‘Of Scholars and Schoole.
‘God give you good morrow, Sir! Good morrow gossip: good morrow my she
gossip: God give you a good morrow and a good year.’
Thus the familiar salutation was not introduced by Bacon; it was, on the
other hand, the very first formula which a writer of an English-French
phrase-book translated into French ten years before Bacon made his
notes. Presently he comes to ‘Good evening, good night, good rest,’ and
so on.
This fact annihilates Mrs. Pott’s contention that Bacon introduced
‘Good morrow’ through the plays falsely attributed to Shakespeare. There
follows, in ‘Promus,’ a string of proverbs, salutations, and quotations,
about sleep and waking. Among these occur ‘Golden Sleepe’ (No. 1207) and
(No. 1215) ‘Uprouse. You are up.’ Now Friar Laurence says to Romeo:--
But where unbruised youth with unstuffed brain
Doth couch his limbs, there GOLDEN SLEEP doth reign:
Therefore thy earliness doth me assure,
Thou art UP-ROUSED by some distemperature.
Dr. Abbott writes: ‘Mrs. Pott’s belief is that the play is indebted for
these expressions to the “Promus;” mine is that the “Promus” is borrowed
from the play.’ And why should either owe anything to the other? The
phrase ‘Uprouse’ or ‘Uprose’ is familiar in Chaucer, from one of his
best-known lines. ‘Golden’ is a natural poetic adjective of excellence,
from Homer to Tennyson. Yet in Dr. Abbott’s opinion ‘TWO of these
entries constitute a coincidence amounting almost to a demonstration’
that either Shakespeare or Bacon borrowed from the other. And this
because each writer, one in making notes of commonplaces on sleep, the
other in a speech about sleep, uses the regular expression ‘Uprouse,’
and the poetical commonplace ‘Golden sleep’ for ‘Good rest.’ There was
no originality in the matter.
We have chosen Dr. Abbott’s selected examples of Mrs. Pott’s triumphs.
Here is another of her parallels. Bacon gives the formula, ‘I pray God
your early rising does you no hurt.’ Shakespeare writes:--
Go, you cot-quean, go,
Get you to bed; faith, you’ll be sick to-morrow
For this night’s watching.
Here Bacon notes a morning salutation, ‘I hope you are none the worse
for early rising,’ while Shakespeare tells somebody not to sit up late.
Therefore, and for similar reasons, Bacon is Shakespeare.
We are not surprised to find Mr. Bucke adopting Mrs. Pott’s theory of
the novelty of ‘Good morrow.’ He writes in the Christmas number of
an illustrated sixpenny magazine, and his article, a really masterly
compendium of the whole Baconian delirium, addresses its natural public.
But we are amazed to find Dr. Abbott looking not too unkindly on such
imbecilities, and marching at least in the direction of Coventry with
such a regiment. He is ‘on one point a convert’ to Mrs. Pott, and that
point is the business of ‘Good morrow,’ ‘Uprouse,’ and ‘Golden sleepe.’
It need hardly be added that the intrepid Mr. Donnelly is also a firm
adherent of Mrs. Pott.
‘Some idea,’ he says, ‘may be formed of the marvellous industry of this
remarkable lady when I state that to prove that we are indebted to Bacon
for having enriched the English language, through the plays, with these
beautiful courtesies of speech, ‘Good morrow,’ ‘Good day,’ etc., she
carefully examined SIX THOUSAND WORKS ANTERIOR TO OR CONTEMPORARY WITH
BACON.’
Dr. Abbott thought it judicious to ‘hedge’ about these six thousand
works, and await ‘the all-knowing dictionary’ of Dr. Murray and
the Clarendon Press. We have deemed it simpler to go to the first
Elizabethan phrase-book on our shelves, and that tiny volume, in its
very first phrase, shatters the mare’s-nest of Mrs. Pott, Mr. Donnelly,
and Mr. Bucke.
But why, being a great poet, should Bacon conceal the fact, and choose
as a mask a man whom, on the hypothesis of his ignorance, every one that
knew him must have detected as an impostor? Now, one great author did
choose to conceal his identity, though he never shifted the burden of
the ‘Waverley Novels’ on to Terry the actor. Bacon may, conceivably,
have had Scott’s pleasure in secrecy, but Bacon selected a mask much
more impossible (on the theory) than Terry would have been for Scott.
