Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

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 passage on the pill which was to “fetch up” masses 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 Molière, 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 of no other actor-playwright could this be said.

   “grownTo a little wealth and credit in the scene,”

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 Molière. 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 nobody but Shakespeare. Hence it follows that the “works” of Poet-Ape, are the works of Shakespeare. Ben admits, nay, asserts the existence of the works, says that they may reach “the after-time,” but he calls them a mass 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.” 206 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 entitled 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.” 207 We proved, by quoting Greene’s words, that he said nothing which could be tortured into this sense. 208 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.” 209 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 publishing, as his own, whole plays by some other author, but that his works are tissues of scraps 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 nobody but the actor Shakespeare, as far as Ben then knew. If later, and in altered circumstances, 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 attitudes 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 snobs. 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 BELOVEDTHE AUTHORMR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEAREANDWHAT 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 byChaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lieA 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 seekFor names, but call forth thund’ring Æschylus,”

and the other glories of the Roman and Attic stage, to see and hear how Shakespeare bore comparison with all that the classic 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 classical scholarship 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 astonishing and at the same time more unsatisfactory than this?” 210

Can anything be more like Ben Jonson?

Did he know the secret of the authorship 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. 211 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. 212 Again, I leave untouched some witticisms 213 on Jonson’s lines about Spenser, Chaucer, and Beaumont in their tombs – lines either suggested by, or suggestive of others by an uncertain W. Basse, “but the evidence of authorship seems somewhat doubtful. How the date is determined I do not know.. ” 214 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 pass by.

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

“‘And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.. ’” 215

In “these memorable words,” every non-Baconian sees Ben’s opinion about his friend’s lack of scholarship. 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.”

(6) Pp. 382, 383. “Some of us” (some of whom?) “have long looked upon it as axiomatic.. that Jonson’s ‘small Latin and less Greek,’ if meant to be taken seriously, can only be applicable to Shakspere of Stratford and not to Shakespeare,” that is, not to the Unknown author. Unluckily Ben, in 1623, is addressing the shade of the “sweet Swan of Avon,” meaning Stratford-on-Avon.

(7) The next references in the laudable Index are to pp. 474, 475. “Then follow these memorable words, which I have already discussed:

“‘And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,’

words which those who see how singularly inappropriate they are to the author of the Plays and Poems of Shakespeare have been at such infinite pains to explain away without impeaching the credit of the author, or assuming that he is here indulging in a little Socratic irony.”

I do not want to “explain” Ben’s words “away”: I want to know how on earth Mr. Greenwood explains them away. My view is that Ben meant what he said, that Will, whose shade he is addressing, was no scholar (which he assuredly was not). I diligently search Mr. Greenwood’s scriptures, asking How does he explain Ben’s “memorable words” away? On p. 106 of The Shakespeare Problem Restated I seem to catch a glimmer of his method. “Once let the Stratfordians” (every human and non-Baconian person of education) “admit that Jonson when he penned the words ‘small Latin and less Greek’ was really writing ‘with his tongue in his cheek.’.. ”

Once admit that vulgarism concerning a great English poet engaged on a poem of Pindaric flight, and of prophetic vision! No, we leave the admission to Mr. Greenwood and his allies.

To consider thus is to consider too seriously. The Baconians and Anti-Willians have ceased to deserve serious attention (if ever they did deserve it), and virtuous indignation, and all that kind of thing, when they ask people who care for poetry to “admit” that Ben wrote his verses “with his tongue in his cheek.” Elsewhere, 216 in place of Ben’s “tongue in his cheek,” Mr. Greenwood prefers to suggest that Ben “is here indulging in a little Socratic irony.” Socrates “with his tongue in his cheek”! Say “talking through his throat,” if one may accept the evidence of the author of Raffles, as to the idioms of burglars.

To return to criticism, we are to admit that Jonson was really writing “with his tongue in his cheek,” knowing that, as a fact, “Shakespeare” (the Great Unknown, the Bacon of the Baconians) “had remarkable classical attainments, and they, of course, open the door to the suggestion that the entire poem is capable of an ironical construction and esoteric interpretation.” 217

So this is Mr. Greenwood’s method of “explaining away” the memorable words. He seems to conjecture that Will was not Shakespeare, not the author of the plays; that Jonson knew it; that his poem is, as a whole, addressed to Bacon, or to the Great Unknown, under his “nom de plume” of “William Shakespeare”; that the address to the “Swan of Avon” is a mere blind; and that Ben only alludes to his “Beloved,” the Stratford actor, when he tells his Beloved that his Beloved has “small Latin and less Greek.” All the praise is for Bacon, or the Great Unknown (Mr. Harris), the jeer is for “his Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, And what he hath left Us.”

