves”?
Mr. Greenwood and the Baconians believe that the author of the plays
abounded in Latin and Greek. In my opinion his classical scholarship
must have seemed slight indeed to Ben, so learned and so vain of his
learning: but this is part of a vexed question, already examined.
So far, Ben’s verses have brought not a hint to suggest that he
does not identify the actor, his Beloved, with the author. Nothing
is gained when Ben, in commendatory verses, praises “Thy Art,”
whereas, speaking to Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), he said that Shakespeare
“wanted art.” Ben is not now growling to Drummond
of Hawthornden: he is writing a panegyric, and applauds Shakespeare’s
“well-turned and true-filed lines,” adding that, “to
write a living line” a man “must sweat,” and “strike
the second heat upon the Muses’ anvil.”
To produce such lines requires labour, requires conscious “art.”
So Shakespeare had “art,” after all, despite what
Ben had said to Drummond: “Shakespeare lacked art.”
There is no more in the matter; the “inconsistency” is that
of Ben’s humours on two perfectly different occasions, now grumbling
to Drummond; and now writing hyperbolically in commendatory verses.
But the contrast makes Mr. Greenwood exclaim, “Can anything be
more astonishing and at the same time more unsatisfactory than this?”
{249a}
Can anything be more like Ben Jonson?
Did he know the secret of the authorship in 1619? If so, why did
he say nothing about the plays of the Great Unknown (whom he called
Shakespeare), save what Drummond reports, “want of art,”
ignorance of Bohemian geography. Or did Ben not know the
secret till, say, 1623, and then heap on the very works which he had
previously scouted praise for the very quality which he had said they
lacked? If so, Ben was as absolutely inconsistent, as before.
There is no way out of this dilemma. On neither choice are Ben’s
utterances “easy to reconcile one with the other,” except
on the ground that Ben was - Ben, and his comments varied with his varying
humours and occasions. I believe that, in the commendatory verses,
Ben allowed his Muse to carry him up to heights of hyperbolical praise
which he never came near in cold blood. He was warmed with the
heat of poetic composition and wound up to heights of eulogy, though
even now he could not forget the small Latin and less Greek!
We now turn to Mr. Greenwood’s views about the commendatory verses.
On mature consideration I say nothing of his remarks on Ben’s
couplets about the bad engraved portrait. {250a}
They are concerned with the supposed “original bust,”
as represented in Dugdale’s engraving of 1656. What the
Baconians hope to make out of “the original bust”
I am quite unable to understand. {250b}
Again, I leave untouched some witticisms {250c}
on Jonson’s lines about Spenser, Chaucer, and Beaumont in their
tombs - lines either suggested by, or suggestive of others by an uncertain
W. Basse, “but the evidence of authorship seems somewhat doubtful.
How the date is determined I do not know . . . ” {251a}
As Mr. Greenwood knows so little, and as the discussion merely adds
dust to the dust, and fog to the mist of his attempt to disable Ben’s
evidence, I glance and pass by.
“Then follow these memorable words, which I have already discussed:
“‘And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek . . .
’” {251b}
In “these memorable words,” every non-Baconian sees Ben’s
opinion about his friend’s lack of scholarship. According
to his own excellent Index, Mr. Greenwood has already adverted often
to “these memorable words.”
(1) P. 40. “ . . . if this testimony is to be explained
away as not seriously written, then are we justified in applying the
same methods of interpretation to Jonson’s other utterances as
published in the Folio of 1623. But I shall have more to say as
to that further on.”
(2) P. 88. Nothing of importance.
(3) P. 220. Quotation from Dr. Johnson. Ben, “who
had no imaginable temptation to falsehood,” wrote the memorable
words. But Mr. Greenwood has to imagine a “temptation to
falsehood,” - and he does.
(4) P. 222. “And we have recognised that Jonson’s
‘small Latin and less Greek’ must be explained away”
(a quotation from somebody).
(5) P. 225. Allusion to anecdote of “Latin (latten)
spoons.”
(6) Pp. 382, 383. “Some of us” (some of whom?)
“have long looked upon it as axiomatic . . . that Jonson’s
‘small Latin and less Greek,’ if meant to be taken seriously,
can only be applicable to Shakspere of Stratford and not to Shakespeare,”
that is, not to the Unknown author. Unluckily Ben, in 1623, is
addressing the shade of the “sweet Swan of Avon,” meaning
Stratford-on-Avon.
(7) The next references in the laudable Index are to pp. 474,
475. “Then follow these memorable words, which I have already
discussed:
“‘And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,’
words which those who see how singularly inappropriate they are to the
author of the Plays and Poems of Shakespeare have been
at such infinite pains to explain away without impeaching the credit
of the author, or assuming that he is here indulging in a little Socratic
irony.”
I do not want to “explain” Ben’s words “away”:
I want to know how on earth Mr. Greenwood explains them away.
My view is that Ben meant what he said, that Will, whose shade he is
addressing, was no scholar (which he assuredly was not). I diligently
search Mr. Greenwood’s scriptures, asking How does he explain
Ben’s “memorable words” away? On p. 106 of The
Shakespeare Problem Restated I seem to catch a glimmer of his method.
“Once let the Stratfordians” (every human and non-Baconian
person of education) “admit that Jonson when he penned the words
‘small Latin and less Greek’ was really writing ‘with
his tongue in his cheek.’ . . . ”
Once admit that vulgarism concerning a great English poet engaged on
a poem of Pindaric flight, and of prophetic vision! No, we leave
the admission to Mr. Greenwood and his allies.
To consider thus is to consider too seriously. The Baconians and
Anti-Willians have ceased to deserve serious attention (if ever they
did deserve it), and virtuous indignation, and all that kind of thing,
when they ask people who care for poetry to “admit” that
Ben wrote his verses “with his tongue in his cheek.”
Elsewhere, {253a}
in place of Ben’s “tongue in his cheek,” Mr. Greenwood
prefers to suggest that Ben “is here indulging in a little Socratic
irony.” Socrates “with his tongue in his cheek”!
Say “talking through his throat,” if one may accept the
evidence of the author of Raffles, as to the idioms of
burglars.
To return to criticism, we are to admit that Jonson was really writing
“with his tongue in his cheek,” knowing that, as a fact,
“Shakespeare” (the Great Unknown, the Bacon
of the Baconians) “had remarkable classical attainments, and they,
of course, open the door to the suggestion that the entire poem is capable
of an ironical construction and esoteric interpretation.” {254a}
So this is Mr. Greenwood’s method of “explaining away”
the memorable words. He seems to conjecture that Will was not
Shakespeare, not the author of the plays; that Jonson
knew it; that his poem is, as a whole, addressed to Bacon, or to the
Great Unknown, under his “nom de plume” of
“William Shakespeare”; that the address to the “Swan
of Avon” is a mere blind; and that Ben only alludes to his “Beloved,”
the Stratford actor, when he tells his Beloved that his Beloved has
“small Latin and less Greek.” All the praise is for
Bacon, or the Great Unknown (Mr. Harris), the jeer is for “his
Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, And what he hath left
Us.”
As far as I presume to understand this theory of the “tongue in
the cheek,” of the “Socratic irony,” this is what
Mr. Greenwood has to propose towards “explaining away” the
evidence of Ben Jonson, in his famous commendatory verses. When
we can see through the dust of words we find that the “esoteric
interpretation” of the commendatory verses is merely a reassertion
of the general theory: a man with small Latin and less Greek could not
have written the plays and poems. Therefore when Ben explicitly
states that his Beloved, Mr. Shakespeare of Stratford, the Swan of Avon
did write the plays, and had small Latin and less Greek, Ben
meant that he did not write them, that they were written by somebody
else who had plenty of Greek and Latin. It is a strange logical
method! Mr. Greenwood merely reasserts his paradox, and proves
it, like certain Biblical critics of more orthodoxy than sense, by aid
of his private “esoteric method of interpretation.”
Ben, we say, about 1630, in prose and in cold blood, and in a humour
of criticism without the old rancour and envy, or the transitory poetic
enthusiasm, pens a note on Shakespeare in a volume styled “Timber,
or Discoveries, made upon men and Matter, as they have flowed out of
his daily Readings; or had their reflux to his peculiar Notion of the
Times.” Ben died in 1637; his MS. collection of notes and
brief essays, and reflections, was published in 1641. Bacon, of
whom he wrote his impressions in this manuscript, had died in 1626.
Ben was no longer young: he says, among these notes, that his memory,
once unusually strong, after he was past forty “is much decayed
in me . . . It was wont to be faithful to me, but shaken with
age now . . . (I copy the extract as given by Mr. Greenwood. {255a})
He spoke sooth: he attributes to Orpheus, in “Timber,” a
line from Homer, and quotes from Homer what is not in that poet’s
“works.”
In this manuscript occurs, then, a brief prose note, headed, De Shakespeare
nostrati, on our countryman Shakespeare. It is an anecdote
of the Players and their ignorance, with a few critical and personal
remarks on Shakespeare. “I remember the players have often
mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that (whatsoever he penned)
he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would
he had blotted a thousand,’ which they thought a malevolent speech.
