Part 8 (2/2)
”The habits of the author could not have been more scholastic,” so Judge Webb is quoted, ”if he had, like Bacon, spent three years in the University of Cambridge . . . ” Bacon, or whoever corrected the play in 1598, might have corrected ”primater” into ”pia mater,”
unless Bacon intended the blunder for a malapropism of ”Nathaniel, a Curate.” Either Will or Bacon, either in fun or ignorance, makes Nathaniel turn a common Italian proverb on Venice into gibberish. It was familiar in Florio's Second Frutes (1591), and First Frutes (1578), with the English translation. The books were as accessible to Shakspere as to Bacon. Either author might also draw from James Sandford's Garden of Pleasure, done out of the Italian in 1573-6.
Where the scholastic habits of Bacon at Cambridge are to be discovered in this play, I know not, unless it be in Biron's witty speech against study. If the wit implies in the author a Cambridge education, Costard and Dull and Holofernes imply familiarity with rustics and country schoolmasters. Where the author proves that he ”could not have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had spent three years in the train of an Amba.s.sador to France,” I cannot conjecture. THERE ARE NO FRENCH POLITICS IN THE PIECE, any more than there are ”mysteries of fas.h.i.+onable life,” such as Bacon might have heard of from Ess.e.x and Southampton. There is no ”familiarity with all the gossip of the Court”; there is no greater knowledge of foreign proverbs than could be got from common English books. There is abundance, indeed overabundance of ridicule of affected styles, and quips, with which the literature of the day was crammed: call it Gongorism, Euphuism, or what you please. One does not understand how or where Judge Webb (in extreme old age) made all these discoveries, sympathetically quoted by Mr. Greenwood. {127a} ”Like Bacon, the author of the play must have had a large command of books; he must have had his ”Horace,” his ”Ovidius Naso,” and his ”good old 'Mantuan.'” What a prodigious ”command of books”! Country schoolmasters confessedly had these books on the school desks. It was not even necessary for the author to ”have access to the Chronicles of Monstrelet.” It is not known, we have said, whether or not such plot as the play possesses, with King Ferdinand and the 100,000 ducats, or 200,000 ducats (needed to bring the Princess and the mythical King Ferdinand of Navarre together), were not adapted by the poet from an undiscovered conte, partly based on a pa.s.sage in Monstrelet.
Perhaps it will be conceded that Love's Labour's Lost is not a play which can easily be attributed to Bacon. We do not know how much of the play existed before Shakespeare ”augmented” it in 1598. We do not know whether what he then corrected and augmented was an early work of his own or from another hand, though probably it was his own.
Moliere certainly corrected and augmented and transfigured, in his ill.u.s.trious career in Paris, several of the brief early sketches which he had written when he was the chief of a strolling troupe in Southern France.
Mr. Greenwood does not attribute the wit (such as it is), the quips, the conceits, the affectations satirised in Love's Labour's Lost, to Will's knowledge of the artificial style then prevalent in all the literatures of Western Europe, and in England most pleasingly used in Lyly's comedies. No, ”the author must have been not only a man of high intellectual culture, but one who was intimately acquainted with the ways of the Court, and the fas.h.i.+onable society of his time, as also with contemporary foreign politics.” {129a}
I search the play once more for the faintest hint of knowledge of foreign politics. The emba.s.sy of the daughter of the King of France (who, by the date of the affair of the ducats, should be Charles VII) has been compared to a diplomatic sally of the mother of the childless actual King of France (Henri III), in 1586, when Catherine de Medici was no chicken. I do not see in the emba.s.sy of the Princess of the story any ”intimate acquaintance with contemporary foreign politics” about 1591-3. The introduction of Mayenne as an adherent of the King of Navarre, shows either a most confused ignorance of foreign politics on the part of the author, or a freakish contempt for his public. I am not aware that the author shows any ”intimate acquaintance with the ways” of Elizabeth's Court, or of any other fas.h.i.+onable society, except the Courts which Fancy held in plays.
Mr. Greenwood {129b} appears to be repeating ”the case as to this very remarkable play” as ”well summed up by the late Judge Webb in his Mystery of William Shakespeare” (p. 44). In that paralysing judicial summary, as we have seen, ”the author could not have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had spent three years in the train of an Amba.s.sador to France.” The French politics, in the play, are to send the daughter of a King of France (the contemporary King Henri III was childless) to conduct a negotiation about 200,000 ducats, at the Court, steeped in peace, of a King of Navarre, a scholar who would fain be a recluse from women, in an Academe of his own device. Such was not the Navarre of Henri in his war with the Guises, and Henri did not shun the s.e.x!
Such are the ”contemporary foreign politics,” the ”French politics”
which the author knows--as intimately as Bacon might have known them.
They are not foreign politics, they are not French politics, they are politics of fairy-land: with which Will was at least as familiar as Bacon.
These, then, are the arguments in favour of Bacon, or the Great Unknown, which are offered with perfect solemnity of a.s.surance: and the Baconians repeat them in their little books of popularisation and propaganda. Quantula sapientia!
CHAPTER VII: CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION OF WILL AS AUTHOR
It is absolutely impossible to prove that Will, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, was the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems.
But it is easy to prove that Will was recognised as the author, by Ben Jonson, Heywood, and Heminge and Condell the actors, to take the best witnesses. Meanwhile we have received no hint that any man except Will was ever suspected of being the author till 1856, when the twin stars of Miss Delia Bacon and Mr. Smith arose. The evidence of Ben Jonson and the rest can only prove that professed playwrights and actors, who knew Will both on and off the stage, saw nothing in him not compatible with his work. Had he been the kind of letterless country fellow, or bookless fellow whom the Baconians and Mr.
