Shakspere and Montaigne Part 22

12: Jonson probably calls Shakspere an hermaphrodite because, having a wife, he cultivated an intimate friends.h.i.+p at the same time with William Herbert, the later Earl of Pembroke. Jonson's _Epicoene, or The Silent Woman_ (1609) satirises this connection. We are not the first in making this a.s.sertion. (See _Sonnets of Shakspere Solved_, by Henry Brown: London, 1876, p. 16.)

In Epicoene a College is described, which is stated to be composed of women. Instead of women, we may boldly a.s.sume men to be meant. Truewitt thus describes the new Society:--

'A new foundation, Sir, here in the town, of ladies, that call themselves the Collegiates: an order between courtiers and country madams that live from their husbands, and give entertainment to all the wits and braveries of the time, as they call them: cry down, or up, what they like or dislike in a brain or a fas.h.i.+on, with most masculine or rather hermaphroditical authority; and every day gain to their College some new probationer.

_Clerimont_. Who is the president?

_Truewitt_. The grave and youthful matron, the Lady Haughty.'

Shakspere at that time was in the 'matronly' age of forty-five.

We have seen how a 'dislike in a brain' has been expressed in _Hamlet_.

13: The name of Ovid, likewise used in that eulogy, Jonson a.s.signed, in his _Poetaster_, to Marston. (See _note_ 22 at end of Section V.)

14: It would have been most strange, indeed, if the two greatest geniuses of their time had not exercised some influence on each other; if the greatest thinker of that age had not given some suggestive thoughts to the poet; and if the poet had not animated the thinker to the cultivation of art, inducing him to offer his philosophical thoughts in beautiful garment. Hence Mrs. Henry Pott may have found vestiges of a more perfected and n.o.bler style in Bacon's _Diaries_, on which she founded her wild theory. Had not Kant and Fichte great influence on their contemporary, Schiller? Does not Goethe praise the influence exercised by Spinoza upon him? Let us a.s.sume that the latter two had been contemporaries; that they had lived in the same town. Would it not have been extraordinary if they had remained intellectual strangers to each other, instead of drawing mutual advantage from their intercourse? Why should Bacon not have been one of the n.o.blemen who, after the performance of a play, were initiated, in the Mermaid Tavern, into the more hidden meaning of a drama? Is it not rather likely that Bacon drew Shakspere's attention to the inconsistencies of Montaigne?

15: The advocates, in festive processions, made use of mules. Maybe that Jonson calls Shakspere a 'good dull mule' because in _Hamlet_ he champions the views of 'Sir Lawyer' Bacon.

16: This notion, that Shakspere has mainly distinguished himself in the comic line--in the representation of Foolery--harmonises with Jonson's opinion, as privately expressed in _Timber; or, Discoveries made upon Men and Matter_ (1630-37), in a noteworthy degree. There he says of Shakspere:--'His wit was in his own power.

Would the rule of it had been so, too.'

17: An allusion to Shakspere's uncla.s.sical metrics, and his great success among the public, although in Jonson's opinion he brings neither regular 'play nor university show.'

18: In Androgyno, whom he brings in.

19: This is Jonson's answer to the question raised in _Twelfth Night_ (act iv. sc. 2), when Malvolio is in prison, in regard to Pythagoras.

20: We can nowhere find any clue to such a personage of antiquity, and we take it to be a reference to Pyrrhon of Elis, the founder of the sceptic school.

21: Bacon was a friend of this sport. Mrs. Pott points out some technical expressions which we find both in Bacon's works and in Shakspere. Perhaps we might stretch our fancy so far as to a.s.sume that Bacon is Pyrrhus of Delos, and that gentle Shakspere sometimes went a-fis.h.i.+ng with him on the banks of the Thames.

22: 'As itself doth relate it.' Yet the soul does not relate anything, except that it is said to have spoken, in all the characters it a.s.sumed, 'as in the cobbler's c.o.c.k.' We must, therefore, probably look in plays--in Shakspere's dramas--for that which the soul has spoken in its various stages as a king, as a beggar, and so forth.