I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance who chose that
circumstance to commend their friend by (that) wherein he most faulted;
and to justify mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour
his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed,
honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave
notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility
that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. ‘Sufflaminandus
erat,’ as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit
was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too! Many
times he fell into those things could not escape laughter, as when he
said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him, ‘Caesar,
thou dost me wrong.’ He replied, ‘Cæsar did
never wrong but with just cause’; and such like, which were ridiculous.
But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more
in him to be praised than to be pardoned.” Baconians actually
maintain that Ben is here speaking of Bacon.
Of whom is Ben writing? Of the author of Julius Cæsar,
- certainly, from which, his memory failing, he misquotes a line.
If Ben be in the great secret - that the author was Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s
Great Unknown, he is here no more enthusiastic about the Shadow or the
Statesman, than about Shakespeare; no less cool and critical, whoever
may be the subject of his comments. Whether, in the commendatory
verses, he referred to the Actor-Author, or Bacon, or the Shining Shadow,
or all of them at once, he is now in a mood very much more cool and
critical. If to be so cool and critical is violently inconsistent
in the case of the Stratford actor, it is not less so if Ben has Bacon
or the Shadow in his mind. Meanwhile the person of whom he speaks
is here the actor-author, whom the players, his friends,
commended “wherein he faulted,” namely, in not “blotting”
where, in a thousand cases, Ben wishes that he had blotted.
Can the most enthusiastic Baconian believe that when Ben wrote about
the players’ ignorant applause of Shakespeare’s, of their
friend’s lack of care in correction, Ben had Bacon in his mind?
As for Mr. Greenwood, he says that in Ben’s sentence about the
players and their ignorant commendation, “we have it on Jonson’s
testimony that the players looked upon William Shakspere the actor as
the author of the plays and praised him for never blotting out a line.”
We have it, and how is the critic to get over or round the fact?
Thus, “We know that this statement” (about the almost blotless
lines) “is ridiculous; that if the players had any unblotted manuscripts
in their hands (which is by no means probable) they were merely fair
copies . . . ”
Perhaps, but the Baconians appear to assume that a “fair copy”
is not, and cannot be, a copy in the handwriting of the author.
As I have said before, the Players knew Will’s handwriting, if
he could write. If they received his copy in a hand not his own,
and were not idiots, they could not praise him and his unerring speed
and accuracy in penning his thoughts. If, on the other hand, Will
could not write, in their long friendship with Will, the Players must
have known the fact, and could not possibly believe, as they certainly
did, “on Jonson’s testimony” in his authorship.
To finish Mr. Greenwood’s observations, “if they”
(the players) “really thought that the author of the plays wrote
them off currente calamo, and never” (or “hardly
ever”) “blotted a line, never revised, never made any alterations,
they knew nothing whatever concerning the real Shakespeare.” {258a}
Nothing whatever? What they did not know was merely that Will
gave them fair copies in his own hand, as, before the typewriting machine
was invented, authors were wont to do. Within the last fortnight
I heard the error attributed to the players made by an English scholar
who is foremost in his own field of learning. He and I were looking
at some of Dickens’s MSS. They were full of erasions and
corrections. I said, “How unlike Scott!” whose first
draft of his novels exactly answered to the players’ description
of Will’s “copy.” My friend said, “Browning
scarcely made an erasion or change in writing his poems,” and
referred to Mr. Browning’s MSS. for the press, of which examples
were lying near us. “But Browning must have made clean copies
for the press,” I said: which was as new an idea to my learned
friend as it was undreamed of by the Players:- if what they received
from him were his clean copies.
The Players’ testimony, through Jonson, cannot be destroyed by
the “easy stratagem” of Mr. Greenwood.
Mr. Greenwood now nearly falls back on Bacon, though he constantly professes
that he “is not the advocate of Bacon’s authorship.”
The author was some great man, as like Bacon as one pea to another.
Mr. Greenwood says that Jonson looked on the issue of the First Folio
{259a} “as
a very special occasion.” Well, it was a very special
occasion; no literary occasion could be more “special.”
Without the Folio, badly as it is executed, we should perhaps never
have had many of Shakespeare’s plays. The occasion was special
in the highest degree.
But, says Mr. Greenwood, “if we could only get to the back of
Jonson’s mind, we should find that there was some efficient cause
operating to induce him to give the best possible send-off to that celebrated
venture.” {260a}
Ben was much in the habit of giving “sendoffs” of great
eloquence to poetic “ventures” now forgotten. What
could “the efficient cause” be in the case of the Folio?
At once Mr. Greenwood has recourse to Bacon; he cannot, do what he will,
keep Bacon “out of the Memorial.” Ben was with Bacon
at Gorhambury, on Bacon’s sixtieth birthday (January 22, 1621).
Ben wrote verses about the Genius of the old house,
“Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst.”
“What was that ‘mystery’?” asks Mr. Greenwood.
{260b}
What indeed? And what has all this to do with Ben’s commendatory
verses for the Folio, two years later? Mr. Greenwood also surmises,
as we have seen, {260c}
that Jonson was with Bacon, helping to translate The Advancement
of Learning in June, 1623.
Let us suppose that he was: what has that to do with Ben’s verses
for the Folio? Does Mr. Greenwood mean to hint that Bacon was
the “efficient cause operating to induce” Ben “to
give the best possible send-off” to the Folio? One does
not see what interest Bacon had in stimulating the enthusiasm of Ben,
unless we accept Bacon as author of the plays, which Mr. Greenwood does
not. If Mr. Greenwood thinks that Bacon was the author of the
plays, then the facts are suitable to his belief. But if he does
not, - “I hold no brief for the Baconians,” he says, - how
is all this passage on Ben’s visits to Bacon concerned with the
subject in hand?
Between the passage on some “efficient cause” “at
the back of Ben’s mind,” {261a}
and the passage on Ben’s visits to Bacon in 1621-3, {261b}
six pages intervene, and blur the supposed connection between the “efficient
cause” of Ben’s verses of 1623, and his visits to Bacon
in 1621-3. These intercalary pages are concerned with Ben’s
laudations of Bacon, by name, in his Discoveries. The first
is entirely confined to praise of Bacon as an orator. Bacon is
next mentioned in a Catalogue of Writers as “he who hath filled
up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may
be preferred or compared either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,”
words used of Shakespeare by Jonson in the Folio verses.
Mr. Greenwood remarks that Jonson’s Catalogue, to judge by the
names he cites (More, Chaloner, Smith, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sidney, Hooker,
Essex, Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, and so on), suggests that “he
is thinking mainly of wits and orators of his own and the preceding
generation,” not of poets specially. This is obvious; why
should Ben name Shakespeare with More, Smith, Chaloner, Eliot, Bishop
Gardiner, Egerton, Sandys, and Savile? Yet “it is remarkable
that no mention should be made of the great dramatist.”
Where is Spenser named, or Beaumont, or Chaucer, with whom Ben ranked
Shakespeare? Ben quoted of Bacon the line he wrote long before
of Shakespeare as a poet, about “insolent Greece,” and all
this is “remarkable,” and Mr. Greenwood finds it “not
surprising” {262a}
that the Baconians dwell on the “extraordinary coincidence of
expression,” as if Ben were incapable of repeating a happy phrase
from himself, and as if we should wonder at anything the Baconians may
say or do.
Another startling coincidence is that, in Discoveries, Ben
said of Shakespeare “his wit was in his own power,” and
wished that “the rule of it had been so too.” Of Bacon,
Ben wrote, “his language, where he could spare or pass by a jest,
was nobly censorious.” Thus Bacon had “the
rule of his own wit,” Bacon “could spare or pass
by a jest,” whereas Shakespeare apparently could not - so like
were the two Dromios in this particular! Strong in these convincing
arguments, the Baconians ask (not so Mr. Greenwood, he is no Baconian),
“were there then two writers of whom this description was
appropriate . . . Was there only one, and was it of Bacon, under the
name of “Shakespeare,” that Ben wrote De Shakespeare
nostrati?
Read it again, substituting “Bacon” for “Shakespeare.”
“I remember the players,” and so on, and what has Bacon
to do here? “Sometimes it was necessary that Bacon should
be stopped.” “Many times Bacon fell into those
things could not escape laughter,” such as Cæsar’s
supposed line, “and such like, which were ridiculous.”
“Bacon redeemed his vices with his virtues. There
was ever more in Bacon to be praised than to be pardoned.”
Thus freely, according to the Baconians, speaks Ben of Bacon, whom he
here styles “Shakespeare,” - Heaven knows why! while crediting
him with the players as his friends. Ben could not think or speak
thus of Bacon. Mr. Greenwood occupies his space with these sagacities
of the Baconians; one marvels why he takes the trouble. We are
asked why Ben wrote so little and that so cool (“I loved him on
this side idolatry as much as any”) about Shakespeare. Read
through Ben’s Discoveries: what has he to say about any
one of his great contemporary dramatists, from Marlowe to Beaumont?
He says nothing about any of them; though he had panegyrised them, as
he panegyrised Beaumont, in verse. In his prose Discoveries
he speaks, among English dramatists, of Shakespeare alone.