As far as I presume to understand this theory of the “tongue in the cheek,” of the “Socratic irony,” this is what Mr. Greenwood has to propose towards “explaining away” the evidence of Ben Jonson, in his famous commendatory verses. When we can see through the dust of words we find that the “esoteric interpretation” of the commendatory verses is merely a reassertion of the general theory: a man with small Latin and less Greek could not have written the plays and poems. Therefore when Ben explicitly states that his Beloved, Mr. Shakespeare of Stratford, the Swan of Avon did write the plays, and had small Latin and less Greek, Ben meant that he did not write them, that they were written by somebody else who had plenty of Greek and Latin. It is a strange logical method! Mr. Greenwood merely reasserts his paradox, and proves it, like certain Biblical critics of more orthodoxy than sense, by aid of his private “esoteric method of interpretation.” Ben, we say, about 1630, in prose and in cold blood, and in a humour of criticism without the old rancour and envy, or the transitory poetic enthusiasm, pens a note on Shakespeare in a volume styled “Timber, or Discoveries, made upon men and Matter, as they have flowed out of his daily Readings; or had their reflux to his peculiar Notion of the Times.” Ben died in 1637; his MS. collection of notes and brief essays, and reflections, was published in 1641. Bacon, of whom he wrote his impressions in this manuscript, had died in 1626. Ben was no longer young: he says, among these notes, that his memory, once unusually strong, after he was past forty “is much decayed in me.. It was wont to be faithful to me, but shaken with age now.” (I copy the extract as given by Mr. Greenwood. 218) He spoke sooth: he attributes to Orpheus, in “Timber,” a line from Homer, and quotes from Homer what is not in that poet’s “works.”

In this manuscript occurs, then, a brief prose note, headed, De Shakespeare nostrati, on our countryman Shakespeare. It is an anecdote of the Players and their ignorance, with a few critical and personal remarks on Shakespeare. “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand,’ which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance who chose that circumstance to commend their friend by (that) wherein he most faulted; and to justify mine own candour, for I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. ‘Sufflaminandus erat,’ as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too! Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter, as when he said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him, ‘Cæsar, thou dost me wrong.’ He replied, ‘Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause’; and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.” Baconians actually maintain that Ben is here speaking of Bacon.

Of whom is Ben writing? Of the author of Julius Cæsar, – certainly, from which, his memory failing, he misquotes a line. If Ben be in the great secret – that the author was Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s Great Unknown, he is here no more enthusiastic about the Shadow or the Statesman, than about Shakespeare; no less cool and critical, whoever may be the subject of his comments. Whether, in the commendatory verses, he referred to the Actor-Author, or Bacon, or the Shining Shadow, or all of them at once, he is now in a mood very much more cool and critical. If to be so cool and critical is violently inconsistent in the case of the Stratford actor, it is not less so if Ben has Bacon or the Shadow in his mind. Meanwhile the person of whom he speaks is here the actor-author, whom the players, his friends, commended “wherein he faulted,” namely, in not “blotting” where, in a thousand cases, Ben wishes that he had blotted. Can the most enthusiastic Baconian believe that when Ben wrote about the players’ ignorant applause of Shakespeare’s, of their friend’s lack of care in correction, Ben had Bacon in his mind?

As for Mr. Greenwood, he says that in Ben’s sentence about the players and their ignorant commendation, “we have it on Jonson’s testimony that the players looked upon William Shakspere the actor as the author of the plays and praised him for never blotting out a line.” We have it, and how is the critic to get over or round the fact? Thus, “We know that this statement” (about the almost blotless lines) “is ridiculous; that if the players had any unblotted manuscripts in their hands (which is by no means probable) they were merely fair copies.. ”

Perhaps, but the Baconians appear to assume that a “fair copy” is not, and cannot be, a copy in the handwriting of the author.

As I have said before, the Players knew Will’s handwriting, if he could write. If they received his copy in a hand not his own, and were not idiots, they could not praise him and his unerring speed and accuracy in penning his thoughts. If, on the other hand, Will could not write, in their long friendship with Will, the Players must have known the fact, and could not possibly believe, as they certainly did, “on Jonson’s testimony” in his authorship.

To finish Mr. Greenwood’s observations, “if they” (the players) “really thought that the author of the plays wrote them off currente calamo, and never” (or “hardly ever”) “blotted a line, never revised, never made any alterations, they knew nothing whatever concerning the real Shakespeare.” 219

Nothing whatever? What they did not know was merely that Will gave them fair copies in his own hand, as, before the typewriting machine was invented, authors were wont to do. Within the last fortnight I heard the error attributed to the players made by an English scholar who is foremost in his own field of learning. He and I were looking at some of Dickens’s MSS. They were full of erasions and corrections. I said, “How unlike Scott!” whose first draft of his novels exactly answered to the players’ description of Will’s “copy.” My friend said, “Browning scarcely made an erasion or change in writing his poems,” and referred to Mr. Browning’s MSS. for the press, of which examples were lying near us. “But Browning must have made clean copies for the press,” I said: which was as new an idea to my learned friend as it was undreamed of by the Players: – if what they received from him were his clean copies.

The Players’ testimony, through Jonson, cannot be destroyed by the “easy stratagem” of Mr. Greenwood.

Mr. Greenwood now nearly falls back on Bacon, though he constantly professes that he “is not the advocate of Bacon’s authorship.” The author was some great man, as like Bacon as one pea to another. Mr. Greenwood says that Jonson looked on the issue of the First Folio 220 “as a very special occasion.” Well, it was a very special occasion; no literary occasion could be more “special.” Without the Folio, badly as it is executed, we should perhaps never have had many of Shakespeare’s plays. The occasion was special in the highest degree.

But, says Mr. Greenwood, “if we could only get to the back of Jonson’s mind, we should find that there was some efficient cause operating to induce him to give the best possible send-off to that celebrated venture.” 221

Ben was much in the habit of giving “sendoffs” of great eloquence to poetic “ventures” now forgotten. What could “the efficient cause” be in the case of the Folio? At once Mr. Greenwood has recourse to Bacon; he cannot, do what he will, keep Bacon “out of the Memorial.” Ben was with Bacon at Gorhambury, on Bacon’s sixtieth birthday (January 22, 1621). Ben wrote verses about the Genius of the old house,