23: 'Brock' (badger)--a word which Shakspere only uses once; viz. in _Twelfth Night_ (act ii. sc. 5). Sir Toby's whole indignation against Malvolio culminates in the words:--'Marry, hang thee, brock!' We know of Jonson's unseemly bodily figure, his 'ambling' gait, which rendered him unfit for the stage. The pace of a badger would be a very graphic description of his manner of walking. Now, Jonson sneers at the word 'brock' in a way not unfrequent with Shakspere himself, in regard to various words used by Jonson against him. In _The Poetaster_, Tucca falls out against the 'wormwood' comedies, which drag everything on to the stage. We are reminded here of Hamlet's exclamation:--'Wormwood, wormwood!' when the Queen of the Interlude speaks the two lines he had probably intercalated:--

In second husband let me be accurst!

None wed the second but who kill'd the first.

24: 'Cobbler's c.o.c.k' refers most likely to a drama by Robert Wilson, ent.i.tled: _Cobbler's Prophecy_. In Collier's _History of the English Drama_ (iii. pp. 247-8) it is thus described:--

'It is a ma.s.s of absurdity without any leading purpose, but here and there exhibiting glimpses of something better. The scene of the play is laid in Boeotia which is represented to be ruled by a duke, but in a state of confusion and disorganisation.... One of the princ.i.p.al characters is a whimsical Cobbler who, by intermediation of the heathen G.o.d Mercury, obtains prophetic power, the chief object of which is to warn the Duke of the impending ruin of his state unless he consents to introduce various reforms, and especially to unite the discordant cla.s.ses of his subjects.' Jonson may have looked upon _Hamlet_ in this manner from his point of view.

It is for us to admire the prophetical spirit of Shakspere who in Montaigne perceived the germ of the helplessly divided nature of modern man.

25: 'Or his great oath, by _Quarter_.' No doubt, this is an allusion of Jonson to Shakspere's 'quarter share,' the fourth part of the receipts of his company. The Blackfriars Theatre had sixteen shareholders. It is proved that Shakspere at that time, when a valuation of the theatre was made, had a claim to four parts, each of 233 6s. 8d. (Chr. Armitage Brown, _Shak.

Autobiographical Poems_, London, 1838, p. 101). In _The Poetaster_ (act iii. sc. i), Tucca says to Crispinus the Poetaster:--'Thou shall have a quarter share.' In Epistle xii.

(_Forest_), which Jonson addresses to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, and which, in our opinion, also contains an allusion to Shakspere, as well as to his protector, William Herbert, Ben speaks of poets with 'their quarter face.'

26: Shakspere often introduced music in his dramas. Jonson ridicules this; so did Marston, as we shall see. (_Twelfth Night_, for instance, opens with music.)

27: 'His golden thigh.' The shape of the legs, the 'yellow cross-gartered stockings' of poor Malvolio in _Twelfth Night_ are here ridiculed.

28: Malvolio says to his friends:--'I am not of your element.' In the same play, great sport is made of this word, until the Fool himself at last gets weary of it, when he says (act iii. sc. i):--'You are out of my welkin--I might say _element_, but the word is overworn.'

29: Blackfriars, where Shakspere first acted, was a former cloister.

'On fish, when first a Carthusian I entered,' no doubt means that from the beginning he had preferred keeping mute as a fish, in regard to forbidden matters of the Church.

30: I.e., _Christmas_-pie. In the Prologue of _The Return from Parna.s.sus_, this comedy is called a _Christmas Toy_.

Shakspere is therein lavishly praised by his brother actors, whereas Jonson is spoken of as 'a bold wh.o.r.eson, as confident now in making of a book, as he was in times past in laying of a brick.'

A veritable libel!

31: _Hamlet_ (act v. sc. 2):--

Methought, I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes

32: Through Jonson's satire we always see the sanctimonious Jesuit peering out.

33: These are the parables in which Hamlet speaks. Many a reader will understand why Shakspere could not use more explicit language.

34: So the envious Jonson calls Shakspere's public who are satisfied with 'salad;' that is, with patchy compositions, pieced together from all kinds of material.