We are also asked by the Baconians to believe that his remarks on Bacon
under the name of Shakespeare are really an addition to his more copious
and infinitely more reverential observations on Bacon, named by his
own name; “I have and do reverence him for the greatness that
was only proper to himself.” Also (where Bacon is spoken
of as Shakespeare) “He redeemed his vices by his virtues.
There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned . . . Sometimes
it was necessary that he should be stopped . . . Many times he fell
into those things that could not escape laughter.”
These two views of Bacon are, if you like, incongruous. The person
spoken of is in both cases Bacon, say the Baconians, and Mr. Greenwood
sympathetically alludes to their ideas, {264a}
which I cannot qualify in courteous terms. Baconians “would,
of course, explain the difficulty by saying that however sphinx-like
were Jonson’s utterances, he had clearly distinct in his own mind
two different personages, viz. Shakspere the player, and Shakespeare
the real author of the plays and poems, and that if in the perplexing
passage quoted from the Discoveries he appears to confound one
with the other, it is because the solemn seal of secrecy had been imposed
on him.” They would say, they do say all that.
Ben is not to let out that Bacon is the author. So he tells us
of Bacon that he often made himself ridiculous, and so forth, - but
he pretends that he is speaking of Shakespeare.
All this wedge of wisdom, remember, is inserted between the search for
“the efficient cause” of Ben’s panegyric (1623), in
the Folio, on his Beloved Mr. William Shakespeare, and the discovery
of Ben’s visits to Bacon in 1621-3.
Does Mr. Greenwood mean that Ben, in 1623 (or earlier), knew the secret
of Bacon’s authorship, and, stimulated by his hospitality, applauded
his works in the Folio, while, as he must not disclose the secret, he
throughout speaks of Bacon as Shakespeare, puns on that name in the
line about seeming “to shake a lance,” and salutes the Lord
of Gorhambury as “Sweet Swan of Avon”? Mr. Greenwood
cannot mean that; for he is not a Baconian. What does he
mean?
Put together his pages 483, 489-491. On the former we find how
“it would appear” that Jonson thought the issue of the Folio
(1623) “a very special occasion,” and that perhaps if we
could only “get to the back of his mind, we should find that there
was some efficient cause operating to induce him to give the best possible
send-off to that celebrated venture.” Then skip to pp. 489-491,
and you find very special occasions: Bacon’s birthday feast with
its” mystery”; Ben as one of Bacon’s “good pens,”
in 1623. “The best of these good pens, it seems, was Jonson.”
{266a}
On what evidence does it “seem”? The opinion of Judge
Webb.
Is this supposed collaboration with Bacon in 1623, “the efficient
cause operating to induce” Ben “to give the best possible
send-off” to the Folio? How could this be the “efficient
cause” if Bacon were not the author of the plays?
Mr. Greenwood, like the Genius at the birthday supper,
“Stands as if some mystery he did.”
On a trifling point of honour, namely, as to whether Ben were a man
likely to lie, tortuously, hypocritically, to be elaborately false about
the authorship of the Shakespearean plays, it is hopelessly impossible
to bring the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood (who “holds no brief
for the Baconians”) to my point of view. Mr. Greenwood rides
off thus - what the Baconians do is unimportant.
“There are, as everybody knows, many falsehoods that are justifiable,
some that it is actually a duty to tell.” It may be so;
I pray that I may never tell any of them (or any more of them).
Among justifiable lies I do not reckon that of Scott if ever he plumply
denied that he wrote the Waverley novels. I do not judge
Sir Walter. Heaven forbid! But if, in Mr. Greenwood’s
words, he, “we are told, thought it perfectly justifiable for
a writer who wished to preserve his anonymity, to deny, when questioned,
the authorship of a work, since the interrogator had no right to put
such a question to him,” {267a}
I disagree with Sir Walter. Many other measures, in accordance
with the conditions of each case, were open to him. Some are formulated
by his own Bucklaw, in The Bride of Lammermoor, as regards
questions about what occurred on his bridal night. Bucklaw would
challenge the man, and cut the lady, who asked questions. But
Scott’s case, as cited, applies only to Bacon (or Mr. Greenwood’s
Unknown), if he were asked whether or not he were the author
of the plays. No idiot, at that date, was likely to put the question!
But, if anyone did ask, Bacon must either evade, or deny, or tell the
truth.
On the parallel of Scott, Bacon could thus deny, evade, or tell the
truth. But the parallel of Scott is not applicable to any other
person except to the author who wishes to preserve his anonymity, and
is questioned. The parallel does not apply to Ben. He
had not written the Shakespearean plays. Nobody was asking
him if he had written them. If he knew that the author
was Bacon, and knew it under pledge of secrecy, and was asked (per
impossibile) “Who wrote these plays?” he had
only to say, “Look at the title-page.” But no mortal
was asking Ben the question. But we are to suppose that, in the
panegyric and in Discoveries, Ben chooses to assert, first,
that Shakespeare was his Beloved, his Sweet Swan of Avon; and that he
“loved him, on this side idolatry, as much as any.”
There is no evidence that he did love Shakespeare, except his own statement,
when, according to the Baconians, he is really speaking of Bacon, and,
according to Mr. Greenwood, of an unknown person, singularly like Bacon.
Consequently, unless we can prove that Ben really loved the actor, he
is telling a disgustingly hypocritical and wholly needless falsehood,
both before and after the death of Bacon. To be silent about the
authorship of a book, an authorship which is the secret of your friend
and patron, is one thing and a blameless thing. All the friends,
some twenty, to whom Scott confided the secret of his authorship were
silent. But not one of them publicly averred that the author was
their very dear friend, So-and-so, who was not Scott, and perhaps not
their friend at all. That was Ben’s line. Thus the
parallel with Scott drawn by Mr. Greenwood, twice, {268a}
is no parallel. It has no kind of analogy with Ben’s alleged
falsehoods, so elaborate, so incomprehensible except by Baconians, and,
if he did not love the actor Shakspere dearly, so detestably hypocritical,
and open to instant detection.
It is not easy to find a parallel to the conduct with which Ben is charged.
But suppose that Scott lived unsuspected of writing his novels, which,
let us say, he signed “James Hogg,” and died without confessing
his secret, and without taking his elaborate precautions for its preservation
on record.
Next, imagine that Lockhart knew Scott’s secret, under vow of
silence, and was determined to keep it at any cost. He therefore,
writing after the death of Hogg of Ettrick, and in Scott’s lifetime,
publishes verses declaring that Hogg was his “beloved” (an
enormous fib), and that Hogg, “Sweet Swan of Ettrick,” was
the author of the Waverley novels.
To complete the parallels, Lockhart, after Scott’s death, leaves
a note in prose to the effect that, while he loved Hogg on this side
idolatry (again, a monstrous fable), he must confess that Hogg, author
of the Waverley novels, often fell into things that were ridiculous;
and often needed to have a stopper put on him for all these remarks.
Lockhart, while speaking of Hogg, is thinking of Scott - and he makes
the remarks solely to conceal Scott’s authorship of the novels
- of which, on the hypothesis, nobody suspected Scott to be the author.
Lockhart must then have been what the Baconian Mr. Theobald calls Mr.
Churton Collins, “a measureless liar,” - all for no reason.
Mr. Greenwood, starting as usual from the case, which is no parallel,
of Scott’s denying his own authorship, goes on, “for all
we know, Jonson might have seen nothing in the least objectionable in
the publication by some great personage of his dramatic works under
a pseudonym” (under another man’s name really), “even
though that pseudonym led to a wrong conception as to the authorship;
and that, if, being a friend of that great personage, and working in
his service” (Ben worked, by the theory, in Bacon’s), “he
had solemnly engaged to preserve the secret inviolate, and not to reveal
it even to posterity, then doubtless (‘I thank thee, Jew’
(meaning Sir Sidney Lee), ‘for teaching me that word’!)
he would have remained true to that solemn pledge.” {270a}
To remain “true,” Ben had only to hold his peace.
But he lied up and down, and right and left, and even declared that
Bacon was a friend of the players, and needed to be shut up, and made
himself a laughing-stock in his plays, - styling Bacon” Shakespeare.”
All this, and much more of the same sort, we must steadfastly believe
before we can be Baconians, for only by believing these doctrines can
we get rid of Ben Jonson’s testimony to the authorship of Will
Shakspere, Gent.
CHAPTER XIII: THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF BACON
Let us now examine a miracle and mystery in which the Baconians find
nothing strange; nothing that is not perfectly normal. Bacon was
the author of the Shakespearean plays, they tell us. Let us look
rapidly at his biography, after which we may ask, does not his poetic
supremacy, and imaginative fertility, border on the miraculous, when
we consider his occupations and his ruling passion?
Bacon, born in 1561, had a prodigious genius, was well aware of it,
and had his own ideal as to the task which he was born to do.
While still at Cambridge, and therefore before he was fifteen, he was
utterly dissatisfied, as he himself informed Dr. Rawley, with the scientific
doctrines of the Schools. In the study of nature they reasoned
from certain accepted ideas, a priori principles, not from what
he came to call “interrogation of Nature.” There were,
indeed, and had long been experimental philosophers, but the school
doctors went not beyond Aristotle; and discovered nothing. As
Mr. Spedding puts it, the boy Bacon asked himself, “If our study
of nature be thus barren, our method of study must be wrong; might not
a better method be found? . . . Upon the conviction ‘This
may be done,’ followed at once the question, How may it
be done? Upon that question answered followed the resolution to
try and do it.”
