Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford (1661–3), who has heard that the actor was “a natural wit,” and contracted and died of a fever, after a bout with Drayton and Ben. I can scarcely believe that these were local traditions. How could these rustauds have an opinion about “natural wit,” how could they have known the names of Ben and Drayton?

When you come to Aubrey, publishing in 1680, sixty years after Shakespeare’s death, you neglect to trace the steps in the descent of his tradition. As has been stated, Beeston, “the chronicle of the Stage” (died 1682), gave him the story of the school-mastering; Beeston being the son of a servitor of Phillips, an actor and friend of Shakespeare, who died eleven years before that player. The story of the school-mastering and of Shakespeare “knowing Latin pretty well,” is of no value to me. I think that he had some knowledge of Latin, as he must have had, if he were what I fancy him to have been, and if (which is mere hypothesis) he went for four years to a Latin School. But the story does not suit you, and you call it “a mere myth,” which, “of course, will be believed by those who wish to believe it.” But, most excellent of mortals, will it not, by parity of reasoning, “of course be disbelieved by those who do not wish to believe it”?

And do you want to believe it?

To several stage anecdotes of the actor as an excellent instructor of younger players, you refer slightingly. They do not weigh with me: still, the Stage would remember Shakspere (or Shakespeare) best in stage affairs. In reference to a very elliptic statement that, “in Hamlet Betterton benefited by Shakespeare’s coaching,” you write, “This is astonishing, seeing that Shakspere had been in his grave nearly twenty years when Betterton was born. The explanation is that Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, was, according to Sir William Davenant, instructed by Shakspere, and Davenant, who had seen Taylor act, according to Downes, instructed Betterton. There is a similar story about Betterton playing King Henry VIII. Betterton was said to have been instructed by Sir William, who was instructed by Lowen, who was instructed by Shakspere!” 146

Why a note of exclamation? Who was Downes, and what were his opportunities of acquiring information? He “was for many years book-keeper in the Duke’s Company, first under Davenant in the old house.. ” Davenant was notoriously the main link between “the first and second Temple,” the theatre of Shakespeare whom, as a boy, he knew, and the Restoration theatre. Devoted to the traditions of the stage, he collected Shakespearean and other anecdotes; he revived the theatre, cautiously, during the last years of Puritan rule, and told his stories to the players of the early Restoration. As his Book-keeper with the Duke of York’s Company, Downes heard what Davenant had to tell; he also, for his Roscius Anglicanus, had notes from Charles Booth, prompter at Drury Lane. On May 28, 1663, Davenant reproduced Hamlet, with young Betterton as the Prince of Denmark. Davenant, says Charles Booth, “had seen the part taken by Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, and Taylor had been instructed by the author,” (not Bacon but) “Mr. William Shakespeare,” and Davenant “taught Mr. Betterton in every particle of it.” Mr. Elton adds, “We cannot be sure that Taylor was taught by Shakespeare himself. He is believed to have been a member of the King’s Company before 1613, and to have left it for a time before Shakespeare’s death.” 147 His name is in the list in the Folio of “the principall Actors in all these plays,” but I cannot pretend to be certain that he played in them in Will’s time.

It is Mr. Pepys (December 30, 1668) who chronicles Davenant’s splendid revival of Henry VIII, in which Betterton, as the King, was instructed by Sir William Davenant, who had it from old Mr. Lowen, that had his instruction “from Mr. Shakespear himself.” Lowin, or Lowen, joined Shakespeare’s Company in 1604, being then a man of twenty-eight. Burbage was the natural man for Hamlet and Henry VIII; but it is not unusual for actors to have “understudies.”

The stage is notoriously tenacious of such traditions.

When we come with you to Mr. W. Fulman, about 1688, and the additions to his notes made about 1690–1708, we are concerned with evidence much too remote, and, in your own classical style, “all this is just a little mixed.” 148 With what Mr. Dowdall heard in 1693, and Mr. William Hall (1694) heard from a clerk or sexton, or other illiterate dotard at Stratford, I have already dealt. I do not habitually believe in what I hear from “the oldest aunt telling the saddest tale,” – no, not even if she tells a ghost story, or an anecdote about the presentation by Queen Mary of her portrait to the ancestor of the Laird, – the portrait being dated 1768, and representing her Majesty in the bloom of girlhood. Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on Betterton’s information), in 1709, about Shakespeare’s schooling; nor for what Dr. Furnivall said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody said that Sir John Mennes (Menzies?) said. But I do care for what Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’s fellow-actors said; and for what his literary contemporaries have left on record. But this evidence you explain away by ætiological guesses, absolutely modern, and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not more valuable as history than other explanatory myths.