Greenwood describe, the contemporary witnesses cited must have detected Will in a day; and the story of the ”Concealed Poet” who really, at first, did the additions and changes in the Company's older ma.n.u.script plays, and of the inconceivably impudent pretences of Will of Stratford, would have kept the town merry for a month.
Five or six threadbare scholars would have sat down at a long table in a tavern room, and, after their manner, dashed off a Comedy of Errors on the real and the false playwright.
Baconians never seem to think of the mechanical difficulties in their a.s.sumed literary hoax. If Will, like the old Hermit of Prague who never saw pen and ink, could not even write, the hoax was a physical impossibility. If he could write, but was a rough bookless man, his condition would be scarcely the more gracious, even if he were able to copy in his scrawl the fine Roman hand of the concealed poet. I am surprised that the Baconians have never made that point. Will's ”copy” was almost without blot or erasion, the other actors were wont to boast. Really the absence of erasions and corrections is too easily explained on the theory that Will was NOT the author. Will merely copied the fair copies handed to him by the concealed poet.
The farce was played for some twenty years, and was either undetected or all concerned kept the dread secret--and all the other companies and rival authors were concerned in exposing the imposture.
The whole story is like the dream of a child. We therefore expect the Anti-Willians to endeavour to disable the evidence of Jonson, Heywood, Heminge, and Condell. Their attempts take the shape of the most extravagant and complex conjectures; with certain petty objections to Ben's various estimates of the MERITS of the plays. He is constant in his witness to the authors.h.i.+p. To these efforts of despair we return later, when we hope to justify what is here deliberately advanced.
Meanwhile we study Mr. Greenwood's attempts to destroy or weaken the testimony of contemporary literary allusions, in prose or verse, to the plays as the work of the actor. Mr. Greenwood rests on an argument which perhaps could only have occurred to legal minds, originally, perhaps to the mind of Judge Webb, not in the prime vigour of his faculties. Not very many literary allusions remain, made during Will's life-time, to the plays of Shakespeare. The writers, usually, speak of ”Shakespeare,” or ”W. Shakespeare,” or ”Will Shakespeare,” and leave it there. In the same way, when they speak of other contemporaries, they name them,--and leave it there, without telling us ”who” (Frank) Beaumont, or (Kit) Marlowe, or (Robin) Greene, or (Jack) Fletcher, or any of the others ”were.” All interested readers knew who they were: and also knew who ”Shakespeare” or ”Will Shakespeare” was. No other Will Shak(&c.) was prominently before the literary and dramatic world, in 1592-1616, except the Warwicks.h.i.+re provincial who played with Burbage.
But though the mere names of the poets, Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe, Frank Beaumont, Harry Chettle, and so forth, are accepted as indicating the well-known men whom they designate, this evidence to ident.i.ty does not satisfy Mr. Greenwood, and the Baconians, where Will is concerned. ”We should expect to find allusions to dramatic and poetical works published under the name of 'Shakespeare'; we should expect to find Shakespeare spoken of as a poet and a dramatist; we should expect, further, to find some few allusions to Shakespeare or Shakspere the player. And these, of course, we do find; but these are not the objects of our quest. What we require is evidence to establish the ident.i.ty of the player with the poet and dramatist; to prove that the player was the author of the PLAYS and POEMS. THAT is the proposition to be established, and THAT the allusions fail, as it appears to me, to prove,” says Mr. Greenwood.
He adds, ”At any rate they do not disprove the theory that the true authors.h.i.+p was hidden under a pseudonym” {136a}--which raises an entirely different question.
Makers of allusions to the plays must identify Shakespeare with the actor, explicitly; must tell us who this Shakespeare was, though they need not, and usually do not, tell us who the other authors mentioned were; and though the world of letters and the Stage knew but one William Shakspere or Shakespeare, who was far too familiar to them to require further identification. But even if the makers of allusions did all this, and said, ”by W. Shakespeare the poet, we mean W.
Shakespeare the actor”--THAT is not enough. For they may all be deceived, may all believe that a bookless, untutored man is the author. So we cannot get evidence correct enough for Mr. Greenwood.
Dest.i.tute as I am of legal training, I leave this notable way of disposing of the evidence to the judgement of the Bench and the Bar, a layman intermeddleth not with it. Still, I am, like other readers, on the Jury addressed,--I do not accept the arguments. Miror magis, as Mr. Greenwood might quote Latin. We have already seen one example of this argument, when Heywood speaks of the author of poems by Shakespeare, published in The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim. Heywood does nothing to identify the actor Shakspere with the author Shakespeare, says Mr. Greenwood. I shall prove that, elsewhere, Heywood does identify them, and no man knew more of the world of playwrights and actors than Heywood. I add that in his remarks on The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim, Heywood had no need to say ”by W. Shakespeare I mean the well-known actor in the King's Company.” There was no other William Shakspere or Shakespeare known to his public.
It is to no purpose that Mr. Greenwood denies, as we have seen above, that the allusions ”disprove the theory that the true authors.h.i.+p was hidden under a pseudonym.” That is an entirely different question.
He is now starting quite another hare. Men of letters who alluded to the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant the actor; that is my position. That they may all have been mistaken: that ”William Shakespeare” was Bacon's, or any one's pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly different question; and we must not allow the critic to glide away into it through an ”at any rate”; as he does three or four times. So far, then, Mr. Greenwood's theory that it was impossible for the actor Shakspere to have been the author of the plays, encounters the difficulty that no contemporary attributed them to any other hand: that none is known to have said, ”This Warwicks.h.i.+re man cannot be the author.”
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