This was, in religious phrase, the Conversion of Bacon, “the event
which had a greater influence than any other upon his character and
future course. From that moment he had a vocation which employed
and stimulated him . . . an object to live for as wide as humanity,
as immortal as the human race; an idea to live in vast and lofty enough
to fill the soul for ever with religious and heroic aspirations.”
{274a}
The vocation, the idea, the object, were not poetical.
In addition to this ceaseless scientific preoccupation, Bacon was much
concerned with the cause of reformed religion (then at stake in France,
and supposed to be in danger at home), and with the good government
of his native country. He could only aid that cause by the favour
of Elizabeth and James; by his services in Parliament, where, despite
his desire for advancement, he conscientiously opposed the Queen.
He was obliged to work at such tasks of various sorts, legal and polemical
literature, as were set him by people in power. With these three
great objects filling his heart, inspiring his ambition, and occupying
his energies and time, we cannot easily believe, without direct external
evidence, that he, or any mortal, could have leisure and detachment
from his main objects (to which we may add his own advancement) sufficient
to enable him to compose the works ascribed to Shakespeare.
Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583), when, if ever, he might
have penned sonnets to his mistress’s eyebrow, he reports that
he wrote “his first essay on the Instauration of Philosophy, which
he called Temporis Partus Maximus, ‘The Greatest
Birth of Time,’” and “we need not doubt that between
Law and Philosophy he found enough to do.” {275a}
For the Baconians take Bacon to have been a very great lawyer (of which
I am no judge), and Law is a hard mistress, rapacious of a man’s
hours. In 1584 he entered Parliament, but we do not hear anything
very important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote a long
pamphlet, “Touching the Controversies of the Church of England.”
{275b}
He had then leisure enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the
stage with plays I can neither prove nor disprove: but there is no proof
that he wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost!
By 1591-2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never
would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy.
He was apparently hard at scientific work. “I account my
ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most
parts of action are.” He adds, “The contemplative
planet carries me away wholly,” and by contemplation I conceive
him to mean what he calls “vast contemplative ends.”
These he proceeds to describe: he does not mean the writing of
Venus and Adonis (1593), nor of Lucrece (1594), nor of
comedies! “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,”
and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period.
“If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof the
one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities; the
other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures,
hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious
observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries
. . . This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if
one take it favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it
cannot be removed.” If Cecil cannot help him to a post,
if he cannot serve the truth, he will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras,
to voluntary poverty, “ . . . and become some sorry bookmaker,
or a true pioneer in that mine of truth . . . ” {276a}
Really, from first to last he was the prince of begging-letter writers,
endlessly asking for place, pensions, reversions, money, and more money.
Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as Shelley
at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, “my Lord Treasurer Burghley.”
What did Cecil care for his youngish kinsman’s philanthropy, and
“vast speculative ends” (how modern it all is!),
and the rest of it? But just because Bacon, at thirty-one,
is so extremely “green,” going to “take all
knowledge for his province (if some one will only subsidise him, and
endow his research), I conceive that he was in earnest about his reformation
of science. Surely no Baconian will deny it! Being so deeply
in earnest, taking his “study and meditation” so hard, I
cannot see him as the author of Venus and Adonis, and
whatever plays of the period, - say, Love’s Labour’s
Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI, Part
I, - are attributed to him, about this time, by Baconians. Of
course my view is merely personal or “subjective.”
The Baconians’ view is also “subjective.” I
regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by his
vast speculative aims:- what he says that he desires to do, in science,
is what he did, as far as he was able. His other
desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of
affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit.
There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition
in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other
professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym
of an ignorant actor.
You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do. Argument
is unavailing. I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive
letter to Cecil. Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think,
a vast literary aim. They must take his alternative - to
be “some sorry bookmaker, or a pioneer in that mine of
truth,” as meaning that he would either be the literary hack of
a company of players, or the founder of a regenerating philosophy.
But, at that date, playwrights could not well be called “bookmakers,”
for the owners of the plays did their best to keep them from appearing
as printed books. If Bacon by “bookmaker” meant “playwright,”
he put a modest value on his poetical work!
Meanwhile (1591-2), Bacon attached himself to the young, beautiful,
and famous Essex, on the way to be a Favourite, and gave him much excellent
advice, as he always did, and, as always, his advice was not taken.
It is not a novel suggestion, that Essex is the young man to whom Bacon
is so passionately attached in the Sonnets traditionally attributed
to Shakespeare. “I applied myself to him” (that is,
to Essex), says Bacon, “in a manner which, I think, happeneth
rarely among men.” The poet of the Sonnets applies himself
to the Beloved Youth, in a manner which (luckily) “happeneth rarely
among men.”
It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon’s life. But,
if you pursue the context of what Bacon says concerning Essex, you find
that he does not speak openly of a tenderly passionate attachment
to that young man; not more than this, “I did nothing
but advise and ruminate with myself, to the best of my understanding,
propositions and memorials of anything that might concern his Lordship’s
honour, fortune, or service.” {279a}
As Bacon did nothing but these things (1591-2), he had no great leisure
for writing poetry and plays. Moreover, speaking as a poet, in
the Sonnets, he might poetically exaggerate his intense amatory devotion
to Essex into the symbolism of his passionate verse. Was Essex
then a married man? If so, the Sonneteer’s insistence
on his marrying must be symbolical of - anything else you please.
We know that Bacon, at this period, “did nothing” but “ruminate”
about Essex. The words are his own! (1604). No plays, no
Venus and Adonis, nothing but enthusiastic service of
Essex and the Sonnets. Mr. Spedding, indeed, thinks that, to adorn
some pageant of Essex (November 17, 1592), Bacon kindly contributed
such matter as “Mr. Bacon in Praise of Knowledge” (containing
his usual views about regenerating science), and “Mr. Bacon’s
Discourse in Praise of his Sovereign.” {279b}
Both are excellent, though, for a Court festival, not very gay.
He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer to Father Parson’s
(?) famous indictment of Elizabeth’s Government, in Observations
on a Libel. {280a}
What with ruminating on Essex, and this essay, he was not solely devoted
to Venus and Adonis and to furbishing-up old plays, though, no
doubt, he may have unpacked his bosom in the Sonnets, and indulged
his luscious imaginations in Venus and Adonis. I would
not limit the potentialities of his genius. But, certainly, this
amazing man was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to mention
his severe “study and meditation” on science.
All these activities of Bacon, in the year of Venus and Adonis,
do not exhaust his exercises. Bacon, living laborious days,
plunged into the debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth’s
disgrace, and vainly competed with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship,
and went on to write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try
to gain the office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex’s affairs,
to plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit
for the Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of “Formularies
and Elegancies” (January 1595), to write his Essays, to try for
the Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of the doomed
Essex (1600-1), while always “labouring in secret” at that
vast aim of the reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied
him, he says, and distracted his attention from his practice and from
affairs of State. {281a}
Of these State affairs the projected Union with Scotland was the most
onerous. He was also writing The Advancement of Learning (1605).
“I do confess,” he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley, “since
I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from
that I have done.” {281b}
His mind was with his beloved Reformation of Learning: this came between
him and his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and
his private schemes and suits. To this burden of Atlas the Baconians
add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare’s company, and
the inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets. Even without
this considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough,
but with it - he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept
him and his plot - to write plays under the pseudonym of “William
Shakespeare.”
Talk of miracles as things which do not happen! The activities
of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man’s mind and
heart, - especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute
his passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem,
to me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold,
he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older.
No wonder that he turned to tragedy, Lear, Macbeth,
Othello, and saw life en noir: man delighted him not,
nor woman either.
The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of Bacon,
do not make his authorship of the plays a physical impossibility.
But they make it an intellectual miracle. Perhaps I may be allowed
to set off this marvel against that other portent, Will Shakspere’s
knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. {282a}
I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip
of his pen. Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon
and no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and
his legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only
Bacon can have been capable of these mysterious productions. (But
why was Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of scholarship and history?)
By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon (not
Ben, as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the Dedication of
the Folio. {282b}
“If it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote the plays,
he would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication of the Folio,
and the style of it” (stuffed with terms of law) “would
be accounted for.” Mr. Greenwood thinks that Jonson wrote
the Dedication; so Ben, too, was fond of using legal terms in literature.
“Legal terms abounded in all plays and poems of the period,”
says Sir Sidney Lee, and Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word “all.”
{283a}
However he says, “We must admit that this use of legal jargon
is frequently found in lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan
period - in sonnets for example, where it seems to us intolerable.”
Examples are given from Barnabe Barnes. {283b}
The lawyers all agree, however, that Shakespeare does the legal style
“more natural,” and more accurately than the rest.
And yet I cannot even argue that, if he did use legal terms at all,
he would be sure to do it pretty well.
For on this point of Will’s use of legal phraseology I frankly
profess myself entirely at a loss. To use it in poetry was part
of the worse side of taste at that period. The lawyers with one
voice declare that Will’s use of it is copious and correct, and
that their “mystery” is difficult, their jargon hard to
master; “there is nothing so dangerous,” wrote Lord Campbell,
“as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry.”
