Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown Part 14

Referring to Jonson's Poetaster, and to Satiromastix, the counter- attack, we find a pa.s.sage in the Cambridge play, The Return from Parna.s.sus (about 1602). Burbage, the tragic actor, and Kempe, the low-comedy man of Shakespeare's company, are introduced, discussing the possible merits of Cambridge wits as playwrights. Kempe rejects them as they "smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis . . . " The purpose, of course, is to laugh at the ignorance of the low-comedy man, who thinks "Metamorphosis" a writer, and does not suspect--how should he?--that Shakespeare "smells of Ovid." Kempe innocently goes on, "Why, here's our fellow" (comrade) "Shakespeare puts them all down" (all the University playwrights), "aye, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace" (in The Poetaster) "giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge . . . "

The Cambridge author, perhaps, is thinking of the pill (not purge) which, in Satiromastix, might be administered to Jonson. The Cambridge author may have thought that Shakespeare wrote the pa.s.sage on the pill which was to "fetch up" ma.s.ses of Ben's insolence, self- love, arrogance, and detraction. If this be not the sequence of ideas, it is not easy to understand how or why Kempe is made to say that Shakespeare has given Jonson a purge. Stupid old nonsense!

There are other more or less obscure indications of Jonson's spite, during the stage-quarrel, against Shakespeare, but the most unmistakable proof lies in his verses in "Poet-Ape." I am aware that Ben's intention here to hit at Shakespeare has been denied, for example by Mr. Collins with his usual vigour of language. But though I would fain agree with him, the object of attack can be no known person save Will. Jonson was already, in The Poetaster, using the term "Poet-Ape," for he calls the actors at large "apes."

Jonson thought so well of his rhymes that he included them in the Epigrams of his first Folio (1616). By that date, the year of Shakespeare's death, if he really loved Shakespeare, as he says, in verse and prose, Ben might have suppressed the verses. But (as Drummond noted) he preferred his jest, such as it was, to his friend; who was not, as usually understood, a man apt to resent a very blunt shaft of very obsolete wit. Like Moliere, Shakespeare had outlived the charge of plagiarism, made long ago by the jealous Ben.

Poet-Ape is an actor-playwright "THAT WOULD BE THOUGHT OUR CHIEF"-- words which, by 1601, could only apply to Shakespeare; there was no rival, save Ben, near his throne. The playwright-actor, too, has now confessedly

"grown To a little wealth and credit in the scene,"

of no other actor-playwright could this be said.

He is the author of "works" (Jonson was laughed at for calling his own plays "works"), but these works are "the frippery of wit," that is, a tissue of plagiarisms, as in the case of Pantalabus. But "told of this he slights it," as most successful authors, when accused, as they often are, of plagiarism by jealous rivals, wisely do;--so did Moliere. This Poet-Ape began his career by "picking and gleaning"

and "buying reversions of old plays." This means that Shakespeare DID work over earlier plays which his company had acquired; or, if Shakespeare did not,--then, I presume,--Bacon did!

THAT, with much bad humour, is the gist of the rhymes on Poet-Ape.

Ben thinks Shakespeare's "works" very larcenous, but still, the "works," as such, are those of the poet-actor. I hope it is now clear that Poet-Ape, who, like Pantalabus, "takes up all"; who has "grown to a little wealth and credit in the scene," and who "thinks himself the chief" of contemporary dramatists, can be n.o.body but Shakespeare. Hence it follows that the "works" of Poet-Ape, are the works of Shakespeare. Ben admits, nay, a.s.serts the existence of the works, says that they may reach "the after-time," but he calls them a ma.s.s of plagiarisms,--because he is in a jealous rage.

But this view does not at all suit Mr. Greenwood, for it shows Ben regarding Shakespeare as the "Ape," or Actor, and also as the "Poet"

and author of the "works." Yet Ben's words mean nothing if not that an actor is the author of works which Ben accuses of plagiarism. Mr.