What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was men’s impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their knowledge, if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often bad reprints, in quartos, of about half of the plays. Men also had Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly, and I do not wonder at it. Of the genius of Shakespeare England could form no conception, till the publication of the Folio (1623), not in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in 1664. The engouement about the poet, the search for personal details, did not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty years after 1664 – and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless. What could have been picked up, by 1680–90, about Bacon at Gorhambury, or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.

XI

THE FIRST FOLIO

“The First Folio” is the name commonly given to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume includes a Preface signed by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait. The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.

The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The title-page says that all the contents are published “according to the true original copies.” If only MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by MSS. The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), 149 speaking in the name of the two actors who sign it. They say that Shakespeare’s friends “have collected and published” the plays, have so published them “that whereas you were abus’d with divers stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: even those” (namely, the pieces previously ill-produced by pirates) “are now offered to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest” (that is, all the plays which had not been piratically debased), “absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them.” So obscure is the Preface that not all previously published separate plays are explicitly said to be stolen and deformed, but “divers stolen copies” are denounced. Mr. Pollard makes the same point in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, p. 2 (1909).

Now, as a matter of fact, while some of the quarto editions of separate plays are very bad texts, others are so good that the Folio sometimes practically reprints them, with some tinkerings, from manuscripts. Some quartos, like that of Hamlet of 1604, are excellent, and how they came to be printed from good texts, and whether or not the texts were given to the press by Shakespeare’s Company, or were sold, or stolen, is the question. Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds almost certain, that “we have strong prima facie evidence that the sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the Stationers’ Registers was regulated by their lawful owners.” 150

The Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately printed texts were good, but says that “divers” of them were stolen and deformed. My view of the meaning of the Preface is not generally held. Dr. H. H. Furness, in his preface to Much Ado about Nothing (p. vi), says, “We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare assert in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the Author’s manuscripts, and in the same breath denounce the Quartos as stolen and surreptitious.” I cannot see, I repeat, that the Preface denounces all the Quartos. It could be truly said that divers stolen and maimed copies had been foisted on “abused” purchasers, and really no more is said. Dr. Furness writes, “When we now find them using as ‘copy’ one of these very Quartos” (Much Ado about Nothing, 1600), “we need not impute to them a wilful falsehood if we suppose that in using what they knew had been printed from the original text, howsoever obtained, they held it to be the same as the manuscript itself.. ” That was their meaning, I think, the Quarto of Much Ado had not been “maimed” and “deformed,” as divers other quartos, stolen and surreptitious, had been.

Shakspere, unlike most of the other playwrights, was a member of his Company. I presume that his play was thus the common good of his Company and himself. If they sold a copy to the press, the price would go into their common stock; unless they, in good will, allowed the author to pocket the money.

It will be observed that I understand the words of the Preface otherwise than do the distinguished Editors of the Cambridge edition. They write, “The natural inference to be drawn from this statement” (in the Preface) “is that all the separate editions of Shakespeare’s plays were ‘stolen,’ ‘surreptitious’ and imperfect, and that all those published in the Folio were printed from the author’s own manuscripts” (my italics). The Editors agree with Dr. Furness, not with Mr. Pollard, whose learned opinion coincides with my own.

Perhaps it should be said that I reached my own construction of the sense of this passage in the Preface by the light of nature, before Mr. Pollard’s valuable book, based on the widest and most minute research, came into my hands. By the results of that research he backs his opinion (and mine), that some of the quartos are surreptitious and bad, while others are good “and were honestly obtained.” 151 The Preface never denies this; never says that all the quartos contain maimed and disfigured texts. The Preface draws a distinction to this effect, “even those” (even the stolen and deformed copies) “are now cured and perfect in their limbs,” – that is, have been carefully edited, while “all the rest” are “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” This does not allege that all the rest are printed from Shakespeare’s own holograph copies.

Among the plays spoken of as “all the rest,” namely, those not hitherto published and not deformed by the fraudulent, are, Tempest, Two Gentlemen, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, Henry VI, iii., Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon, Julius Cæsar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. Also Henry VI, i., ii., King John, and Taming of the Shrew, appeared now in other form than in the hitherto published Quartos bearing these or closely similar names. We have, moreover, no previous information as to The Shrew, Timon, Julius Cæsar, All’s Well, and Henry VIII. The Preface adds the remarkable statement that, whatever Shakespeare thought, “he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”

It is plain that the many dramas previously unpublished could only be recovered from manuscripts of one sort or another, because they existed in no other form. The Preface takes it for granted that the selected manuscripts contain the plays “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” But the Preface does not commit itself, I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed from Shakespeare’s own handwriting. After “as he conceived them,” it goes on, “Who, as he was a most happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”

This may be meant to suggest, but does not affirm, that the actors have “all the rest” of the plays in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. They may have, or may have had, some of his manuscripts, and believed that other manuscripts accessible to them, and used by them, contain his very words. Whether from cunning or design, or from the Elizabethan inability to tell a plain tale plainly, the authors or author of the Preface have everywhere left themselves loopholes and ways of evasion and escape. It is not possible to pin them down to any plain statement of facts concerning the sources for the hitherto unpublished plays, “the rest” of the plays.