I have not tampered with it. Perhaps a man of genius who found
it interesting might have learned the technical terms more readily than
lawyers deem possible. But Will, so accurate in his legal terms,
is so inaccurate on many other points; for example, in civil and natural
history, and in classic lore. Mr. Greenwood proves him to be totally
at sea as a naturalist. On the habits of bees, for example, “his
natural history of the insect is as limited as it is inaccurate.”
{284a}
Virgil, though not a Lord Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared
with Will. About the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed.
His Natural History was folklore, or was taken from that great mediæval
storehouse of absurdities, the popular work of Pliny. “He
went to contemporary error or antiquated fancy for his facts, not to
nature,” says a critic quoted by Mr. Greenwood. {284b}
Was that worthy of Bacon?
All these charges against le vieux Williams (as Théophile
Gautier calls our Will) I admit. But Will was no Bacon; Will had
not “taken all knowledge for his province.” Bacon,
I hope, had not neglected Bees! Thus the problem, why is Will
accurate in his legal terminology, and reckless of accuracy in quantity,
in history, in classic matters, is not by me to be solved. I can
only surmise that from curiosity, or for some other unknown reason,
he had read law-books, or drawn information from Templars about the
meaning of their jargon, and that, for once, he was technically accurate.
We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian arguments
against Will Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and poems.
Their chief argument for Bacon is aut Diabolus, aut Franciscus,
which, freely interpreted, means, “If Bacon is not the author,
who the devil is?”
We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the works are
attributed by every voice of his own generation which mentions them,
namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from 1593 to the early years
of the second decade of the following century, held a prominent place
in the world of the drama. His authorship is explicitly vouched
for by his fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests
in his will; and by his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic,
Ben Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had
been one of Henslowe’s “hands,” and lived into the
Great Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from within,
and his “mellifluous Shakespeare” is “Will,”
as his Beaumont was “Frank,” his Marlowe “Kit,”
his Fletcher, “Jack.” The author of Daiphantus
(1604), mentioning the popularity of Hamlet, styles
it “one of friendly Shakespeare’s tragedies.”
Shakespeare, to him, was our Will clearly, a man of known and friendly
character. The other authors of allusions did not need to say
who their “Shakespeare” was, any more than they needed
to say who Marlowe or any other poet was. We have examined
the possibly unprecedented argument which demands that they who mention
Shakespeare as the poet must, if they would enlighten us, add explicitly
that he is also the actor.
“But all may have been deceived” by the long conspiracy
of the astute Bacon, or the Nameless One. To believe this possible,
considering the eager and suspicious jealousy and volubility of rival
playwrights, is to be credulous indeed. The Baconians, representing
Will almost as incapable of the use of pen and ink as “the old
hermit of Prague,” destroy their own case. A Will who had
to make his mark, like his father, could not pose as an author even
to the call-boy of his company. Mr. Greenwood’s bookless
Will, with some crumbs of Latin, and some power of “bumbasting
out a blank verse,” is a rather less impossible pretender, indeed;
but why and when did the speaker of patois, the bookless one, write
blank verse, from 1592 onwards, and where are his blank verses?
Where are the “works” of Poet-Ape? As to the man,
even Will by tradition, whatever it may be worth, he was “a handsome,
well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant,
smooth wit.” To his fellow-actors he was “so worthy
a friend and fellow” (associate). To Jonson, “he was,
indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy,
brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed so freely that
sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.” If Jonson
here refers, as I suppose he does, to his conversation, it had that
extraordinary affluence of thoughts, each mating itself with as remarkable
originality of richly figured expressions, which is so characteristic
of the style of Shakespeare’s plays. In this prodigality
he was remote indeed from the style of the Greeks; “panting Time
toils after him in vain,” and even the reader, much more the listener,
might say, sufflaminandus est; “he needs to have the brake
put on.” {287a}
Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will. Only despair
can venture the sad suggestion that, under the name of Shakespeare,
Ben is here speaking of Bacon, as “falling into those things which
could not escape laughter . . . which were ridiculous.”
But to this last poor shift and fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians
and Baconians reduced.
Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.
But it is “impossible” that a man should have known so much,
especially of classical literature and courtly ways, and foreign manners
and phrases, if he had no more, at most, than four or five years at
a Latin school, and five or six years in that forcing-house of faculty,
the London of the stage, in the flush of the triumph over the Armada.
“With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite fardles
of printed pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and
every study furnished,” says a contemporary. {288a}
If a doubter will look at the cheap and common books of that day (a
play in quarto, and the Sonnets of Shakespeare, when new, were sold
for fippence) in any great collection; he will not marvel that to a
lover of books, poor as he might be, many were accessible. Such
a man cannot be kept from books.
If the reader will look into “the translations and imitations
of the classics which poured from the press . . . the poems and love-pamphlets
and plays of the University wits” (when these chanced to be printed),
“the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing taste,” {288b}
he will understand the literary soil in which the genius of Shakespeare
blossomed as rapidly as the flowers in “Adonis’ garden.”
The whole literature was, to an extent which we find tedious, saturated
with classical myths, anecdotes, philosophic dicta - a world
of knowledge of a kind then “in widest commonalty spread,”
but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians and the public, such lore
seems recondite learning.
The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits as could
get the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to “dispute their
way through Europe,” made the Italian tour, and, notoriously,
were “Italianate.” They would not be chary of reminiscences
of Florence, Venice, and Rome. Actors visited Denmark and Germany.
No man at home was far to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious
Venetian “tranect or common ferry,” the gondolas, and the
Rialto. There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble from the
foreign wars. Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be surprised
by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of
Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish.
That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian
fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his works.
For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly’s
Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the
houses of the great. As to untaught nobility of manners, there
came to the Court of France in 1429, from a small pig-breeding village
on the marches of Lorraine, one whose manners were deemed of exquisite
grace, propriety, and charm, by all who saw and heard her: of her manners
and swift wit and repartee, the official record of her trial bears concordant
evidence. Other untaught gifts she possessed, and the historic
record is unimpeached as regards that child of genius, Jeanne d’Arc.
“Ne me dites jamais cette bête de mot, impossible,”
said Napoleon: it is indeed a stupid word where genius is concerned.
If intellectual “miracles” were impossible to genius, even
Bacon could not have been and done all that he was and did, and also
the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems; even Ben could not
have been the scholar that he was. For the rest, I need not return
on my tracks and explain once more such shallow mysteries as the “Silence
of Philip Henslowe,” and the lack of literary anecdotage about
Shakespeare in a stupendously illiterate country town. Had Will,
not Ben, visited Drummond of Hawthornden, we should have matter enough
of the kind desired.
“We have the epics of Homer,” people say, “what matters
it whether they be by a Man, or by a Syndicate that was in business
through seven centuries? We have the plays of Shakespeare, what
matters it whether he, or Bacon, or X. were, in the main, the author?”
It matters to us, if we hold such doubts to be fantastic pedantries,
such guesses contrary to the nature of things; while we wish to give
love and praise and gratitude where they are due; to that Achæan
“Father of the rest”; and to “friendly Shakespeare.”
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I: “TROILUS AND CRESSIDA”
To myself Troilus and Cressida is, with Henry VI, Part
I, the most mysterious among the Shakespearean plays. Here we
find, if Will wrote it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of
the modern world in touch with the heroes of the greatest poet of the
ancient world; but the English author’s eyes are dimmed by the
mists and dust of post-Homeric perversions of the Tale of Troy.
The work of perversion began, we know, in the eighth century before
our era, when, by the author of the Cypria, these favourite
heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were represented as scoundrels,
assassins, and cowards.
In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that the writer
is no scholar. He makes the Achæan fleet muster in “the
port of Athens,” of all places. Even Ovid
gave the Homeric trysting-place, Aulis, in Bœotia. (This
Prologue is not in the Folio of 1623.) Six gates hath the Englishman’s
Troy, and the Scæan is not one of them.
The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as go-between, are
from the mediæval Troy books, and were wholly unknown to Homer,
whose Pandarus is only notable for loosing a traitor’s shaft at
Menelaus, in time of truce, and for his death at the hand of Diomede.
The play begins after the duel (Iliad, III) between Paris and Menelaus:
in the play, not in Homer, Paris “retires hurt,” as is at
first reported. Hector has a special grudge against the Telamonian
Aias. As in the Iliad there is a view of the Achæans, taken
from the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in the play, Pandarus and Cressida
review the Trojans re-entering the city. Paris turns out not to
be hurt after all.
In Act i. Scene 3, the Achæans hold council, and regret the disaffection
of Achilles. Here comes Ulysses’ great speech on discipline,
in armies, and in states, the gradations of rank and duty; commonly
thought to be a leaf in Shakespeare’s crown of bays. The
speeches of Agamemnon and Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet treats
Agamemnon much more kindly than Homer is wont to do. But the poet
represents Achilles as laughing in his quarters at Patroclus’s
imitation of the cough and other infirmities of old Nestor, to which
Homer, naturally, never alludes. Throughout, the English poet
regards Achilles with the eyes of his most infamous late Greek and ignorant
mediæval detractors. The Homeric sequence of events is so
far preserved that, on the day of the duel between Paris and Menelaus,
comes (through Æneas) the challenge by Hector to fight any Greek
in “gentle and joyous passage of arms” (Iliad, VII).