Again, Sir Walter Scott took pains to make his identity certain, by an
arrangement with Constable, and by preserving his manuscripts, and he
finally confessed. Bacon never confessed, and no documentary traces of
his authorship survive. Scott, writing anonymously, quoted his own poems
in the novels, an obvious ‘blind.’ Bacon, less crafty, never (as far as
we are aware) mentions Shakespeare.
It is arguable, of course, that to write plays might seem dangerous to
Bacon’s professional and social position. The reasons which might make a
lawyer keep his dramatic works a secret could not apply to ‘Lucrece.’
A lawyer, of good birth, if he wrote plays at all, would certainly not
vamp up old stock pieces. That was the work of a ‘Johannes Factotum,’ of
a ‘Shakescene,’ as Greene says, of a man who occupied the same position
in his theatrical company as Nicholas Nickleby did in that of Mr.
Crummles. Nicholas had to bring in the vulgar pony, the Phenomenon,
the buckets, and so forth. So, in early years, the author of the plays
(Bacon, by the theory) had to work over old pieces. All this is the
work of the hack of a playing company; it is not work to which a man
in Bacon’s position could stoop. Why should he? What had he to gain by
patching and vamping? Certainly not money, if the wealth of Shakespeare
is a dark mystery to the Baconian theorists. We are asked to believe
that Bacon, for the sake of some five or six pounds, toiled at
refashioning old plays, and handed the fair manuscripts to Shakespeare,
who passed them off, among the actors who knew him intimately, as his
own. THEY detected no incongruity between the player who was their
Johannes Factotum and the plays which he gave in to the manager. They
seemed to be just the kind of work which Shakespeare would be likely
to write. BE LIKELY TO WRITE, but ‘the father of the rest,’ Mr. Smith,
believed that Shakespeare COULD NOT WRITE AT ALL.
We live in the Ages of Faith, of faith in fudge. Mr. Smith was certain,
and Mr. Bucke is inclined to suspect, that when Bacon wanted a mask he
chose, as a plausible author of the plays, a man who could not write.
Mr. Smith was certain, and Mr. Bucke must deem it possible, that
Shakespeare’s enemy, Greene, that his friends, Jonson, Burbage, Heming,
and the other actors, and that his critics and admirers, Francis Meres
and others, accepted, as author of the pieces which they played in or
applauded, a man who could write no more than his name. Such was the
tool whom Bacon found eligible, and so easily gulled was the literary
world of Eliza and our James. And Bacon took all this trouble for
what reason? To gain five or six pounds, or as much of that sum as
Shakespeare would let him keep. Had Bacon been possessed by the ambition
to write plays he would always have written original dramas, he would
not have assumed the part of Nicholas Nickleby.
There is no human nature in this nonsense. An ambitious lawyer passes
his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap neither
fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate illiterate actor,
who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured of this method that he
publishes ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’ under the name of his actor
friend. Finally, he commits to the actor’s care all his sonnets to the
Queen, to Gloriana, and for years these manuscript poems are handed
about by Shakespeare, as his own, among the actors, hack scribblers, and
gay young nobles of his acquaintance. They ‘chaff’ Shakespeare about his
affection for his ‘sovereign;’ great Gloriana’s praises are stained with
sack in taverns, and perfumed with the Indian weed. And Bacon, careful
toiler after Court favour, ‘thinks it all wery capital,’ in the words
of Mr. Weller pere. Moreover, nobody who hears Shakespeare talk and sees
him smile has any doubt that he is the author of the plays and amorous
fancies of Bacon.
It is needless to dwell on the pother made about the missing manuscripts
of Shakespeare. ‘The original manuscripts, of course, Bacon would take
care to destroy,’ says Mr. Holmes, ‘if determined that the secret should
die with him.’ If he was so determined, for what earthly reason did he
pass his valuable time in vamping up old plays and writing new ones?