Greenwood thinks that the epigram proves merely that "Jonson looked upon Shakspere (if, indeed, he refers to him) as one who put forward the writings of others as his own, or, in plain English, an impostor." "The work which goes in his name is, in truth, the work of somebody else." {244a} Mr. Greenwood put the same interpretation on Greene's words about "Shakescene," and we showed that the interpretation was impossible. "The utmost we should be ent.i.tled to say" (if Shake-scene be meant for Shakspere) "is that Greene accuses Player Shakspere of putting forward, as his own, some work or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another."

{245a} We proved, by quoting Greene's words, that he said nothing which could be tortured into this sense. {245b} In the same way Ben's words cannot be tortured into the sense that "the work which goes in his" (Poet-Ape's) "name is, in truth, the work of somebody else." {245c} Mr. Greenwood tries to find the Anti-Willian hypothesis in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and in Ben's epigram. It is in neither.

Jonson is not accusing Shakespeare of pretending to be the author of plays written by somebody else, but of "making EACH MAN'S wit his own," and the MEN are the other dramatists of the day. Thus the future "may judge" Shakespeare's work "to be his as well as OURS."

It is "we," the living and recognised dramatists, whom Shakespeare is said to plagiarise from; so boldly that

"WE, THE ROBBED, leave rage, and pity it."

Ben does not mean that Shakespeare is publis.h.i.+ng, as his own, whole plays by some other author, but that his works are tissues of sc.r.a.ps stolen from his contemporaries, from "us, the robbed." Where are to be found or heard of any works by a player-poet of 1601, the would-be chief dramatist of the day, except those signed William Shak(&c.).

There are none, and thus Ben, at this date, is identifying Will Shakspere, the actor, with the author of the Shakespearean plays, which he expects to reach posterity; "after times may judge them to be his," as after times do to this hour.

Thus Ben expresses, in accordance with his humour on each occasion, most discrepant opinions of Will's works, but he never varies from his identification of Will with the author of the plays.

The "works" of which Ben wrote so splenetically in Poet-Ape, were the works of a Playwright-Actor, who could be n.o.body but the actor Shakespeare, as far as Ben then knew. If later, and in altered circ.u.mstances, he wrote of the very same works in very different terms, his "utterances" are "not easily reconcilable" with each other,--WHOEVER the real author of the works may be. If Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood's anonymous equivalent for Bacon, were the author, and if Ben came to know it, his att.i.tudes towards the WORKS are still as irreconcilable as ever.

Perhaps Baconians and Mr. Greenwood might say, "as long as Ben believed that the works were those of an Actor-Playwright, he thought them execrable. But when he learned that they were the works of Bacon (or of some Great One), he declared them to be more than excellent"--BUT NOT TO DRUMMOND. I am reluctant to think that Jonson was the falsest and meanest of sn.o.bs. I think that when his old rival, by his own account his dear friend, was dead, and when (1623) Ben was writing panegyric verses about the first collected edition of his plays (the Folio), then between generosity and his habitual hyperbolical manner when he was composing commendatory verses, he said,--not too much in the way of praise,--but a good deal more than he later said (1630?), in prose, and in cold blood. I am only taking Ben as I find him and as I understand him. Every step in my argument rests on well-known facts. Ben notoriously, in his many panegyric verses, wrote in a style of inflated praise. In conversation with Drummond he censured, in brief blunt phrases, the men whom, in verse, he had extolled. The Baconian who has not read all Ben's panegyrics in verse, and the whole of his conversations with Drummond, argues in ignorance.

We now come to Ben's panegyrics in the Folio of 1623. Ben heads the lines,

"TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED THE AUTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US."

Words cannot be more explicit. Bacon was alive (I do not know when Mr. Greenwood's hidden genius died), and Ben goes on to speak of the Author, Shakespeare, as dead, and buried. He calls on him thus:

"Soul of the Age!

The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!

My Shakespear rise: I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument, without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give."

Beaumont, by the way, died in the same year as Shakespeare, 1616, and, while Ben here names him with Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, his contemporaries have left no anecdotes, no biographical hints. In the panegyric follow the lines:

"And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, From thence to honour thee I would not seek For names, but call forth thund'ring AEschylus,"

and the other glories of the Roman and Attic stage, to see and hear how Shakespeare bore comparison with all that the cla.s.sic dramatists did, or that "did from their ashes come."