As in the Iliad, the Greeks decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but
by the contrivance of Odysseus (not by chance, as in Homer) the lot
falls on Aias. In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic
as Porthos in Les Trois Mousquetaires. The play makes him
as great an eater of beef, and as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
Achilles, save in a passage quite out of accord with the rest of the
piece, is nearly as dull as Aias, is discourteous, and is cowardly!
No poet and no scholar who knew Homer’s heroes in Homer’s
Greek, could thus degrade them; and the whole of the revilings of Thersites
are loathsome in their profusion of filthy thoughts. It does not
follow that Will did not write the part of Thersites. Some of
the most beautiful and Shakespearean pieces of verse adorn the play;
one would say that no man but Will could have written them. Troilus
and Cressida, at first, appear “to dally with the innocence of
love”; and nothing can be nobler and more dramatic than the lines
in which Cressida, compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the Greek
camp, in exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love.
But the Homeric and the alien later elements, - the story of false love,
- cannot be successfully combined. The poet, whoever he was, appears
to weary and to break down. He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends,
with the death of Hector, but Hector, in the play, is murdered, while
resting unarmed, without shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of
sumptuous mail from a nameless runaway. In the play he has slain
Patroclus, but has not stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which,
in Homer, he is wearing. Achilles then meets Hector, but far from
rushing to avenge on him Patroclus, he retires like a coward, musters
his men, and makes them surround and slay the defenceless Hector.
Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a
day becomes “the sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and of
Diomede, and the comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of
1609, is a squalid tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light
o’ love, and the base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly
Hector. Yet there seemed to be muffled notes from the music, and
broken lights from the splendour of Homer. When Achilles eyes
Hector all over, during a truce, and insultingly says that he is thinking
in what part of his body he shall drive the spear, we are reminded of
Iliad, XXII, 320-326, where Achilles searches his own armour, worn by
Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him, and worn by Hector, for a chink
in the mail. Yet, after all, these points are taken, not from
the Iliad, but from Caxton’s popular Troy Book.
Once more, when Hector is dead, and Achilles bids his men to
“cry amain,
Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain,”
we think of Iliad, XXII, 390-393, where Achilles commands the Myrmidons
to go singing the pæan
“Glory have we won, we have slain great Hector!”
The sumptuous armour stripped by Hector from a nameless man, recalls
his winning of the arms of Achilles from Patroclus. But, in fact,
this passage is also borrowed, with the murder of Hector, from Caxton,
except as regards the pæan.
It may be worth noting that Chapman’s first instalment of his
translation of the Iliad, containing Books I, II, and VII-XI, appeared
in 1598, and thence the author could adapt the passages from Iliad,
Book VII. In or about 1598-9 occurred, in Histriomastix,
by Marston and others, a burlesque speech in which Troilus, addressing
Cressida, speaks of “thy knight,” who “Shakes his
furious Speare,” while in April 1599, Henslowe’s
account-book contains entries of money paid to Dekker and Chettle for
a play on Troilus and Cressida, for the Earl of Nottingham’s Company.
{297a}
Of this play no more is known, nor can we be sure that Chapman’s
seven Books of the Iliad (I, II, VII-XI) of 1598 attracted the attention
of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Chettle and Dekker, to Trojan affairs.
The coincidences at least are curious. If “Shakes his
furious Speare” in Histriomastix refers to
Shakespeare in connection with Cressida, while, in 1599, Dekker and
Chettle were doing a Troilus and Cressida for a company not Shakespeare’s,
then there were two Troilus and Cressida in the field.
A licence to print a Troilus and Cressida was obtained in 1602-3,
but the quarto of our play, the Shakespearean play, is of 1609, “as
it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain’s men,” that is, by Shakespeare’s
Company. Now Dekker and Chettle wrote, apparently, for Lord Nottingham’s
Company. One quarto of 1609 declares, in a Preface, that the play
has “never been staled with the stage”; another edition
of the same year, from the same publishers, has not the Preface, but
declares that the piece “was acted by the King’s Majesty’s
servants at the Globe.” {298a}
The author of the Preface (Ben Jonson, Mr. Greenwood thinks, {298b})
speaks only of a single author, who has written other admirable comedies.
“When he is gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will scramble
for them, and set up a new English Inquisition.” Why?
The whole affair is a puzzle. But if the author of the Preface
is right about the single author of Troilus and Cressida,
and if Shakespeare is alluded to in connection with Cressida, in
Histriomastix (1599), then it appears to me that Shakespeare,
in 1598-9, after Chapman’s portion of the Iliad appeared, was
author of one Troilus and Cressida, extant in 1602-3 (when
its publication was barred till the publisher “got authority”),
while Chettle and Dekker, in April 1599, were busy with another Troilus
and Cressida, as why should they not be? In an age
so lax about copyright, if their play was of their own original making,
are we to suppose that there was copyright in the names of the leading
persons of the piece, Troilus and Cressida?
Perhaps not: but meanwhile Mr. Greenwood cites Judge Stotsenburg’s
opinion {298c}
that Henslowe’s entries of April 1599 “refute the Shakespearean
claim to the authorship of Troilus and Cressida,” which
exhibits “the collaboration of two men,” as “leading
commentators” hold that it does. But the learned Judge mentions
as a conceivable alternative that “there were two plays on the
subject with the same name,” and, really, it looks as if there
were! The Judge does not agree “with Webb and other gifted
writers that Bacon wrote this play.” So far the Court is
quite with him. He goes on however, “It was, in my opinion,
based on the foregoing facts, originally the production of Dekker and
Chettle, added to and philosophically dressed by Francis Bacon.”
But, according to Mr. Greenwood, “it is admitted not only that
the different writing of two authors is apparent in the Folio play,
but also that ‘Shakespeare’ must have had at least some
share in a play of Troilus and Cressida as early as the very
year 1599, in the spring of which Dekker and Chettle are found engaged
in writing their play of that name,” on the evidence of Histriomastix.
{299a}
How that evidence proves that “a play of Troilus and Cressida
had been published as by ‘Shakespeare’ about
1599,” I know not. Perhaps “published” means
“acted”? “And it is not unreasonable to suppose
that this play” (“published as by Shakespeare”) “was
the one to which Henslowe alludes” - as being written in April
1599, by Dekker and Chettle.
If so, the play must show the hands of three, not two, men, Dekker,
Chettle, and “Shakespeare,” the Great Unknown, or Bacon.
He collaborates with Dekker and Chettle, in a play for Lord Nottingham’s
men (according to Sir Sidney Lee), {300a}
but it is, later at least, played by Shakespeare’s company; and
perhaps Bacon gets none of the £4 paid {300b}
to Dekker and Chettle. Henslowe does not record his sale of the
Dekker and Chettle play to Shakespeare’s or to any company or
purchaser. Without an entry of the careful Henslowe recording
his receipts for the sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to any purchaser,
it is not easy to see how Shakespeare’s company procured the manuscript,
and thus enabled him to refashion it. Perhaps no reader will fail
to recognise his hand in the beautiful blank verse of many passages.
I am not familiar enough with the works of Dekker and Chettle to assign
to them the less desirable passages. Thersites is beastly: a Yahoo
of Swift’s might poison with such phrases as his the name and
nature of love, loyalty, and military courage. But whatsoever
Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly, and if he were weary, if man delighted
him not, nor woman either, he may have written the whole piece, in which
love perishes for the whim of “a daughter of the game,”
and the knightly Hector is butchered to sate the vanity of his cowardly
Achilles. If Shakespeare read the books translated by Chapman,
he must have read them in the same spirit as Keats, and was likely to
find that the poetry of the Achæan could not be combined with
the Ionian, Athenian, and Roman perversions, as he knew them in the
mediæval books of Troy, in the English of Lydgate and Caxton.
The chivalrous example of Chaucer he did not follow. Probably
Will looked on the play as one of his failures. The Editor, if
we can speak of an Editor, of the Folio clearly thrust the play in late,
so confusedly that it is not paged, and is not mentioned in the table
of the contents.
“The Grand Possessors” of the play referred to in the Preface
to one of the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to be Shakespeare’s
Company. In this case the owners would not permit the publication
of the play if they could prevent it. The title provokes Mr. Greenwood
to say, “Why these worthies should be so styled is not apparent;
indeed the supposition seems not a little ridiculous.” {301a}
Of course, if the players were the possessors, “grand” is
merely a jeer, by a person advertising a successful piracy. And
in regard to Tieck’s conjecture that James I is alluded to as
“the grand possessor, for whom the play was expressly written,”
{301b} the autocratic
James was very capable of protecting himself against larcenous publishers.
APPENDIX II - CHETTLE’S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL SHAKSPERE
In discussing contemporary allusions to William Shakspere or Shakespeare
(or however you spell the name), I have not relied on Chettle’s
remarks (in Kind-Hart’s Dreame, 1592) concerning Greene’s
Groatsworth of Wit. Chettle speaks of it, saying, “in
which a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one
or two of them taken.” It appears that by “one or
two” Chettle means two. “With neither of
them that take offence was I acquainted” (at the time when he
edited the Groatsworth), “and with one of them I care not
if I never be.” We do not know who “the Gentlemen
his Quondam acquaintance,” addressed by Greene, were. They
are usually supposed to have been Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge, or Nash.