‘There was no money in it,’ and there was no reason. But, if he was not
determined that the secret should die with him, why did not he, like
Scott, preserve the manuscripts? The manuscripts are where Marlowe’s and
where Moliere’s are, by virtue of a like neglect. Where are the MSS.
of any of the great Elizabethans? We really cannot waste time over Mr.
Donnelly’s theory of a Great Cryptogram, inserted by Bacon, as proof of
his claim, in the multitudinous errors of the Folio. Mr. Bucke, too,
has his Anagram, the deathless discovery of Dr. Platt, of Lakewood, New
Jersey. By manipulating the scraps of Latin in ‘Love’s Labour’s
Lost,’ he extracts ‘Hi Ludi tuiti sibi Fr. Bacono nati’: ‘These plays,
entrusted to themselves, proceeded from Fr. Bacon.’ It is magnificent,
but it is not Latin. Had Bacon sent in such Latin at school, he would
never have survived to write the ‘Novum Organon’ and his sonnets to
Queen Elizabeth. In that stern age they would have ‘killed him--with
wopping.’ That Bacon should be a vamper and a playwright for no
appreciable profit, that, having produced his deathless works, he
should make no sign, has, in fact, staggered even the great credulity of
Baconians. He MUST, they think, have made a sign in cipher. Out of the
mass of the plays, anagrams and cryptograms can be fashioned a plaisir,
and the world has heard too much of Mrs. Gallup, while the hunt for
hints in contemporary frontispieces led to mistaking the porcupine of
Sidney’s crest for ‘a hanged hog’ (Bacon).
The theory of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and poems
has its most notable and recent British advocate in His Honour Judge
Webb, sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Regius Professor of
Laws, and Public Orator in the University of Dublin. Judge Webb, as
a scholar and a man used to weighing evidence, puts the case at its
strongest. His work, ‘The Mystery of William Shakespeare’ (1902), rests
much on the old argument about the supposed ignorance of Shakespeare,
and the supposed learning of the author of the plays. Judge Webb, like
his predecessors, does not take into account the wide diffusion of a
kind of classical and pseudo-scientific knowledge among all Elizabethan
writers, and bases theories on manifest misconceptions of Shakespearean
and other texts. His book, however, has affected the opinions of
some readers who do not verify his references and examine the mass of
Elizabethan literature for themselves.
Judge Webb, in his ‘Proem,’ refers to Mr. Holmes and Mr. Donnelly as
‘distinguished writers,’ who ‘have received but scant consideration from
the accredited organs of opinion on this side of the Atlantic.’ Their
theories have not been more favourably considered by Shakespearean
scholars on the other side of the Atlantic, and how much consideration
they deserve we have tried to show. The Irish Judge opens his case by
noting an essential distinction between ‘Shakspere,’ the actor, and
‘Shakespeare,’ the playwright. The name, referring to the man who was
both actor and author, is spelled both ‘Shakspeare’ and ‘Shakespeare’
in the ‘Returne from Parnassus’ (1602).* The ‘school of critics’ which
divides the substance of Shakespeare on the strength of the spelling of
a proper name, in the casual times of great Elizabeth, need not detain
the inquirer.
*The Returne from Parnassus, pp. 56,57,138. Oxford, 1886.
As to Shakespeare’s education, Judge Webb admits that ‘there was a
grammar school in the place.’ As its registers of pupils have not
survived, we cannot prove that Shakespeare went to the school. Mr.
Collins shows that the Headmaster was a Fellow of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, and describes the nature of the education, mainly in
Latin, as, according to the standard of the period, it ought to have
been.* There is no doubt that if Shakespeare attended the school (the
age of entry was eight), minded his book, and had ‘a good sprag memory,’
he might have learned Latin. Mr. Collins commends the Latin of two
Stratford contemporaries and friends of Shakespeare, Sturley and Quiney,
who probably were educated at the Grammar School. Judge Webb disparages
their lore, and, on the evidence of the epistles, says that Sturley
and Quiney ‘were not men of education.’ If Judge Webb had compared
the original letters of distinguished Elizabethan officials and
diplomatists--say, Sir William Drury, the Commandant of Berwick--he
would have found that Sturley and Quiney were at least on the ordinary
level of education in the upper classes. But the whole method of the
Baconians rests on neglecting such comparisons.