Jonson means, "despite your lack of Greek and Latin I would not shrink from challenging the greatest Greek and Roman tragedians to see how you bear comparison with themselves"?

Mr. Greenwood and the Baconians believe that the author of the plays abounded in Latin and Greek. In my opinion his cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p must have seemed slight indeed to Ben, so learned and so vain of his learning: but this is part of a vexed question, already examined.

So far, Ben's verses have brought not a hint to suggest that he does not identify the actor, his Beloved, with the author. Nothing is gained when Ben, in commendatory verses, praises "Thy Art," whereas, speaking to Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), he said that Shakespeare "wanted art." Ben is not now growling to Drummond of Hawthornden: he is writing a panegyric, and applauds Shakespeare's "well-turned and true-filed lines," adding that, "to write a living line" a man "must sweat," and "strike the second heat upon the Muses' anvil."

To produce such lines requires labour, requires conscious "art." So Shakespeare HAD "art," after all, despite what Ben had said to Drummond: "Shakespeare lacked art." There is no more in the matter; the "inconsistency" is that of Ben's humours on two perfectly different occasions, now grumbling to Drummond; and now writing hyperbolically in commendatory verses. But the contrast makes Mr.

Greenwood exclaim, "Can anything be more astonis.h.i.+ng and at the same time more unsatisfactory than this?" {249a}

Can anything be more like Ben Jonson?

Did he know the secret of the authors.h.i.+p in 1619? If so, why did he say nothing about the plays of the Great Unknown (whom he called Shakespeare), save what Drummond reports, "want of art," ignorance of Bohemian geography. Or did Ben NOT know the secret till, say, 1623, and then heap on the very works which he had previously scouted praise for the very quality which he had said they lacked? If so, Ben was as absolutely inconsistent, as before. There is no way out of this dilemma. On neither choice are Ben's utterances "easy to reconcile one with the other," except on the ground that Ben was-- Ben, and his comments varied with his varying humours and occasions.

I believe that, in the commendatory verses, Ben allowed his Muse to carry him up to heights of hyperbolical praise which he never came near in cold blood. He was warmed with the heat of poetic composition and wound up to heights of eulogy, though even NOW he could not forget the small Latin and less Greek!

We now turn to Mr. Greenwood's views about the commendatory verses.

On mature consideration I say nothing of his remarks on Ben's couplets about the bad engraved portrait. {250a} They are concerned with the supposed "ORIGINAL bust," as represented in Dugdale's engraving of 1656. What the Baconians hope to make out of "the ORIGINAL bust" I am quite unable to understand. {250b} Again, I leave untouched some witticisms {250c} on Jonson's lines about Spenser, Chaucer, and Beaumont in their tombs--lines either suggested by, or suggestive of others by an uncertain W. Ba.s.se, "but the evidence of authors.h.i.+p seems somewhat doubtful. How the date is determined I do not know . . . " {251a} As Mr. Greenwood knows so little, and as the discussion merely adds dust to the dust, and fog to the mist of his attempt to disable Ben's evidence, I glance and pa.s.s by.

"Then follow these memorable words, which I have already discussed:

"'And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek . . . '" {251b}

In "these memorable words," every non-Baconian sees Ben's opinion about his friend's lack of scholars.h.i.+p. According to his own excellent Index, Mr. Greenwood has already adverted often to "these memorable words."

(1) P. 40. " . . . if this testimony is to be explained away as not seriously written, then are we justified in applying the same methods of interpretation to Jonson's other utterances as published in the Folio of 1623. But I shall have more to say as to that further on."

(2) P. 88. Nothing of importance.

(3) P. 220. Quotation from Dr. Johnson. Ben, "who had no imaginable temptation to falsehood," wrote the memorable words. But Mr. Greenwood has to imagine a "temptation to falsehood,"--and he does.

(4) P. 222. "And we have recognised that Jonson's 'small Latin and less Greek' must be explained away" (a quotation from somebody).

(5) P. 225. Allusion to anecdote of "Latin (latten) spoons."