We do not know which of the two who take offence is the man with whom
Chettle did not care to be acquainted. Of “the other,”
according to Chettle, “myself have seen his demeanour no less
civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes” (that
is, “in his profession,” as we say), “besides divers
of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his
honesty; and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.”
Speaking from his own observation, Chettle avers that the person of
whom he speaks is civil in his demeanour, and (apparently) that
he is “excellent in the quality he professes” - in his profession.
Speaking on the evidence of “divers of worship,” the same
man is said to possess “facetious grace in writing.”
Had his writings been then published, Chettle, a bookish man, would
have read them and formed his own opinion. Works of Lodge, Peele,
and Marlowe had been published. Writing is not “the
quality he professes,” is not the “profession” of
the man to whom Chettle refers. On the other hand, the profession
of Greene’s “Quondam acquaintance” was writing,
“they spend their wits in making Plays.” Thus the
man who wrote, but whose profession was not that of writing, does not,
so far, appear to have been one of those addressed by Greene.
It seems undeniable that Greene addresses gentlemen who are “playmakers,”
who “spend their wits in making Plays,” and who are not
actors; for Greene’s purpose is to warn them against the rich,
ungrateful actors. If Greene’s friends, at the moment when
he wrote, were, or if any one of them then was, by profession an actor,
Greene’s warning to him against actors, directed to an actor,
is not, to me, intelligible. But Mr. Greenwood writes, “As
I have shown, George Peele was one of the playwrights addressed by Greene,
and Peele was a successful player as well as playwright, and might quite
truly have been alluded to both as having ‘facetious grace in
writing,’ and being ‘excellent in the quality he professed,’
that is, as a professional actor.” {304a}
I confess that I did not know that George Peele, M.A., of Oxford, had
ever been a player, and a successful player. But one may ask,
- in 1592 did George Peele “profess the quality” of an actor;
was he then a professional actor, and only an occasional playwright?
If so, I am not apt to believe that Greene seriously advised him not
to put faith in the members of his own profession. From them,
as a successful member of their profession (a profession which, as Greene
complains, “exploited” dramatic authors), Peele stood in
no danger. Thus I do not see how Chettle’s professional
actor, reported to have facetious grace in writing, can be identified
with Peele. The identification seems to me impossible. Peele
and Marlowe, in 1592, were literary gentlemen; Lodge, in 1592, was filibustering,
though a literary man; he had not yet become a physician. In 1592,
none of the three had any profession but that of literature, so far
as I am aware. The man who had a special profession, and also
wrote, was not one of these three; nor was he Tom Nash, a mere literary
gentleman, pamphleteer and playwright.
I do not know the name of any one of the three to whom Greene addressed
the Groatsworth, though the atheistic writer of tragedies seems
meant, and disgracefully meant, for Marlowe. I only know that
Chettle is expressing his regrets for Greene’s language to some
one whom he applauded as to his exercise of his profession; and who,
according to “divers of worship,” had also “facetious
grace in writing.” “Myself have seen him no less civil
than he is excellent in the quality he professes”; whether or
not this means that Chettle has seen his excellence in his profession,
I cannot tell for certain; but Chettle’s remark is, at least,
contrasted with what he gives merely from report - “the facetious
grace in writing” of the man in question. His writing
is not part of his profession, so he is not, in 1592 (I conceive), Lodge,
Peele, Marlowe, or Nash.
Who, then, is this mysterious personage? Malone, Dyce, Steevens,
Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Knight, Sir Sidney Lee, Messrs. Gosse
and Garnett, and Mr. J. C. Collins say that he is Will Shakspere.
But Mr. Fleay and Mr. Castle, whose “mind” is “legal,”
have pointed out that this weird being cannot be Shake-scene (or Shakspere,
if Greene meant Shakspere), attacked by Greene. For Chettle says
that in the Groatsworth of Wit “a letter, written to divers
play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken.”
The mysterious one is, therefore, one of the playwrights addressed by
Greene. Consequently all the followers of Malone, who wrote before
Messrs. Fleay and Castle, are mistaken; and what Mr. Greenwood has to
say about Sir Sidney Lee, J. C. Collins, and Dr. Garnett, and Mr. Gosse,
in the way of moral reprobation, may be read by the curious in his pages.
{305a}
Meanwhile, if we take Chettle to have been a strict grammarian, by his
words - “a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively
by one or two of them taken,” Will is excluded; the letter was
most assuredly not written to him. But I, whose mind is
not legal, am not certain that Chettle does not mean that the letter,
written to divers play-makers, was by one or two makers of plays offensively
taken.
This opinion seems the less improbable, as the person to whom Chettle
is most apologetic excels in a quality or profession, which is contrasted
with, and is not identical with, “his facetious grace in writing”
- a parergon, or “ bye-work,” in his case.
Whoever this person was, he certainly was not Marlowe, Peele, Lodge,
or Nash. We must look for some other person who had a profession,
and also was reported to have facetious grace in writing.
If Chettle is to be held tight to grammar, Greene referred to some one
unknown, some one who wrote for the stage, but had another profession.
If Chettle is not to be thus tautly construed, I confess that to myself
he seems to have had Shakspere, even Will, in his mind. For Will
in 1592 had “a quality which he professed,” that of an actor;
and also (I conceive) was reported to have “ facetious grace in
writing.” But other gentlemen may have combined these attributes;
wherefore I lay no stress on the statements of Chettle, as if they referred
to our Will Shakspere.
Footnotes:
{0a} E. J.
Castle, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene,
pp. 194-195.
{0b} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 145.
{0c} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 340.
{0d} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 340, 341.
{0e} In
Re Shakespeare, p. 54.
{0f} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 341.
{0g} Ibid.,
p. 470.
{0h} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 339.
{0i} The
Vindicators of Shakespeare, pp. 115-116.
{0j} Ibid.,
p. 49.
{0k} The
Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 14.
{4a} Francis
Bacon Wrote Shakespeare. By H. Crouch-Batchelor, 1912.
{7a} The
Shakespere Problem Restated, p. 293.
{11a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 31-37.
{13a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 36-37.
{16a} Tue
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 20.
{17a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 47-48.
{17b} Ibid.,
pp. 54-55.
{17c} Ibid.,
p. 54.
{17d} Ibid.,
p. 56.
{17e} Ibid.,
p. 59.
{17f} Ibid.,
p. 62.
{17g} Ibid.,
p. 193.
{18a} See
his Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 210.
{19a} Vindicators,
p. 187.
{19b} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 223.
{21a} In
Re Shakespeare, p. 54.
{22a} In
a brief note of two pages (Cornhill Magazine, November
1911) he makes such reply as the space permits to a paper of my own,
“Shakespeare or X?” in the September number. With
my goodwill he might have written thirty-two pages to my sixteen, but
I am not the Editor, and never heard of Mr. Greenwood’s note till
May 1912.
He says that I had represented him as stating that the Unknown genius
adopted the name of William Shake-speare or Shakespeare as a good nom
de guerre, without any reference to the fact that there was an actor
in existence of the name of William Shakspere, whose name was sometimes
written Shakespeare, and without the least idea that the works he published
under this pseudonym would be fathered upon the actor . . . ”
(My meaning has obviously been too obscurely stated by me.)
Mr. Greenwood next writes that the confusion between the actor, and
the unknown taking the name William Shakespeare, “did happen and
was intended to happen.”
C’est là le miracle!
How could it happen if the actor were the bookless, ignorant man whom
Mr. Greenwood describes? It could not happen: Will must have been
unmasked in a day. The fact that a strange plot existed was only
too obvious. The Unknown’s secret must have been tracked
by the hounds of keenest nose in the packs of rival and jealous authors
and of actors. None gives tongue.
{27a} Francis
Bacon Wrote Shakespeare, p. 37.
{30a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 333.
{31a} In
the passage which I quoted, with notes of omission, from Mr. Greenwood
(p. 333), he went on to say that the eulogies of the poet by “some
cultured critics of that day,” “afford no proof that the
author who published under the name of Shakespeare was in reality Shakspere
the Stratford player.” That position I later contest.
{31b} See
chap. XI, The First Folio.
{33a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 305, 306.
{34a} Furness,
Merchant of Venice, pp. 271, 272.
{34b} On
this see Mr. Pollard’s Shakespeare Folios and Quartos,
pp. 1-9.
{37a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 202, 348, 349.
{38a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 349.
{44a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 356.
{45a} In
Re Shakespeare, p. 88, note I.
{48a} Studies
in Shakespeare, p. 15; Life of Shakespeare, by
Malone, pp. 561-2, 564; Appendix, XI, xvi.
{50a} C.
I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
pp. 97, 98.
{51a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 44.
{52a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 39.
{52b} Vindicators
of Shakespeare, p. 210.
{53a} Vindicators
of Shakespeare, p. 187.
{53b} Shakespeare
Problem Restated, p. 223.
{55a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 69.