35: Jonson had Scottish ancestry.

36: In a moment of fanaticism, Hamlet wishes Ophelia to go to a nunnery. Jonson, in most cynical manner, means to say that Hamlet had been impotent as regards his _innamorata_. Though 'for the nones' may be taken as 'for the nonce,' it yet comes close enough to a _double-entendre_--namely, 'for the _nuns_.'

37: _Dramatic versus Wit Combats_. London, 1864. Ed. John Russell Smith.

38: To mount a bank = mountebank.

39: From one of them poor Ben received a _vile medicine_: a _purge_.

40: 'Lewd'=unlearned.

41: Shakspere's _Autobiographical Poems_.

42: Karl Elze (_Essays on Shakespeare_; London 1874) thinks this pa.s.sage is intended against Shakespeare's alleged theft committed in the _Tempest_, the composition of which he, therefore, places in the year 1604-5, while most critics a.s.sign it to a much later period. It must also be mentioned that Karl Elze draws attention to the more friendly words with which Jonson, in his own handwriting, dedicates his _Volpone_ to Florio.

In the opinion of the German critic, it is not difficult to gather from this Dedication the desire of the meanly quarrelsome scholar Jonson to give his friend Florio to understand that, among other things, he would read with considerable satisfaction how he (Jonson) had made short work with this 'Shake-scene' and this 'upstart Crow.'

43: Dekker tells Horace that his--Johnson's--plays are misliked at Court.

According to the above-quoted words of Jonson, _Hamlet_ seems to have pleased at Court on its first appearance.

44: The following pa.s.sage in Jonson's _Epicoene_ is also interesting, though in the play itself it is not made to refer to Montaigne but apparently to Plutarch and Seneca: 'Grave a.s.ses! mere essayists: a few loose sentences, and that's all. A man could talk so his whole age. I do utter as good things every hour if they were collected and observed, as either of them.' May not such words have fallen from Shakspere's lips, in regard to Montaigne, before an intimate circle in the Mermaid Tavern?

45: This may point either to Montaigne or to Dr. Guinne, the fellow-worker of Florio in the translation of the Essays, whom the latter calls 'a monster-quelling Theseus or Hercules.'

46: The reasons which induce us to this opinion are the following: The three authors of _Eastward Hoe_ were arrested on account of a satire contained in this play against the Scots; James I., himself a Scot, having become King of England a year before. The audacious stage-poets were threatened with having their noses and ears cut off. They were presently freed, however; probably through the intervention of some n.o.blemen. Soon afterwards, Jonson was again in prison; and we suspect that this second imprisonment took place in consequence of _Volpone_. We base this view on several incidents.

In a letter Jonson addressed in 1605, from his place of confinement, to Lord Salisbury (_Ben Jonson_, edited by Cunningham, vol. i. xlix.), he says that he regrets having once more to apply to his kindness on account of a play, after having scarcely repented 'his first error' (most probably _Eastward Hoe_).' Before I can shew myself grateful in the least for former benefits, I am enforced to provoke your bounties for more.' In this letter, Jonson uses a tone similar to the one which pervades his Dedication of _Volpone_. We therefore believe that both letter and Dedication have reference to one and the same matter. In the letter, Jonson addresses Lord Salisbury in this way:--'My n.o.ble lord, they deal not charitably who are witty in another man's work, and utter sometimes their own malicious meanings under our words.' He then continues, protesting that since his first error, which was punished more with his shame than with his bondage, he has only touched at general vice, sparing particular persons. He goes on:--'I beseech your most honourable Lords.h.i.+p, suffer not other men's errors or faults past to be made my crimes; but let me be examined by all my works past and this present; and trust not to Rumour, but my books (for she is an unjust deliverer, both of great and of small actions), whether I have ever (many things I have written private and public) given offence to a nation, to a public order or state, or any person of honour or authority; but have equally laboured to keep their dignity, as my own person, safe.'

Now, let us compare the following verses from the second Prologue of _Epicoene_ (the plural here becomes the singular):--