*Fortnightly Review, April 1903.
In a letter of Sturley’s, eximiae is spelled eximie, without the
digraph, a thing then most usual, and no disproof of Sturley’s
Latinity.* The Shakspearean hypothesis is that Shakespeare was rather
a cleverer man than Quiney and Sturley, and, consequently, that, if he
went to school, he probably learned more by a great deal than they did.
There was no reason why he should not acquire Latin enough to astonish
modern reviewers, who have often none at all.
*Webb, p. 14. Phillipps’s Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, i. p.
150, ii. p. 57.
Judge Webb then discusses the learning of Shakespeare, and easily
shows that he was full of mythological lore. So was all Elizabethan
literature. Every English scribbler then knew what most men have
forgotten now. Nobody was forced to go to the original authorities--say,
Plato, Herodotus, and Plutarch--for what was accessible in translations,
or had long before been copiously decanted into English prose and
poetry. Shakespeare could get Rhodope, not from Pliny, but from B. R.’s
lively translation (1584) of the first two books of Herodotus. ‘Even
Launcelot Gobbo talks of Scylla and Charybdis,’ says Judge Webb. Who did
not? Had the Gobbos not known about Scylla and Charybdis, Shakespeare
would not have lent them the knowledge.
The mythological legends were ‘in the air,’ familiar to all the
Elizabethan world. These allusions are certainly no proof ‘of trained
scholarship or scientific education.’ In five years of contact with the
stage, with wits, with writers for the stage, with older plays, with
patrons of the stage, with Templars, and so on, a man of talent
could easily pick up the ‘general information’--now caviare to the
general--which a genius like Shakespeare inevitably absorbed.
We naturally come to Greene’s allusion to ‘Shakescene’ (1592),
concerning which a schoolboy said, in an examination, ‘We are tired to
death with hearing about it.’ Greene conspicuously insults ‘Shakescene’
both as a writer and an actor. Judge Webb says: ‘As Mr. Phillipps justly
observes, it’ (one of Greene’s allusions) ‘merely conveys that Shakspere
was one who acted in the plays of which Greene and his three friends
were the authors (ii. 269).’
It is necessary to verify the Judge’s reference. Mr. Phillipps writes:
‘Taking Greene’s words in their contextual and natural sense, he first
alludes to Shakespeare as an actor, one “beautified with our feathers,”
that is, one who acts in their plays; THEN TO THE POET as a writer just
commencing to try his hand at blank verse, and, finally, to him as not
only engaged in both those capacities, but in any other in which he
might be useful to the company.’ Mr. Phillipps adds that Greene’s
quotation of the line ‘TYGER’S HEART WRAPT IN A PLAYER’S HIDE’ ‘is a
decisive proof of Shakespeare’s authorship of the line.’*
*Webb, p. 57. Phillipps, ii. p. 269.
Judge Webb has manifestly succeeded in not appreciating Mr. Phillipps’s
plain English. He says, with obvious truth, that Greene attacks
Shakespeare both as actor and poet, but Judge Webb puts the matter thus:
‘The language of Greene... as Mr. Phillipps justly observes, merely
conveys that Shakspere was one who acted in the plays of which Greene
and his three friends were authors.’
The language of Greene IN ONE PART OF HIS TIRADE, ‘an upstart crow
beautified in our feathers,’ probably refers to Shakespeare as an actor
only, but Greene goes on to insult him as a writer. Judge Webb will
not recognise him as a writer, and omits that part of Mr. Phillipps’s
opinion.
There followed Chettle’s well-known apology (1592), as editor of
Greene’s sally, to Shakespeare. Chettle speaks of his excellence ‘in
the quality he professes,’ and of his ‘facetious grace in writing, that
approves his art,’ this on the authority of ‘the report of divers of
worship.’
This proves, of course, that Shakespeare was a writer as well as an
actor, and Judge Webb can only murmur that ‘we are “left to guess” who
divers of worship’ were, and ‘what motive’ they had for praising his
‘facetious grace in writing.’ The obvious motive was approval of the
work, for work there WAS, and, as to who the ‘divers’ were, nobody
knows.
