Part 9 (1/2)

”Let us, however, examine some of these allusions to Shakspere, real or supposed,” says the critic. {138a} He begins with the hackneyed words of the dying man of letters, Robert Greene, in A Groatsworth of Wit (1592). The pamphlet is addressed to Gentlemen of his acquaintance ”that spend their wits in making plays”; he ”wisheth them a better exercise,” and better fortunes than his own. (Marlowe is supposed to be one of the three Gentlemen playwrights, but such suppositions do not here concern us.) Greene's is the ancient feud between the players and the authors, between capital and labour. The players are the capitalists, and buy the plays out and out,--cheap.

The author has no royalties; and no control over the future of his work, which a Shakspere or a Bacon, a Jonson or a Chettle, or any handyman of the company owning the play, may alter as he pleases. It is highly probable that the actors also acquired most of the popular renown, for, even now, playgoers have much to say about the players in a piece, while they seldom know the name of the playwright. Women fall in love with the actors, not with the authors; but with ”those puppets,” as Greene says, ”that speake from our mouths, these anticks, garnished in our colours.” Ben Jonson, we shall see, makes some of the same complaints,--most natural in the circ.u.mstances: though he managed to retain the control of his dramas; how, I do not know. Greene adds that in his misfortunes, illness, and poverty, he is ungratefully ”forsaken,” by the players, and warns his friends that such may be THEIR lot; advising them to seek ”some better exercise.” He then writes--and his meaning cannot easily be misunderstood, I think, but misunderstood it has been--”Yes, trust them not” (trust not the players), ”FOR there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his TYGER'S HEART WRAPT IN A PLAYER'S HIDE” (”Player's” in place of ”woman's,” in an old play, The Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, &c.), ”supposes he is as well able to b.u.mbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake- scene in a country.”

The meaning is pellucid. ”Do not trust the players, my fellow playwrights, for the reasons already given, for they, in addition to their glory gained by mouthing OUR words, and their ingrat.i.tude, may now forsake you for one of themselves, a player, who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of yours” (including Marlowe's, probably).

”The man is ready at their call (”an absolute Johannes Factotum”).

”In his own conceit” he is ”the only Shake-scene in a country.”

”Seek you better masters,” than these players, who have now an author among themselves, ”the only Shake-scene,” where the pun on Shakespeare does not look like a fortuitous coincidence. But it may be, anything may happen.

The sense, I repeat, is pellucid. But Mr. Greenwood writes that if Shake-scene be an allusion to Shakespeare ”it seems clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author he is attacked.” {140a} As an ACTOR the person alluded to is merely a.s.sailed with the other actors, his ”fellows.” But he is picked out as presenting another and a new reason why authors should distrust the players, ”FOR there is” among themselves, ”in a player's hide,” ”an upstart crow”--who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of theirs. He is, therefore, necessarily a playwright, and being a factotum, can readily be employed by the players to the prejudice of Greene's three friends, who are professed playwrights.

Mr. Greenwood says that ”we do not know why Greene should have been so particularly bitter against the players, and why he should have thought it necessary so seriously to warn his fellow playwrights against them.” {141a} But we cannot help knowing; for Greene has told us. In addition to gaining renown solely through mouthing ”OUR”

words, wearing ”OUR feathers,” they have been bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will, in the same circ.u.mstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; ”yes, for they now have” an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous rival, in their own fellows.h.i.+p. Thus we know with absolute certainty why Greene wrote as he did. He says nothing about the superior financial gains of the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have been the ”only”

cause of his bitterness. Greene gives its causes in the plainest possible terms, as did Ben Jonson later, in his verses ”Poet-Ape”

(Playwright-Actor). Moreover, Mr. Greenwood gives Greene's obvious motives on the very page where he says that we do not know them.

Even Mr. Greenwood, {141b} anxious as he is to prove Shake-scene to be attacked as an actor, admits that the words ”supposes himself as well able to b.u.mbast out a blank verse as the best of you,” ”do seem to have that implication,” {141c} namely, that ”Shake-scene” is a dramatic author: what else can the words mean; why, if not for the Stage, should Shake-scene write blank verse?

Finally Mr. Greenwood, after saying ”it is clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author that 'Shake-scene' is attacked,”

{142a} concedes {142b} that it ”certainly looks as if he” (Greene) ”meant to suggest that this Shake-scene supposed himself able to compose, as well as to mouth verses.” Nothing else can possibly be meant. ”The rest of you” were authors, not actors.

If not, why, in a whole company of actors, should ”Shake-scene” alone be selected for a special victim? Shake-scene is chosen out because, as an author, a factotum always ready at need, he is more apt than the professed playwrights to be employed as author by his company: this is a new reason for not trusting the players.