These, at least, were from manuscript sources which the actors thought accurate, and some may have been “fair copies” in Shakespeare’s own hand. (Scott, as regards his novels, sent his prima cura, his first writing down, to the press, and his pages are nearly free from blot or erasion. In one case at least, Shelley’s first draft of a poem is described as like a marsh of reeds in water, with wild ducks, but he made very elegant fair copies for the press.) Let it be supposed that Ben Jonson wrote all this Preface, in accordance with the wishes and instructions of the two actors who sign it. He took their word for the almost blotless MSS. which they received from Shakespeare. He remarks, in his posthumously published Discoveries (notes, memories, brief essays), “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line.” And Ben gives, we shall later see, his habitual reply to this habitual boast.

As to the sources of such plays as had been “maimed and deformed by injurious impostors,” and are now “offered cur’d and perfect of their limbs,” “it can be proved to demonstration,” say the Cambridge Editors, “that several plays in the Folio were printed from earlier quarto editions” (but the players secured a retreat on this point), “and that in other cases the quarto is more correctly printed, or from a better manuscript than the Folio text, and therefore of higher authority.” Hamlet, in the Folio of 1623, when it differs from the quarto of 1604, “differs for the worse in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better in twenty places.”

Can the wit of man suggest any other explanation than that the editing of the Folio was carelessly done; out of the best quartos and MSS. in the theatre for acting purposes, and, – if the players did not lie in what they “often said,” and if they kept the originals, – out of some MSS. received from Shakspere? Whether the two players themselves threw into the press, after some hasty botchings, whatever materials they had, or whether they employed an Editor, a very wretched Editor, or Editors, or whether the great Author, Bacon, himself was his own Editor, the preparation of a text was infamously done. The two actors, probably, I think, never read through the proof-sheets, and took the word of the man whom they employed to edit their materials, for gospel. The editing of the Folio is so exquisitely careless that twelve printer’s errors in a quarto of 1622, of Richard III, appear in the Folio of 1623. Again, the Merry Wives of the Folio, is nearly twice as long as the quarto of 1619, yet keeps old errors.

How can we explain the reckless retention of errors, and also the large additions and improvements? Did the true author (Bacon or Bungay) now edit his work, add much matter, and go wrong forty-seven times where the quarto was right, and go right twenty times when the quarto was wrong? Did he, for the Folio of 1623, nearly double The Merry Wives in extent, and also leave all the errors of the fourth quarto uncorrected?

In that case how negligent was Bacon of his immortal works! Now Bacon was a scholar, and this absurd conduct cannot be imputed, I hope, to him.

Mr. Pollard is much more lenient than his fellow-scholars towards the Editor or Editors of the Folio. He concludes that “manuscript copies of the plays were easily procurable.” Sixteen out of the thirty-six plays existed in quartos. Eight of the sixteen were not used for the Folio; five were used, “with additions, corrections, or alterations” (which must have been made from manuscripts). Three quartos only were reprinted as they stood. The Editors greatly preferred to use manuscript copies; and showed this, Mr. Pollard thinks, by placing plays, never before printed, in the most salient parts of the three sets of dramas in their book. 152 They did make an attempt to divide their plays into Acts and Scenes, whereas the quartos, as a general rule, had been undivided. But the Editors, I must say, had not the energy to carry out their good intentions fully – or Bacon or Bungay, if the author, wearied in well-doing. The work is least ill done in the Comedies, and grows worse and worse as the Editor, or Bacon, or Bungay becomes intolerably slack.