The evidence that, IN THE OPINION OF GREENE, CHETTLE, AND ‘DIVERS OF
WORSHIP,’ Shakespeare was a writer as well as an actor is absolutely
irrefragable. Had Shakespeare been the ignorant lout of the Baconian
theorists, these men would not have credited him, for example, with his
first signed and printed piece, ‘Venus and Adonis.’ It appeared early
in 1593, and Greene and Chettle wrote in 1592. ‘Divers of worship,’
according to the custom of the time, may have seen ‘Venus and Adonis’ in
manuscript. It was printed by Richard Field, a Stratford-on-Avon man,
as was natural, a Stratford-on-Avon man being the author.* It was
dedicated, in stately but not servile courtesy, to the Earl of
Southampton, by ‘William Shakespeare.’
*Phillipps, i. p. 101.
Judge Webb asks: ‘Was it a pseudonym, or was it the real name of the
author of the poem?’ Well, Shakespeare signs ‘Shakspere’ in two deeds,
in which the draftsman throughout calls him ‘Shakespeare:’ obviously
taking no difference.* People were not particular, Shakespeare let them
spell his name as best pleased them.
*Phillipps, ii. pp. 34, 36.
Judge Webb argues that Southampton ‘took no notice’ of the dedication.
How can he know? Ben Jonson dedicated to Lady Wroth and many others.
Does Judge Webb know what ‘notice’ they took? He says that on various
occasions ‘Southampton did not recognise the existence of the Player.’
How can he know? I have dedicated books to dozens of people. Probably
they ‘took notice,’ but no record thereof exists. The use of arguments
of this kind demonstrates the feebleness of the case.
That Southampton, however, DID ‘take notice’ may be safely inferred
from the fact that Shakespeare, in 1594, dedicated to him ‘The Rape
of Lucrece.’ Had the Earl been an ungrateful patron, had he taken no
notice, Shakespeare had Latin enough to act on the motto Invenies alium
si te hic fastidit Alexin. He speaks of ‘the warrant I have of your
honourable disposition,’ which makes the poem ‘assured of acceptance.’
This could never have been written had the dedication of ‘Venus and
Adonis’ been disdained. ‘The client never acknowledged his obligation
to the patron,’ says Judge Webb. The dedication of ‘Lucrece’ is
acknowledgment enough. The Judge ought to think so, for he speaks, with
needless vigour, of ‘the protestations, warm and gushing as a geyser,
of “The Rape.”’ There is nothing ‘warm,’ and nothing ‘gushing,’ in the
dedication of ‘Lucrece’ (granting the style of the age), but, if it were
as the Judge says, here, indeed, would be the client’s ‘acknowledgment,’
which, the Judge says, was never made.* To argue against such logic
seems needless, and even cruel, but judicial contentions appear to
deserve a reply.
Webb, p. 67.
We now come to the evidence of the Rev. Francis Meres, in ‘Palladis
Tamia’ (1598). Meres makes ‘Shakespeare among the English’ the rival, in
comedy and tragedy, of Plautus and Seneca ‘among the Latines.’ He names
twelve plays, of which ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’ is unknown. ‘The soul of
Ovid’ lives in his ‘Venus and Adonis,’ his ‘Lucrece,’ and his ‘sugred
sonnets among his private friends.’ Meres also mentions Sidney, Spenser,
Daniel, Drayton, and so forth, a long string of English poetic
names, ending with ‘Samuel Page, sometime Fellow of C.C.C. in Oxford,
Churchyard, Bretton.’*
*Phillipps, ii. pp. 149,150.
Undeniably Meres, in 1598, recognises Shakespeare as both playwright
and poet. So Judge Webb can only reply: ‘But who this mellifluous and
honey-tongued Shakespeare was he does not say, AND HE DOES NOT PRETEND
TO KNOW.’* He does not ‘pretend to know’ ‘who’ any of the poets
was--except Samuel Page, and he was a Fellow of Corpus. He speaks of
Shakespeare just as he does of Marlowe, Kid, Chapman, and the others
whom he mentions. He ‘does not pretend to know who’ they were. Every
reader knew who they all were. If I write of Mr. Swinburne or Mr.