I am not going to take the trouble to argue as to whether, in the circ.u.mstances of the case, ”Shake-scene” is meant by Greene for a pun on ”Shake-speare,” or not. If he had some other rising player- author, the Factotum of a cry of players, in his mind, Baconians may search for that personage in the records of the stage. That other player-author may have died young, or faded into obscurity. The term ”the only Shake-scene” may be one of those curious coincidences which do occur. The presumption lies rather on the other side. I demur, when Mr. Greenwood courageously struggling for his case says that, even a.s.suming the validity of the surmise that there is an allusion to Shakspere, {143a} ”the utmost that we should be ent.i.tled to say is that Greene here 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” (the Great Unknown?). I do more than demur, I defy any man to exhibit that sense in Greene's words.

”The utmost that we should be ent.i.tled to say,” is, in my opinion, what we have no shadow of a t.i.tle to say. Look at the poor hackneyed, tortured words of Greene again. ”Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his TYGER'S HEART WRAPPED IN A PLAYER'S HIDE, supposes he is as well able to b.u.mbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake- scene in a country.”

How can mortal man squeeze from these words the charge that ”Player Shakspere” is ”putting forward, as his own, some work, or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another”?

It is as an actor, with other actors, that the player is ”beautified with OUR feathers,”--not with the feathers of some one NOT ourselves, Bacon or Mr. Greenwood's Unknown. Mr. Greenwood even says that Shake-scene is referred to ”as beautified with the feathers WHICH HE HAS STOLEN from the dramatic writers” (”our feathers”).

Greene says absolutely nothing about feathers ”WHICH HE HAS STOLEN.”

The ”feathers,” the words of the plays, were bought, not stolen, by the actors, ”anticks garnished in our colours.”

Tedious it is to write many words about words so few and simple as those of Greene; meaning ”do not trust the players, for one of them writes blank verse which he thinks as good as the best of yours, and fancies himself the only Shake-scene in a country.”

But ”Greene here 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,” this is ”the utmost we should be ent.i.tled to say,” even if the allusion be to Shakspere. How does Mr.

Greenwood get the Anti-Willian hypothesis out of Greene's few and plain words?

It is much safer for him to say that ”Shake-scene” is not meant for Shakespeare. n.o.body can prove that it IS; the pun MAY be a strange coincidence,--or any one may say that he thinks it nothing more; if he pleases.

Greene nowhere ”refers to this Shake-scene as being an impostor, an upstart crow beautified with the feathers WHICH HE HAS STOLEN FROM THE DRAMATIC WRITERS (”our feathers”)” {145a}--that is, Greene makes no such reference to Shake-scene in his capacity of writer of blank verse. Like all players, who are all ”anticks garnisht in our colours,” Shake-scene, AS PLAYER, is ”beautified with our feathers.”

It is Mr. Greenwood who adds ”beautified with the feathers which he has STOLEN from the dramatic writers.” Greene does not even remotely hint at plagiarism on the part of Shake-scene: and the feathers, the plays of Greene and his friends, were not stolen but bought. We must take Greene's evidence as we find it,--it proves that by ”Shake- scene” he means a ”poet-ape,” a playwright-actor; for Greene, like Jonson, speaks of actors as ”apes.” Both men saw in a certain actor and dramatist a suspected rival. Only one such successful practising actor-playwright is known to us at this date (1592-1601),--and he is Shakespeare. Unless another such existed, Greene, in 1592, alludes to William Shak(&c.) as a player and playwright. This proves that the actor from Stratford was accepted in Greene's world as an author of plays in blank verse. He cannot, therefore, have seemed incapable of his poetry.

Let us now briefly consider other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare selected by Mr. Greenwood himself. No allusion can prove that Shakespeare was the author of the work attributed to him in the allusions. The plays and poems MAY have been by James VI and I, ”a parcel-poet.” The allusions can prove no more than that, by his contemporaries, Shakespeare was believed to be the poet, which is impossible if he were a mere rustic ignoramus, as the Baconians aver.

Omitting some remarks by Chettle on Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, {146a} as, if grammar goes for all, they do not refer to Shakespeare, we have the Cambridge farce or comedy on contemporary literature, the Return from Parna.s.sus (1602?). The University wits laugh at Shakespeare,--not an university man, as the favourite poet, in his Venus and Adonis, of a silly braggart pretender to literature, Gullio.

They also introduce Kempe, the low comedy man of Shakespeare's company, speaking to Burbage, the chief tragic actor, of Shakespeare as a member of their company, who, AS AN AUTHOR OF PLAYS, ”puts down”