A great living author, who had a decent regard for his own works, could never have made or passed this slovenly Folio. Yet Mr. Greenwood argues that probably Bungay was still alive and active, after Shakspere was dead and buried. (Mr. Greenwood, of course, does not speak of Bungay, which I use as short for his Great Unknown.) Thus, Richard III from 1597 to 1622 appeared in six quartos. It is immensely improved in the Folio, and so are several other plays. Who made the improvements, which the Editors could only obtain in manuscripts? If we say that Shakespeare made them in MS., Mr. Greenwood asks, “What had he to work upon, since, after selling his plays to his company, he did not preserve his manuscript?” 153 Now I do not know that he did sell his plays to his company. We are sure that Will got money for them, but we do not know what arrangement he made with his company. He may have had an author’s rights in addition to a sum down, as later was customary, and he had his regular share in the profits. Nor am I possessed of information that “he did not preserve his manuscript.” How can we know that? He may have kept his first draft, he may have made a fair copy for himself, as well as for the players, or may have had one made. He may have worked on a copy possessed by the players; and the publisher of the quartos of 1605, 1612, 1622, may not have been allowed to use, or may not have asked for the latest manuscript revised copy. The Richard III of the Folio contains, with much new matter, the printer’s errors of the quarto of 1622. I would account for this by supposing that the casual Editor had just sense enough to add the new parts in a revised manuscript to the quarto, and was far too lazy to correct the printer’s errors in the quarto. But Mr. Greenwood asks whether “the natural conclusion is not that ‘some person unknown’ took the Quarto of 1622, revised it, added the new passages, and thus put it into the form in which it appeared in 1623.” This natural conclusion means that the author, Bungay, was alive in 1622, and put his additions and improvements of recent date into the quarto of 1622, but never took the trouble to correct the errors in the quarto. And so on in other plays similarly treated. “Is it not a more natural conclusion that ‘Shakespeare’” (Bungay) “himself revised its publication, and that some part of this revision, at any rate, was done after 1616 and before 1623.” 154

Mr. Greenwood, after criticising other systems, writes, 155 “There is, of course, another hypothesis. It is that Shakespeare” (meaning the real author) “did not die in 1616,” and here follows the usual notion that “Shakespeare” was the “nom de plume” of that transcendent genius, “moving in Court circles among the highest of his day (as assuredly Shakespeare must have moved) – who wished to conceal his identity.”

I have not the shadow of assurance that the Author “moved in Court circles,” though Will would see a good deal when he played at Court, and in the houses of nobles, before “Eliza and our James.” I never moved in Court circles: Mr. Greenwood must know them better than I do, and I have explained (see Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Shakespeare, Genius, and Society) how Will picked up his notions of courtly ways.

“Another hypothesis,” the Baconian hypothesis, – “nom de plume” and all, – Mr. Greenwood thinks “an extremely reasonable one”: I cannot easily conceive of one more unreasonable.

“Supposing that there was such an author as I have suggested, he may well have conceived the idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays which had been written under the name of Shakespeare, and being himself busy with other matters, he may have entrusted the business to some ‘literary man,’ to some ‘good pen,’ who was at the time doing work for him; and why not to the man who wrote the commendatory verses, the ‘Lines to the Reader’” (opposite to the engraving), “and, as seems certain, the Preface, ‘to the great variety of Readers’?” 156

That man, that “good pen,” was Ben Jonson. On the “supposing” of Mr. Greenwood, Ben is “doing work for” the Great Unknown at the time when “the business” following on the “idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays which had been written under the name of Shakespeare” occurred to the illustrious but unknown owner of that “nom de plume.” In plain words of my own, – the Author may have entrusted “the business,” and what was that business if not the editing of the Folio? – to Ben Jonson – “who was at the time doing work for him” – for the Author.

Here is a clue! We only need to know for what man of “transcendent genius, universal culture, world-wide philosophy.. moving in Court circles,” and so on, Ben “was working” about 1621–3, the Folio appearing in 1623.

The heart beats with anticipation of a discovery! “On January 22, 1621, Bacon celebrated his sixtieth birthday with great state at York House. Jonson was present,” and wrote an ode, with something about the Genius of the House (Lar or Brownie),

“Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst.”

Mr. Greenwood does not know what this can mean; nor do I. 157

“Jonson, it appears” (on what authority?), “was Bacon’s guest at Gorhambury, and was one of those good ‘pens,’” of whom Bacon speaks as assisting him in the translation of some of his books into Latin.

Bacon, writing to Toby Mathew, June 26, 1623, mentions the help of “some good pens,” Ben Jonson he does not mention. But Judge Webb does. “It is an undoubted fact,” says Judge Webb, “that the Latin of the De Augmentis, which was published in 1623, was the work of Jonson.” 158 To whom Mr. Collins replies, “There is not a particle of evidence that Jonson gave to Bacon the smallest assistance in translating any of his works into Latin.” 159

Très bien, on Judge Webb’s assurance the person for whom Ben was working, in 1623, was Bacon. Meanwhile, Mr. Greenwood’s “supposing” is “that there was such an author” (of transcendent genius, and so on), who “may have entrusted the editing of his collected plays” to some “good pen,” who was at the time “doing work for him,” and “why not to” – Ben Jonson. 160 Now the man for whom Ben, in 1623, was “doing work” – was Bacon, – so Judge Webb says. 161