Pinero, of Mr. Browning or of Mr. Henry Jones, I do not say ‘who they
were,’ I do not ‘pretend to know.’ There was no Shakespeare in the
literary world of London but the one Shakespeare, ‘Burbage’s deserving
man.’
*Webb, p. 71.
The next difficulty is that Shakespeare’s company, by request of the
Essex conspirators (who paid 2 pounds), acted ‘Richard II.’ just before
their foolish attempt (February 7, 1601). ‘If Coke,’ says the Judge,
‘had the faintest idea that the player’ (Shakespeare) ‘was the author
of “Richard II.,” he would not have hesitated a moment to lay him by the
heels.’ Why, the fact of Shakespeare’s authorship had been announced,
in print, by Meres, in 1598. Coke knew, if he cared to know. Judge Webb
goes on: ‘And that the Player’ (Shakespeare) ‘was not regarded as the
author by the Queen is proved by the fact that, with his company,
he performed before the Court at Richmond, on the evening before the
execution of the Earl.’*
*Webb, pp. 72, 73.
Nothing of the kind is proved. The guilt, if any, lay, not in writing
the drama--by 1601 ‘olde and outworne’--but in acting it, on the eve of
an intended revolution. This error Elizabeth overlooked, and with it the
innocent authorship of the piece, ‘now olde and outworne.’* It is not
even certain, in Mr. Phillipps’s opinion, that the ‘olde and outworne’
play was that of Shakespeare. It is perfectly certain that, as Elizabeth
overlooked the fault of the players, she would not attack the author of
a play written years before Essex’s plot, with no political intentions.
*Phillipps, ii. pp. 359-362.
We now come to evidence of which Judge Webb says very little, that of
the two plays acted at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1600-1601,
known as ‘The Returne from Parnassus.’ These pieces prove that
Shakespeare the poet was identified with Shakespeare the player. They
also prove that Shakespeare’s scholarship and art were held very
cheaply by the University wits, who, as always, were disdainful of
non-University men. His popularity is undisputed, but his admirer in the
piece, Gullio, is a vapouring ignoramus, who pretends to have been
at the University of Padua, but knows no more Latin than many modern
critics. Gullio rants thus: ‘Pardon, faire lady, though sicke-thoughted
Gullio makes amaine unto thee, and LIKE A BOULD-FACED SUTOR ‘GINS TO
WOO THEE.’ This, of course, is from ‘Venus and Adonis.’ Ingenioso says,
aside: ‘We shall have nothinge but pure Shakespeare and shreds of
poetry that he hath gathered at the theaters.’ Gullio next mouths a
reminiscence of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and Ingenioso whispers, ‘Marke,
Romeo and Juliet, O monstrous theft;’ however, aloud, he says ‘Sweete
Mr. Shakspeare!’--the spelling varies. Gullio continues to praise sweete
Mr. Shakspeare above Spenser and Chaucer. ‘Let mee heare Mr. Shakspear’s
veyne.’ Judge Webb does not cite these passages, which identify
Shakspeare (or Shakespeare) with the poet of ‘Venus and Adonis’ and
‘Romeo and Juliet.’
In the second ‘Returne,’ Burbage and Kemp, the noted morrice dancer and
clown of Shakespeare’s company, are introduced. ‘Few of the University
men pen plays well,’ says Kemp; ‘they smack too much of that writer
Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina
and Jupiter. Why here’s our fellow Shakespeare’ (fellow is used in the
sense of companion), ‘puts them all downe, ay, and Ben Jonson too. O
that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the
Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that
made him bewray his credit.’ At Burbage’s request, one of the University
men then recites two lines of ‘Richard III.,’ by the poet of his
company.
Ben, according to Judge Webb, ‘bewrayed his credit’ in ‘The Poetaster,’
1601-1602, where Pantalabus ‘was meant for Shakspere.’* If so,
Pantalabus is described as one who ‘pens high, lofty, and in a new
stalking strain,’ and if Shakespeare is the Poet Ape of Jonson’s
epigram, why then Jonson regards him as a writer, not merely as an
actor. No amount of evil that angry Ben could utter about the plays,
while Shakespeare lived, and, perhaps, was for a time at odds with him,
can obliterate the praises which the same Ben wrote in his milder mood.
