“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.
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_!
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.