{56a} See
chapter X, The Traditional Shakespeare.
{56b}
See C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
pp. 48, 343-8.
{57a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 207-9.
{59a} Chapter
X, infra.
{62a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 96.
{62b} See
chapter X, The Traditional Shakespeare.
{62c}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 94-96.
{64a} Shakespeare,
pp. 38-40.
{65a} Raleigh,
Shakespeare, pp. 77, 78.
{69a} So
he seems to me to do; but in Vindicators of Shakespeare, p.
135, he shows great caution: “I refer the reader to Mr. Collin’s
essay, and ask him to judge for himself.”
{71a} Studies
in Shakespeare, p. 15.
{72a} Studies
in Shakespeare, p. 21.
{75a} Alcibiades,
I, pp. 132, 133; Troilus, III, scene 3.
{77a} Studies
in Shakespeare, p. 46.
{77b} Iliad,
p. 63.
{91a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 54, 55.
{93a} National
Review, vol. xxxix., 1902.
{93b} The
Pilot, Aug. 30, 1902, p. 220.
{96a} The
oldest mention of a circulating library known to me is in Hull,
in 1650, when Sir James Turner found it excellent.
{97a} In
his Shakespeare (English Men of Letters), pp. 66,
67.
{97b} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 77, 78.
{97c} The
Shakespearean Myth, p. 162.
{100a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 76.
{101a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 81, note I.
{103a}
Penzance, The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, pp. 150,
151. Citing Appleton Morgan’s Shakespearean Myth, pp.
248, 298.
{106a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 175.
{107a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 457.
{109a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 58.
{109b}
Apology the Actors, 1612.
{110a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 267.
{111a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 267, 268.
{112a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 50-52.
{113a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 51.
{113b}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 51.
{113c}
Ibid., p. 500, citing Mr. Reed’s Francis Bacon our Shake-speare,
chap. ii. pp. 62, 63.
{113d}
Ibid., pp. 500-520, chap xvi.
{114a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 512.
{114b}
Ibid., p. 514.
{114c}
Ibid., p. 386, note I.
{114d}
Ibid., p. 93.
{120a}
Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v. p. 126.
Prof. G. P. Baker.
{121a}
Furness, Love’s Labour’s Lost, pp.
xiii., 348-350: cf. pp. 348, 349, for the four distinct styles
of linguistic affectation of the period, at least as they are represented
in literature.
{121b}
Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light, Appendix on Marlowe.
{124a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 516.
{126a}
Act i. Scene 2. Furness, Love’s Labour’s
Lost, p. 45, note.
{127a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 67, 68.
{129a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 66.
{129b}
Ibid., p. 67.
{136a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 307.
{138a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 308.
{140a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 309.
{141a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 310.
{141b}
Ibid., pp. 310, 311.
{141c}
Ibid., p. 311.
{142a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 309.
{142b}
Ibid., pp. 311, 312.
{143a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 312, 313.
{145a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 313.
{146a}
See Appendix II, “Chettle’s supposed allusion
to Will Shakspere.”
{147a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 330.
{149a}
The Vindicators of Shakespeare, pp. 115, 116, 211.
See my Introduction, p. xxii.
{150a}
The Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 210.
{150b}
Ibid., p. 136.
{151a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 338.
{155a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 346.
{157a}
Cited in The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 353.
{159a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 353.
{159b}
Diary, pp. xxvii, xxviii.
{160a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 367.
{160b}
Ibid., pp. 368, 369.
{161a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 354.
{163a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 366.
{164a}
Some Baconians say so!
{171a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 181, 397.
{171b}
Ibid., p. 186.
{174a}
Some verses of Fletcher’s may, perhaps, refer to Beaumont’s
death.
{175a}
C. I. Elton, Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp.
246, 247.
{175b}
As to the Aldine Ovid in the Bodleian, see Mr. Greenwood in The Vindicators
of Shakespeare, pp. 191, 192. Of course he raises every
objection, but I do not feel sure that either an affirmative or negative
result can be attained by expertise. We are not told when
or where the Bodleian obtained the book; nor what is the date of the
handwriting of the inscription about W. Hall, a personage whom we are
to meet later. A good deal of business is done in forging names
in books.
{176a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 196.
{176b}
Ibid., p. 197.
{177a}
See Frontispiece,
{179a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 247, 248, note I.
{180a}
National Review, June 1912, p. 903.
{180b}
Pall Mall Gazette, November 1910.
{181a}
Outlines, vol. i. p. 283.
{182a}
P. 73, 1806.
{183a}
Outlines, vol. i. p. 283.
{183b}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 247.
{186a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 248-249.
{186b}
C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
pp. 236-237.
{187a}
C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
p. 228.
{187b}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 199.
{187c}
C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
pp. 332-333.
{187d}
Ibid., p. 250.
{188a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 199, note 1.
{189a}
C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
pp. 339, 342.
{190a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 238.
{198a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 214.
{200a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 214, note 2.
{201a}
C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
p. 56.
{201b}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 28, 29.
{207a}
Like Mr. Greenwood, I think that Ben was the penman.
{208a}
Pollard, ut supra, p. 10.
{210a}
Pollard, ut supra, pp. 64-80.
{215a}
Pollard, ut supra, pp. 121-124.
{216a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 287-288.
{217a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 290-291.
{217b}
Ibid., pp. 292, 293.
{218a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
{219a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 489, 490.
{219b}
Ibid., p. 491.
{219c}
Studies in Shakespeare, p. 352.
{220a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
{220b}
Ibid., p. 491.
{220c}
Ibid., p. 293.
{220d}
Ibid., p. 293.
{221a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 297.
{221b}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 297.
{222a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
{222b}
Ibid., p. 351.
{222c}
Ibid., p. 351.
{222d}
Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
{222e}
Ibid., pp. 351, 358.
{223a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 351.
{223b}
Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
{223c}
Ibid., p. 351.
{223d}
Ibid., p. 351.
{223e}
Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
{223f}
Ibid., p. 290.
{223g}
Ibid., pp. 290, 291.
{223h}
Ibid., p. 293.
{224a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 351.
{224b}
Ibid., p. 358.
{224c}
Ibid., pp. 351, 358.
{224d}
Ibid., p. 290.
{224e}
Ibid., p. 293.
{225a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 355, 356.
{226a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 355, 356.
{226b}
Ibid., pp. 158, 160, 162 (“not the original author”),
170.
{226c}
Ibid., pp. 130-151, 160, 168.
{226d}
Ibid., p., 123, note 2.
{227a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 356.
{228a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 160.
{228b}
Ibid., p. 356.
{228c}
Ibid., p. 160.
{228d}
Ibid., p. 356.
{228e}
Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
{228f}
Ibid., p. 358.
{229a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 365. I will
bet Mr. Greenwood any sum not exceeding half a crown that he cannot
find any “records of the writing of” either of these plays
in Henslowe’s “Diary,” - his account book of expenses
and receipts.
{229b}
Ibid., p. 365.
{229c}
Ibid., p. 365.
{229d}
Ibid., p. 160.
{231a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 276.
{231b}
Ibid., p. 290.
{232a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
{232b}
Ibid., p. 294.
{233a}
The Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 57 (1911).
{237a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 453.
{244a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 466.
{245a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 313.
{245b}
Supra, p. 143.
{245c}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 466.
{249a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 482.
{250a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 467, 471.
{250b}
See chapter IX on The Later Life of Shakespeare.
{250c}
Ibid., pp. 472, 474.
{251a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 473.
{251b}
Ibid., p. 474.
{253a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 475.
{254a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 106.
{255a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 478.
{258a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 480.
{259a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.
{260a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.
{260b}
Ibid., pp. 489-490.
{260c}
See chapter XI, The First Folio.
{261a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.
{261b}
Ibid., pp. 489-491.
{262a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 486.
{264a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 488.
{266a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 491.
{267a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 295, cf. p.
499.
{268a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 295, 499.
{270a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 499.
{274a}
Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
vol. i. p. 4 (1861).
{275a}
Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
vol. i. p. 31.
{275b}
Ibid., vol. i. pp. 74-95.
{276a}
Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
vol. i. pp. 108-109.
{279a}
Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
vol. i. p. 106.
{279b}
Ibid., vol. i. pp. 121-143.
{280a}
Sixty pages in Spedding’s Letters and Life of Francis Bacon,
vol. i. pp. 146-208.
{281a}
See his statement (1603), Spedding, iii. pp. 84-87.
{281b}
Ibid., iii. p. 253.
{282a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 371-406.
{282b}
The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, p. 198.
{283a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 391.
{283b}
Ibid., pp. 408-410.
{284a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 425.
{284b}
Ibid., p. 431.
{287a}
Sufflamen is the “drag” or “brake.”
Ben’s, “it was necessary he should be stopped,”
is an incorrect translation.
{288a}
Quoted by Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, p. 65.
{288b}
Ibid., p. 65.
{297a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 358-362.
{298a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 491-494.
{298b}
Ibid., p. 495.
{298c}
Ibid., pp. 358-360.
{299a} The
Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 361.
{300a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 360.
{300b}
Ibid., p. 358.
{301a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 495, note I.
{301b}
Ibid., p. 494.
{304a}
Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 69.
{305a}
The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 317-319.
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