The charge against Poet Ape is a charge of plagiarism, such as unpopular
authors usually make against those who are popular. Judge Webb has to
suppose that Jonson, when he storms, raves against some ‘works’ at that
time somehow associated with Shakespeare; and that, when he praises, he
praises the divine masterpieces of Bacon. But we know what plays really
were attributed to Shakespeare, then as now, while no other ‘works’ of
a contemptible character, attributed to Shakespeare, are to be heard of
anywhere. Judge Webb does not pretend to know what the things were to
which the angry Jonson referred.** If he really aimed his stupid epigram
at Shakespeare, he obviously alluded to the works which were then, and
now are, recognised as Shakespeare’s; but in his wrath he denounced
them. ‘Potter is jealous of potter, poet of poet’--it is an old saying
of the Greek. There was perhaps some bitterness between Jonson and
Shakespeare about 1601; Ben made an angry epigram, perhaps against
Shakespeare, and thought it good enough to appear in his collected
epigrams in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. By that time the
application to Shakespeare, if to him the epigram applied, might,
in Ben’s opinion perhaps, be forgotten by readers. In any case, Ben,
according to Drummond of Hawthornden, was one who preferred his jest to
his friend.
*Webb, pp. 114-116.
**Webb, pp. 116-119.
Judge Webb’s hypothesis is that Ben, in Shakespeare’s lifetime,
especially in 1600-1601, spoke evil of his works, though he allowed that
they might endure to ‘after-times’--
Aftertimes
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
But these works (wholly unknown) were not (on the Judge’s theory) the
works which, after Shakespeare’s death, Ben praised, as his, in verse;
and, more critically, praised in prose: the works, that is, which the
world has always regarded as Shakespeare’s. THESE were Bacon’s, and Ben
knew it on Judge Webb’s theory. Here Judge Webb has, of course, to deal
with Ben’s explicit declarations, in the First Folio, that the works
which he praises are by Shakespeare. The portrait, says Ben,
Was for gentle Shakespeare cut.
Judge Webb then assures us, to escape this quandary, that ‘in the
Sonnets “the gentle Shakespeare himself informs us that Shakespeare was
not his real name, but the “noted weed” in which he “kept invention.”’ *
The author of the Sonnets does nothing of the kind. Judge Webb
has merely misconstrued his text. The passage which he so quaintly
misinterprets occurs in Sonnet lxxvi.:
Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why, with the time, do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
WHY WRITE I STILL ALL ONE, EVER THE SAME,
AND KEEP INVENTION IN A NOTED WEED,
THAT EVERY WORD DOES ALMOST TELL MY NAME,
SHOWING THEIR BIRTH AND WHENCE THEY DO PROCEED?
Oh, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
*Webb, pp. 125,156,235,264. Judge Webb is fond of his discovery.
The lines capitalised are thus explained by the Judge: ‘Here the author
certainly intimates that Shakespeare is not his real name, and that he
was fearful lest his real name should be discovered.’ The author says
nothing about Shakespeare not being his real name, nor about his fear
lest his real name should be discovered. He even ‘quibbles on his own
Christian name,’ WILL, as Mr. Phillipps and everyone else have noted.
What he means is: ‘Why am I so monotonous that every word almost tells
my name?’ ‘To keep invention in a noted weed’ means, of course, to
present his genius always in the same well-known attire. There is
nothing about disguise of a name, or of anything else, in the sonnet.*
*Webb, pp. 64,156.
But Judge Webb assures us that Shakespeare himself informs us in the
sonnets that ‘Shakespeare was not his real name, but the noted weed in
which he kept invention.’ As this is most undeniably not the case, it
cannot aid his effort to make out that, in the Folio, by the name of
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson means another person.
In the Folio verses, ‘To the Memory of my Beloved, Mr. William
Shakespeare, and What he has Left Us,’ Judge Webb finds many mysterious
problems.
Soul of the Age,
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,
My Shakespeare, rise!